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What Goes Around … Murphy Brown
Half-watching The Emmy’s, I looked up when Candice Bergen took the stage in a sparkly dress. Bergen has always had a relevance in my “American life.” In December 1988, shortly after she showed up as Murphy Brown on primetime TV, I took up permanent residence in the USA. And for the next decade, I liked knowing I could find her if I needed her on a Thursday night at nine o’clock. For many women, Murphy Brown was what Mary Tyler Moore had been to Candice Bergen, “I think Mary Tyler Moore really made women feel they were entitled to a career and to be defined without a man.” Following Moore’s…
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9/11, Anything can Happen, Billy Collins, Healing Field Tempe, Memoir, Remembering September 11th, Seamus Heaney, Terrorism, Themes of childhood
In the Bluest Sky
In the parlance of aviation, a "severe clear" sky, so intensely blue with seemingly unlimited visibility and air so pure, it can blind a pilot.
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has anybody seen my old friend, America?
I often feel guilty for having left my Northern Ireland. I wonder if perhaps the better thing or the best thing would have been to stay, to strive to see beyond the images that flickered on our television screen at six o’clock every night. But I didn’t stay. I fled. I turned my back on the vulnerable, tiny country that shaped and scared me – my lovely tragic Northern Ireland —and I became an immigrant in an America I wouldn’t recognize after three decades. And then, I turned my back on the United States of America. In retrospect, I spent much of the 1980s planning my escape from Northern Ireland. …
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A Poem for Michael and Christopher, Act Two, Door into the Dark, Postscript, Seamus Heaney, The Underground
P.S. Thank you, Seamus
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you. ~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996 Eleven years since you left…
