Editor
The writer hails from County Antrim and has lived in the desert southwest of the United States for over 20 years. Her blog is her virtual home away from home.
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Breast Cancer Treatment, Breast Reconstruction, Chariots of Fire, Coming Home, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Mastectomy, Michael Phelps, Olympic Games, Shirley Valentine
On a mission – Michael Phelps and God and me.
I came into the pool on a mission, and the mission was accomplished ~ Michael Phelps. Watching Chad Le Clos watch Phelps go on to victory and a twentieth Olympic gold medal, I found myself thinking back to 1982’s Oscar winning best film, Chariots of Fire, and its depiction of Eric Liddell, who stunned everyone with a world record breaking gold medal win in the 400 meter…
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Aging, Awesome Women, Castledawson, Coming of age, Family, grandmother, Irish culture, Irish mammies, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Seamus Heaney, Soundtracks of our Lives, Themes of Childhood
for my mother on her birthday
Another long-distance phone call and the miles between my mother and me fall away. With the phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear, she is rescuing sheets from the clothes-line just before another downpour. Next will come a bit of ironing and then the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.…
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Hair Matters – Just Ask Hillary Clinton.
“Didn’t we used to call you Crystal Tipps?” Why yes, you did. Relentlessly. It was funnier to you than it was to me. Teetering on the edge of adolescence in the early seventies, I instinctively knew that Crystal’s coiffure, a big triangular purple frizz, belonged only on the BBC, in the groovy world of cut-out animation created by Hilary Hayton.…
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Actors, Art, Children's Books, Gary Shteyngart, HBO, James Gandolfini, Maurice Sendak, Memoir, Soundtracks of our Lives, television, The Sopranos, Themes of Childhood, Where The Wild Things Are
james gandolfini ~ forever with the wild things
The only non-book on my bookshelves is the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sits among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart says, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever. Every night at 8PM my husband used to ask me, “So are you ready for Tony and the boys?”…