Tell Everyone on This Train I Love Them

Description

Deeply funny, moving, and urgent writing about a country that can feel broken into pieces and the light that shines through the cracks, from Irish comedian Maeve Higgins, author of Maeve in America.
 
As an eternally curious outsider, Maeve Higgins can see that the United States is still an experiment. Some parts work well and others really don’t, but that doesn’t stop her from loving the place and the people that make it. With piercing political commentary in a sweet and salty tone, these essays unearth answers to the questions we all have about this country we call home; the beauty of it all and the dark parts too.
 
Maeve attends the 2020 Border Security Expo to better understand the future of our borders, and finds herself at The Alamo surrounded by queso and homemade rifles. A chance encounter with a statue of a teenage horseback rider causes her to interrogate the purpose of monuments, this sends her hurtling through the past, connecting Ireland’s revolutionary history with the struggles of Black Americans today. And after mistaking edibles for innocent candies, Maeve gets way too high at Paper Source.
 
Most of all, Maeve wants to leave this country and this planet better than she found it. That may well be impossible, but it certainly means showing love. Lots of it, even when it’s difficult to do so. Threaded through these pieces is love for strangers, love for friends who show up right on time, love for trees, love for Tom Hardy, love for those with differing opinions, love for the glamorous older women of Brighton Beach with tattooed eyeliner and gold jewelry, love for everybody on this train.Maeve Higgins is a contributing writer for The New York Times and a former comedian who performed all over the world. She starred in the multi-award winning movie Extra Ordinary and hosts a climate justice podcast with Mary Robinson entitled Mothers of Invention.
 

Lean on Me

 

My most fervent wish during the COVID-19 pandemic was twofold. One, that it end. Two, that it not impart any damn lessons. I can’t stand when horrible and senseless things happen and people insist on finding some neat takeaway to make sense of it all. Despite my resistance to learning anything from this nasty demon of a virus, it did help crystallize one thing for me. You’ll snort when you hear, because it’s incredibly obvious. My realization was this: I really, really, REALLY need my friends. No man is an island; we all know this. Although for many years of my childhood I thought the expression was “No man is in Ireland” and it confused me greatly, particularly when said by a man in Ireland, but I still nodded wisely when I heard it. So true, no man is in Ireland, I would agree, my little eyes darting around in confusion.

 

I have one brother and six sisters, you see, and the thing about my siblings is that they count as friends too. I had no idea what that meant for my friendships with people who are not related to me until my friend Claudia told me exactly what it meant. “You don’t really need friends because you have your family,” she said. “Oh, I doubt that’s true,” I told her, knowing in an instant it was true. I was worried I’d hurt her feelings if I confirmed it. She smiled, knowing me well enough to spot a lie. “It’s fine, Maeve, it’s not a bad thing.”

 

I wasn’t always best friends with my siblings, certainly not as a child. I had running battles with both my older sister and my closest-in-age younger sister. My older sister was a stealth bomber, quieter and cleverer than I. When my family took a day trip to Midleton, a town thirty minutes’ drive away, they accidentally left me behind. That day we spent a long time in a carpet shop. I was about six and I didn’t notice the rest of my family leaving, immersed as I was in the swirling floral rugs of the 1980s. When I did notice, I couldn’t believe it. I remember walking around the shop, through the long swinging halls of hanging carpet, unable to comprehend that they were all gone. Just like that, all those siblings and both parents had vanished. Because we were in the same classroom in the same school growing up, and we only really went on playdates together to cousins’ houses, I’d never been without a family member before in my life. I decided to stand very still and hope nobody noticed me, convinced I would get in trouble with the shop owner for being there alone. Nobody noticed my presence in the shop, or my absence in the car. Well, eventually they did, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this book; I’d be the heiress to a rug fortune, having no doubt been adopted by the Carpet King of Midleton. As my family pulled into the driveway after a successful outing (no money spent, three hours passed, zero fights in the backseat) my mother realized I wasn’t there. “Where’s Maeve?” she asked. My nine-year-old sister replied, a little too calmly, “Oh, Maeve? She’s back at the carpet shop.” As if I was her interior designer and she’d left me there with her credit card to pick up a rug she was too busy to select.

