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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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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?”…
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"Let's Go Crazy", "Little Red Corvette", American Dream, Antrim, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Dispatches from the Diaspora, In Memoriam, Northern Ireland, Prince, Soundtracks of our Lives
‘you need a love that’s gonna last . . .’
Little red Corvette Baby you’re much too fast Little red Corvette You need a love that’s gonna last. I first paid attention to Prince and the Revolution when I was about twenty years old, and “Little Red Corvette” was getting regular airplay on Radio One. It was the eighties. I had big hair, big enough to be in The Revolution, and…
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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
far away on mother’s day . . .
Having worked in schools for thirty years, it is not uncommon for me to encounter former students, all grown-up, some of them married with careers and children. Surreal to find myself standing shoulder to shoulder with these adults who, just a twinkling ago, were scribbling in composition books about who they might become. They are often incredulous to discover I am now the mother of a…
