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Belfast, Friendship, Good Vibrations, JJ Cale, Loss, Memoir, Milestones, Music, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Regrets, Social Media, Soundtracks of our Lives, Terri Hooley, The Clash, Twitter, Vinyl Records, Waking Ned Devine
belated . . . but thank you, jj cale
On my way home from work, I stopped by Half-Price Books, remembering that I still needed to buy George Orwell’s 1984 (the obligatory summer reading for a high school Senior). My lucky day, I found a well-worn paperback copy, published in 1961- the only one in the store – and I paid a dollar for it. Just a dollar to enter a world of newspeak…
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Cancer Language, Culture of breast cancer, Damian Gorman, Damian Gorman, Death and dying, Memoir, Poetry, Road trips, Soundtracks of our Lives, Summertime, Van Morrison, Writing
rest easy, Dermot Healy
Breast cancer forever changed the connotations of certain words for me – “staging” I no longer immediately associate with the theater; “fog” I am more apt to attach to a state of cognitive loss instead of the stuff of Van Morrison’s misty mornings or the cloud that can obscure parts of Pacific Coast Highway as we head north in the summertime; “cure” no longer the…
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California, Father's Day, Happy Father's Day, Love, Memoir, Milestones, Mix tapes, Morro Bay, Ordinary Things, Phoenix, Pismo Beach, Rites of passage, Road trips, Rolling Stones, San Luis Obispo, saying goodbye, Songs for the Road, Summertime
on the road again
From June until September, when the temperatures soar well above 100 degrees, most Phoenicians suffer a kind of amnesia about why they live in a desert city where, for most of the year, the weather is the kind that people from rainy, grey places covet. In the summer, all hot and bothered, we retreat to our air-conditioned offices, and grumble that our backyard pools aren’t…
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Belfast, Crafts, Family, Fathers and sons, Happy Father's Day, Memoir, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Social Media, Soundtracks of our Lives, Themes of Childhood
inarticulate speech of the heart – on father’s day
This will not be a happy Father’s Day for my father. From far away, he will worry about my daughter and me and how we are doing on this, my daughter’s first Father’s Day without her dad. He’ll wish he could be in Phoenix, to fix things for us, to paint the laundry room or clean the windows or mix cement to…
