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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…
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a red letter day
I’m sure he exists, but I have never seen the mailman where I live in Mexico. Regardless, I still peek into the letterbox every day, the way I used to all those years I lived in Arizona when there was likely to be an envelope marked By Air Mail, Par Avion waiting for me in the mailbox in front of our house. My Mexican mail amounts to an electricity bill (without an envelope let alone a stamp) delivered once every two months by someone I have never seen. There’s the occasional business card from someone who wants to wash my car, sell my house, or extend my eyelashes. And once a…
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When the sun stops …
Dawn light began stealingThrough the cold universe to County Meath, Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling,Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stonesMillennia deep in their own unmoving And unmoved alignment. (from A Dream of Solstice by Seamus Heaney) Winter Solstice is the turning point I look forward to each year. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely mid-winter reassurance that the light is coming. Solstice is derived from the Latin, sōlstitium, loosely translated as the apparent standing still of the sun. To ancient civilizations, it looked like the sun stood still at that moment when its rays shine directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, 23…
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a time to give thanks …
The pandemic forced us to reconsider and replace known ways with new routines and rituals; it inspired new reasons - reminders - to be thankful - for all we had previously taken for granted - hugs and handshakes, hanging out and happy hour, multiple trips to the grocery store on the same day and meetings without masks; hair appointments and pedicures and parties and graduations and weddings and funerals - and our kids going off to school every day. We promised ourselves, didn't we, that we'd never take those things for granted again. I wonder if we've maybe forgotten some of that ...
