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Enniskillen lingers
It never occurred to me that I was a child of The Troubles until I stumbled upon a scholarly dissertation about Northern Ireland. As a child, I was usually at a safe distance from “The Troubles,” I saw at 6 o’clock every evening when we turned on the news or the odd time our kitchen window rattled when a bomb had exploded somewhere close. There was the time the car-bomb exploded outside Halls Hotel, and then the time my brother, a freshly minted journalist, had to interview the grandmother of three little boys murdered, burned to death on July 12, 1998. Richard, Mark and Jason, just eleven, nine, and seven…
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a rainy day kind of woman
The other day a Facebook memory popped up to remind me that my actual memory just isn’t what it used to be. There I am in the boots i’ve owned since 1982, perched on a freeway wall with my camera focused on something in the distance. But what? Unable to let go of this – and another thing that I’ll get to some other day when I’m in a better mood – I perused my old writings for some clue and soon found it. The year I turned 50, I had an epiphany or two: a)I would never make enough money to go to a job I hate every day…
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9/11, Anything can Happen, Billy Collins, Healing Field Tempe, Memoir, Remembering September 11th, Seamus Heaney, Terrorism, Themes of childhood
once in a blue 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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Awesome Women, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, Culture of breast cancer, Facebook, Fashion, Memoir, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Nora Ephron, Soundtracks of our Lives, Theater
worn out
"I have been 60 for four years now, and by the time you read this I will probably have been 60 for five. I survived turning 60, I was not thrilled to turn 61, I was less thrilled to turn 62, I didn't much like being 63, I loathed being 64, and I will hate being 65. I don't let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyanna-ish. But the honest truth is that it's sad to be over 60. The long shadows are everywhere ¬ friends dying and battling illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that…
