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Listen to this“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate this thing called life” – Prince. Let’s Go Crazy
In this article, I want to connect a few dots or earlier threads from over the years of my CYC-Net musings. I’m often asked what got me into Child and Youth Care? There are lots of other things I could possibly have gone into on leaving school. As it happens, my dear old Dad is a Chartered Accountant and I worked in his firm for a year prior to attending University. And what a time that was! Being the boss's son had its perks, like I got choice of the mid-morning biscuit pile and the like. I tended not to get the sour milk in my tea. I was allowed the seat near the heater. There was a young staff working in RJ McElwee & Co. Chartered Accountants in those days and we made the most of our evenings and weekends when let out from the basement life that was filled with dreary files and VAT registers. Like a lot of things in life, one had to do it to realise one didn’t want to do it all. And so I found the social and behavioural sciences and from there into Child and Youth Care.
But, earlier to my first career (brief as it was) in accountancy, I had met a young American who was to shape at least some of my thinking around social justice issues. I’m going to call her Sabrina in this article. She was, to me, exotic and a true free spirit. One must remember it was the early-1980s in Ireland – a time with massive unemployment, where most of our young adults were daily emigrating to distant parts of the world, a time of Mods and New Romantics, big haircuts, even bigger shoulder pads and those damn awful stocking warmers! Dallas ruled the airwaves and our best radio came from a ship moored out to sea where it could escape legislation. A lot was happening around me, but I was bored. This is, of course, the prerogative of any young person, indeed a crucial part of growing up. Wasn’t it the Irishman Oscar Wilde who famously quipped that “youth is wasted on the young”.
One beautiful day in 1982 I was cycling on the ocean front promenade in Salthill and along walked this girl in all-black clothes, dyed black hair and more jewellery and piercings than one might see in a Navy harbour brothel, with a pet rat in her arms. The rat’s name was Frankie. I almost knocked her down with shock and she shouted after me, “Hey Buddy, watch where you’re going for Chrissake” in a Californian accent (I knew it was Californian because I was a big fan of CHIPS at that stage). Anyway, I stopped my bike and got off to chat to her. We became friends that summer and I learned a great deal about the “other side of life” that I was to return to in my professional career some ten years later.
It’s a long and complex story but Sabrina was in Ireland because she had been up in front of Juvenile Hall in the US and given a choice: face a youth custody environment in Los Angeles or travel across to Ireland and take up residence for a time with her estranged father who was living in Galway. She chose the latter and that was my good fortune. We never really went out with each other in any kind of romantic way; rather we drifted in and out of each other’s lives over the best part of the next decade.
Sabrina was truly messed up. She had more personal issues than your average rock star. Mostly, she was profoundly hurt that her Mom and Dad had broken up and blamed herself for this. She carried a great deal of guilt. At the time in Ireland, few married couples broke up, and divorce still wasn’t allowed in our oppressive society, so I was intrigued about the dynamics in all of this.
Sabrina and I would hang out for hours in her Dad's place (he had his own demons with alcohol and left us alone) and we would chat about what we wanted out of life, playing music tapes and eating jerkey she got sent over from the US. We shared a real interest in music together and I will always be grateful that she introduced me to much American music that could not be located in Ireland and, in particular, one of Prince’s early songs, Take Me with You. Believe it or not, there was a time when Prince was cool.
Since then, we have all gone through many incarnations. Poor old Prince has gone from Prince to Symbol and back to Prince again. I drifted from Mod into Soul into Rock and my wife tells me I am stuck in a time warp with Springsteen and the Stones. And Sabrina went from Californian pre-Goth to New Age Punk to Free Earth Mother.
Even though I had no formal knowledge then of Child and Youth Care discourse; psychology, attachment theory, addictions theories or the like – I really felt then, and now, that she was a person who just needed a second chance with her life, some consistency and love and hope for the future. She just could not see a future. I have seen this time and time again in my visits to field practica throughout Ireland. But, she didn’t seem to have these, went in search for them in the wrong places with the wrong people and with the wrong substances. And she paid the ultimate price.
There is a tragic end to this story. Sabrina died from an AIDS-related illness. Not that many people in my home town are known to have died from AIDS – even as I write this article at the start of 2007. One girl I knew had her illness recorded as cancer in an effort to hide the truth. AIDS is still a disease surrounded with great shame despite the fact that millions of people around the world suffer from and have died from AIDS illnesses. I note that many of my students express confusion between HIV and AIDS and health commentators over here suggest that the youth today are more ignorant around these illnesses than my peers were back in the mid 1980s and early 1990s.
So, to connect some of the dots. Sabrina is one of the reasons I chose a career in Child and Youth Care. Sabrina may have died a young woman but she is not forgotten. Whenever I hear a Prince song on the radio, I smile and think of her. In this brief article I would like to celebrate her life. For the past few years, I tend to sign off all my emails and correspondence with the words “Be Well”. One for you Sabrina, kid.
“I only wanna be some kind of friend
Baby I could never steal you from another
Such a shame our friendship had to end”
– Prince, Purple Rain
Be Well,