 

As small girls she and I shared a room with our two younger sisters, sleeping in two sets of bunk beds. With an average of two years between us, I seem to remember we were all around the same size and we shared some clothes, like socks and underwear. We would fight about that, but she was always ahead of me in the smarts department. She learned how to spell first, a skill I was insanely jealous of. “G.O.T.O.S.L.E.E.P.,” she would hiss when I wouldn’t stop talking at nighttime, and I’d beg her to tell me what it meant. “Go to sleep,” she’d say, and I’d promise to go to sleep if she’d just tell me what she had spelled. She was a high-achieving and extremely good child, doing everything she could think of to help our mother. This annoyed me, and I annoyed her. I was lazy and funny, like now. While she swept the stairs and looked after whatever baby needed looking after, I’d play outside and make my father laugh as I helped him shape concrete into bricks. It’s really not advisable to have children handle concrete, what with the lime and all, but it was really satisfying work.

 

On Saturday mornings, my parents would go to the market in Cork to get supplies for the week, and it was my older sister’s job to cajole us all into cleaning the house. “I’ll polish,” I’d offer, knowing that meant I could put on the television and half-heartedly wipe the plant pots and our only statue. That statue, inexplicably, was a small bronze figurine of a wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. “No, Maeve, you will clean out the fire.” I hated cleaning out the fire; it involved various steps in turn irritating, grimy, and arduous. First the ashes would need to be roughly sieved so all the clinkers could be saved. Clinkers are the little bits of half-burned matter that would do well for the next fire. So, put the clinkers aside in a little pile and shovel out the ashes into a metal bucket. (Sometimes they were still very hot, adding an element of fear to the task.) This would inevitably leave your hands coated in a fine ashy dust that felt so gross to the touch it makes me shudder for a second at the mere memory. Then you’d have to bring the ash outside (yuck, outside!) and toss it into the ash heap, and load up on kippins (little sticks), wooden logs, turf, and coal to build a new fire. I dodged that whole job so often during the week that my sister always insisted it was my turn on Saturday, which it probably was. I’d make a long speech about parity and trust and how she was basically Miss Hannigan, and she would usually end up cleaning the fire.

 

As teenagers, my older sister and I still shared a room, and the younger ones had their own. This didn’t really improve relations because we remained two people with extremely different personalities. If you’re wondering what my “personality” was, what I mean is I would get home from school and make white toast, cover it in butter, and eat it lying on my bed, reading Louisa May Alcott books and humming tunelessly. For hours. Until dinner, which was often made by my older sister. Sometimes, when she had turned off the light and was trying to sleep, I’d come up with a plan exclusively to irritate her. I’d say, “I’m just going to say good night to my star,” then I’d open the curtain and gaze silently at the sky for a really long time. I don’t know how she resisted putting a pillow over my face.

 

My younger sister was a different type of threat. I resented being responsible for her, having learned early on that I was. I was around five when we visited some family friends and we were playing around in their garden. They had a fat blond dog who, for some reason, took a dislike to Lilly. The dog chased her, and I remember her running past me with her two little braids streaming behind her. I knew it was bad, and I think I went to get an adult. The dog didn’t bite her, but she was very frightened. I don’t remember much else apart from later that evening, when I was punished for not looking after her. I found this deeply unjust, and complained to my mother that I didn’t deserve a smack with the wooden spoon just because my little sister had been chased by a dog. My mother, with tears in her own eyes, was adamant that we must be loyal to one another, and protect and defend one another, and I had failed to do that.

 

So the loyalty is set, no matter what. I have these six girls, now women, and one boy, now man, that are mine. When it comes to sports teams, provincial rivalries, and even nation-states, I really don’t care to identify with one or another, and feel faintly embarrassed for people who do. However, I know that if my brother and sisters needed me to paint my face or chant in a stadium or wave a flag to pledge my allegiance, I would happily do all of that. We grew up together, which sounds like a completely average thing to do, but is quite amazing when you break it down. Nobody else spent time pressed together in a pickup truck driving around to look at bridges my father liked, nobody else had to bear my teenage opining on East Timor’s political situation, and nobody else believed me when I said I woke up while the dentist was pulling out four of my teeth. The time spent together, and the unconditional acceptance of one another that we built in our childhood, became a connection strong enough to withstand any amount of time or distance.

 

We are spread across the world now. Between us we rival the dating profile of a forty-year-old finance guy, with obscure flags lined up beside our names including Sweden, Mongolia, and the Central African Republic. I currently have siblings in the Middle East, in England, in Ireland-and then there is me, repping the Higgins name hard and alone in the United States. Our primary form of contact is a group WhatsApp chat: my parents and the eight children, just the ten of us. Every now and then one of us loses a phone or changes a number, and we start a new chat. The current one was created in August 2017 and holds ten thousand photos and probably four times as many messages.

