The term “Excuses and Rebuttals” will be familiar to anyone who has ever raised money for a non-profit. It refers to the most delicate aspect of canvassing: how to get a person to part with their money. There is a dance the canvasser and the (often reluctant) canvassee perform, at the door, or over the phone, and it is performed as the canvassee tries to extricate themselves from the encounter by claiming poverty. The canvasser counters each such excuse with a rebuttal. This can go on for a while.
In the ideal version of things, the canvasser comes out on top and leaves with cash, a check or a credit card number in hand. I thought of this phrase more than once this year as 2015, the most annoying, unquiet and occasionally murderous year EVER, ground on and on to its uncertain end. It was like a game of excuses and rebuttals between me and 2015. I can’t give you anything at this time. I don’t have money. My resources are scarce. No thank you, not today, tonight or ever, I’d murmur, and try to close the door against each new development. But the year blocked my excuses with cosmic rebuttals, guiding each interaction with a cool determination that left my own wishes in the dust.
Even now as I write this, I’m aware that there are more hours in this day, in this malevolent year and that perhaps I should cool it with the name calling. Well, sorry Fortuna. You are a capricious bitch (everyone says so) and I’m not into placation, especially not after this year. No matter what I did or said to you this year, you refused to get off my doorstep.
It’s like the episode on 30 Rock, where Liz Lemon, after deciding that she’s going to have a great day, has a shitty one, instead. “Can everyone just act normal?” she asks her staff plaintively. The answer is no, we cannot. WE CANNOT BE NORMAL. This was 2015.
It wouldn’t have been so bad had I not paid attention to astrologers who declared chirpily that 2015 was going to be the best year ever, especially for Leos. I’m sorry I read horoscopes, but I’m a Californian (and also it’s my mother’s fault for looking at me when I was 3 and telling me I was her “little Leo”.) Anyway- astrologers and their inflated optimism. It’s their fault. Yeah. They said I was going to have a great year because Jupiter, the big planet with all the moons, was in my sign and everyone knows that’s a good thing. It took until September for a more level-headed astrologer friend of mine to say, actually you know…it just means that whatever is happening ….well, more of that will happen. Expansion, she went on to explain, isn’t always a good thing. Clearly.
About expansion: yeah, it’s not great, especially not when it’s a bunch of cancer cells acting like imperialistic little despots in the bodies of family members. My mom lives here. Get out of her house! Ultimately, the cancerous spot on was taken out of the lower third of her right lung– and miracle or miracles, she didn’t have to get chemo. She has lived to tell the tale.
That’s a blessing that even in my most irate, freaked-out moments (many of which happened before, during and directly after her surgery) I never failed to wonder at. My mother’s doughty, indomitable spirit carried her through a lot this year: first-stage lung cancer, grueling surgery, the tragic death of her nephew to brain cancer (two months and he was gone), the death a week later of her last sibling and Ricky’s father, my uncle Richard. Add to this the difficulty of being a mother to five Creelys, all still in the process of growing, and you could be forgiven for thinking that if anyone has a right to complain, it would be my mother. But she’s got too much sense for that.
Also. Jay lost his job. Also, two people I knew, one very well, and respected highly, died of cancer. Also: I lost a friend. Also: I mishandled a situation with an online publisher and, well, that totally sucked. Also: friends of mine lost family members and old friends in grossly tragic ways that left them bereft and heartsick and the rest of us wondering how we could ever be enough in the face of such godawful loss. Also: Syrian refugees sensibly started getting the fuck out of an intolerable situation while various heads of state debated whether or not this was a legit response to war, war, war.
Also: Tamir Rice. Sandra Bland. Eric Garner. All victims of extra-judicial killing, the magnitude of which should invite the attention of the Special Rapporteur from the United Nations Human Rights Council. It’s performed this service before, notably in the North of Ireland, when an out-of-control police force (whose shadow life as a Loyalist paramilitary organization was well known to human rights activists) proved unable to reform itself and was forced to reform through international intervention.
And indiscriminate bombs in Paris, Beirut, Nigeria, Kabul. And Syria. I am now old enough to grasp exactly what all this means. And it is sobering.
Also, also, also. I turned fifty. And that’s the moment, I feel, when Fortuna, the capricious you-know-what, slackened her grip a bit and things started to lighten up. I turned fifty, a blessed age, I think. I have the face I want and the soul I deserve. I have a husband who thinks I’m pretty, and sexy, and really fucking smart and he likes my writing. And I love him and his big brown eyes, and shambling gait and willingness to sing with me and love me.
I have many, many amazing friends, two of whom called me during Christmas to tell me they loved me. This is such a gift. If you love your friend, TELL THEM. I danced with many of these friends this autumn naked as the day I was born in the deep woods. (don’t ever underestimate the dancing-naked-round-a-fire-in-the-woods scenario: it delivers, without fail, every time.) I gave two public talks this year about an unknown episode about the San Francisco Irish at the Panama Pacific International Exposition for the California Historical Society and the Mechanics Institute, two prestigious cultural spaces in San Francisco that I never thought I’d do work in, or with. The work was a co-production between my mind and my intellect, which is work I never thought I had a right to. And based on those two talks, I wrote one of the better essays I’ve written: It’s called “The Shamrock Isle at the Panama Pacific International Exposition and the end of the Irish Village” and you can find it over at Found SF.org.
I am bloody proud of the work I did in the middle of some hard financial chaos and soulful trouble.
I’m writing this hurriedly on the 31st. In one hour, I’ll be at the United Irish Cultural Center, weaving the threads of next year and doing research for my next event for the Irish American Crossroads festival, an organization that’s given me an cultural and institutional home for the work I want to do, work that is unpaid, but enriching in ways I couldn’t have ever anticipated. This work will keep me busy from now until March and beyond maybe up until April 24th. It will bring me stress and uncertainty. It will cause me to second guess myself and my skill in navigating relationships, information, and communal ecologies, large and small. And this is proper: it is my work.
And I do all my work, large and small. That in some ways is what 2015 was all about.
Yeah, so I paid too much attention to bloviating, gaseous Jupiter, incoherent accounts of the future, and the unaccountable and enigmatic Dama Fortuna. But I did also pay attention to the things in my life that I love, that that love me: family, friends, community and one of my oldest and strongest allies, the sea. Throughout this year, I took to the water when the terrain of my life was tough and uncertain. The Ocean took me in, all right, and held me. I sucked that saltwater in and it came out as the Holy Trinity of the human body: snot, sweat and tears. I picked myself out of the whitewash and turned and looked at the mad ocean that I love so much and waded back in.
So, this game of excuses and rebuttals is at an end. 2015? I mostly agree with your aims and objectives, but it’s been twelve months and I don’t want to talk anymore. Give me your literature. I’ll totally read it. I’ll think about it. But I’m not giving you any money.
Get off my phone. Get off my doorstep. Get out of my house. And, finally, FINALLY: Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
written during the waning moon in Virgo and with love to Rene Gibbons, Mary Brown, Richard Williams, son and father, Justin Chen, Teo Coleman and family, and all the others. Consider the parting glass raised.
The snow pack is growing. All Hail Snow!
Elizabeth Creely 