"I'm
interested in everything,"
Lowell
Bergman (Al Pacino) tells
Mike Wallace (Christopher
Plummer) in last year's
The Insider, one
of my all-time favorite
movies. (And movies are
where I've learned all
the important lessons.)
Well, I jumped up in my
seat with a "whoopee"
- this was in a suburban
Cambridge cinema: Bergman
had just annunciated the
guiding principle of my
life, the passion I bring
not only to my work.
How
could it be otherwise?
I was born in Dublin,
capital of a contested
Ireland and a doubtful
Republic. An English speaker
whose first recorded word
was a protest "no",
my parents agreed to allow
me complete my schooling
through Irish; a decision
which led to such tongue-twisters
as study of the Gallic
Wars "as Gaelige".
To attend school at all
I had to cross the Liffey,
the city's river immortalized
in James Joyce's Finegan's
Wake - this a dangerous
foray into the uncharted,
uncharted at least by
us snobby southsiders.
(I've written about the
Liffey in the short story
I rather naughtily call
Dubliners.)
A
devotee of Anna Pavlova,
I wanted to be an actress,
and television footage
of my early performances
(as an extra - but credited!)
is to be found in the
RTE archives along with
the later newsreels. (Political
allies and antagonists
alike are quick to point
out that I've never left
the stage!) My dancing
shoes stayed with me,
however, and travel and
adventure have been hallmarks
of my life since my first
airplane trip to London
at the advanced age of
eighteen, a trip financed
by double shifts at trendy
Captain America's Cookhouse.
For
women of my generation
coming of age in the immediate
aftermath of bra-burning
and conscious of the innumerable
indignities to which our
mothers had been subjected,
the Ireland we inherited
simply would not do and
I, no more than so many
of my contemporaries,
became involved in the
project of radical social
transformation that has
characterized the last
twenty-five years of Irish
life. That I would become
so intimately identified
with abortion was not
a development I foresaw
when I marched the streets
of Dublin for legalized
contraception. Nor did
I foresee that my intervention
at a public meeting sponsored
by the feminist Women"s
Right to Choose Group
would lead to fifteen
years involvement in defining
and defending women's
moral agency. But this
was my late parents' legacy
- my brother Brian, now
a husband and father,
and I were brought up
to take a stand for our
beliefs.
Perhaps
one of the most difficult
of life's lessons,
particularly for the politically
committed, is the management
of our exits. Shakespeare's
entrances are so lightly
made, but what happens
when our part is run and
the script moves on? At
barely 40 years of age,
I had achieved my personal
goals for pregnancy counseling
and advanced the philosophical
discussion as far as I
believed I usefully could.
It was time to identify
a new challenge.
And
where to find such challenges
if not in the New World?
A long-standing friendship
brought me to Maine three
years ago. The best move
I ever made, I'm fond
of saying to Irish friends
when quizzed about this
decision. It has been
in Maine that I've found
the confidence to believe
in myself as a writer
- not only a journalist,
researcher, essayist,
publicist, but a writer
of fiction and poetry.
My collections Tea
With Friends (poems)
and Too Early for Lupins
(stories) are a source
of pleasant amazement
to me ("I wrote that!")
and represent an absolute
commitment to this work.
For
the next adventure,
I'm turning to the Internet.
I love the possibilities
of this technology, and,
in TheMeMap.com, I have
the opportunity of bringing
my mission Access,
Information, Choice
firmly into the 21st century.
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