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international women’s day: for my grandmother
There are still unguarded moments of dislocation that bring a crushing loneliness and a visceral longing for “home,” for brightly painted front doors and blue space; for a slow pace in a rainy place where strangers say hello to each other; where church bells peal and roosters crow; where there are unplanned sessions in pubs that stay open late if you sing another song for them; and, where there's always a bus to the city. I will know it when I find it. I will be home.
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Dispatch from the Diaspora, Feminism, Love, Meg Ryan, Milestones, Nora Ephron, Online dating, Relationships, Rob Reiner, Social Media, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail
match point ~ seeking romance & mr. right
A match made in heaven? No. In spite of all the tactics and algorithms deployed to make sense of our checked boxes and declare us a 100% match or subsequently updating our relationship as 'official' on Facebook, we are making this match right here, right here where angels fear to tread, in the messiness of the middle of two lives that collided at the best and worst of times. There is no wrong time.
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And you can tell everybody, this is our song …
Over our first few years of singing together, it became our song, a staple in a repertoire of songs into which listeners will stitch their own meaning too.
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Belfast Peace Lines, Borders, Dr. Martin Luther King, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights Movement, Human Rights, Ireland, Justice, Marriage Equality Referendum, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Politics, Seamus Heaney, Themes of Childhood
A story for International Education Day
A photo of Seamus Heaney on his graduation day is making the rounds on social media this morning, marking International Education Day with a reminder that our poet devoted much of his life to teaching. I also spent most of my professional life teaching – and learning. Like Heaney, I’m a product of Queen’s. And, like Heaney, I was what we now call a first generation” college student, the first in the family to go on to university – to go away to school. Although university was less than twenty miles away in Belfast, it was still away, a phenomenon Seamus Heaney explains to Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones: Even Belfast…
