Sophie’s Choice

I saw an orange VW Beetle today and came completely unraveled. In March 1969, when I was a junior at AGHS, waiting for the bus home, our neighbor Cayce Shannon offered me and our friend Carolyn Kawaguchi a ride home. We all lived in the Upper Valley and all of us were Branch School kids. Almost relatives, because we went back so far, even, in my case, as a sixteen- year-old. Nothing could be cooler than riding in the orange Beetle, and with Cayce, a wonderful young man who became an elementary school teacher. I think we laughed a lot, the three of us, on the short drive home.

It was after Cayce had dropped me off that I found my mother dying on the living room sofa. I called the ambulance. It got lost. By the time they got her to the hospital, Patricia Margaret Keefe, named for two ancestors, Famine refugees from Wicklow, had left us.

I believe what happened today was what psychologists call a “flashback,” where you feel as if you’re actually reliving a trauma, and this one from fifty-six years ago. What happened today has never happened to me before. I was literally numb for several hours and am still cobwebby.

And then this happened: A former student named Sophie, Dublin-born, wanted suggestions for learning more about Irish history. (Sophie, as you can see, is beautiful. It was difficult for the boys in her section of AP European history to focus on their lessons.) She is also extremely bright and just the right amount of saucy. She was a delight to teach.

She is a delightful human being.

So when she asked for a little help, I plunged into it with my usual reckless abandon and came up with a four-page list of suggestions: books, films, and, immodestly, my own blog posts, in the link below.

It should be obvious that Sophie’s choice—apologies to the late novelist William Styron—to ask me for history guidance moved me very deeply.

I hope it’s okay that I share this picture of Sophie and of another lovely Irish-descended girl—my Mom. She is twenty-two in this photo, holding my big sister Roberta.