 

When I wake up in New York there are messages from the Middle East, where my brother and one sister are eight hours ahead of me, waiting first; then the messages from Europe flood in from five hours in the future. Jokes and conversations are well underway as I make coffee and read the responses to the message I sent before I went to sleep: a photo of a pair of bronze and marble eyes from the fifth century I’d seen at the Met that day, captioned “me looking at dem scones.” Bad news and difficult conversations are reserved for phone calls and visits. The WhatsApp group is chatter to let us know the small stuff, to keep us company wherever we are. It’s this small stuff, these wispy threads, that weave seamlessly into a fabric that stretches over the time and space between us. I’m usually the last to check in on the family chat, from the subway coming home after a show or sun drunk after a trip to Brighton Beach. I read over the dozens of messages from the day, then I send photos of me posing with my head in a life-size Russian doll cut-out followed by a series of small bouncing pink heart emojis. It strikes me that the reason I’m able to be here in the US on my own, and have this life I love, is that my family set me up for it. How lucky that they made me strong enough to leave. From the next morning in Jordan, my sister sends the letters g.o.t.o.s.l.e.e.p.

 

Of course this isn’t the case with everyone, but my family made me who I am. They’ve given me pretty much everything, every piece of the person who became me. Those pieces, just like Frankenstein’s monster, were then animated-in my case, by the electricity of curiosity and ambition and independence-and I became my own person.

 

There were things I needed to go outside of my family to get, and I believe I got those things from my friends. If I once saw my friends as bonus material in the film of my life, peripheral characters, it’s because I failed to understand what central players they were until I was separated from them by COVID-19. In the 1931 film Frankenstein, there is an infamous scene of the monster getting overexcited by social contact and flinging Maria, his little friend, into a lake. I knew that I would be just the same way by the end of the isolation created by the pandemic. I would surely be so happy to see my friends I’d mutter and tremble with joy and more than likely I’d accidentally drown them. Still, I couldn’t wait!

 

Aside from a snatched walk here and there or a chilly drink on a Brooklyn sidewalk, I didn’t have any new experiences with my friends for many months. Instead, I turned over memories of old experiences with them like treasures found at the bottom of the ocean. At night I’d dive down and come back up with Thanksgiving night 2016. My friend Abi and her husband, Noel, rented chairs and made tables out of plywood, and almost twenty of us showed up. There was wine and music and huge platters of food we breathed over without a care in the world. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I can see, clear as day, my friend Emilie on one side of the table and my friend Sophie on the other. There were some new, interesting people dotted around, and all of us were laughing our heads off. Maybe at something I said! As we laughed we passed the buttery mounds of potatoes, like some corny scene in a holiday movie. That memory, and more like it, sustained me throughout the lockdown. I almost didn’t go to Abi’s that evening because all the pies were sold out at the bakery I went to, can you believe that? As if anyone cared, as if we needed anything more than each other and a warm place to sit and be together.

 

I grew up Catholic, and at the age of seven I was fervently told by a priest in a box that if I simply said half a dozen Hail Marys I’d be forgiven for being mean to my sister. “Deal,” I said, smiling like the devil himself. During the pandemic, I heard myself bargaining with a different higher power. Science maybe, or government. “Please,” I said out into the void. “Let all my friends get through this, and I swear I’ll never cancel on them again.” No matter what. Not for a date, not for a deadline, not even for my bulletproof millennial excuse, exhaustion. Like everyone in New York, my friends and I were scattered, both physically and mentally. I swore that once everyone made it out the other side I would never leave their messages unread and I would always answer their calls. In the past when I’ve found myself at a low point that could last for weeks or months, it was manageable to fake feeling fine for the couple of hours that usually make up a friend date in the city. Coffee, a movie, drinks; these pleasant distractions can cover a multitude. The pandemic stripped all of that away. Now I knew I’d be there when my friends were dull and downhearted with nothing much to say, and I knew it was fine to be that way. We didn’t love each other any less.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.5600 × 5.0100 × 7.7000 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780143135869
ISBN-10	0143135864
Author	Maeve Higgins
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BIO026000, SOC041000
Subjects	memoir books, motivational books, essays, memoirs, books for women, funny gifts, White Elephant gifts, autobiographies, political books, inspirational books, biographies of famous people, autobiography books, sociology books, funny books for women, biographies and memoirs, secret santa gifts, funny stocking stuffers, maeve in america, humor, politics, BIO026000, biography, Memoir, comedy, motivational, SOC041000, Sociology, history, short stories, anthology, book club, funny books, history books, autobiography, true stories, biographies