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Thanks Given
For the day that's in it, Thanksgiving has something to do with wherever you find that moment of transcendence - among trees in a desert city or at the break of day on the edge of Mexico's largest lake. It's about finding the light. Seeing the light. It's about Annie Lamott's Three Essential Prayers - Help, Thanks, Wow:
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Neverending.
To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. Thomas Campbell Today is the anniversary of Ken’s death, and tomorrow would have been the 31st anniversary of our wedding day – magic and loss forever side by side on my calendar. My daughter sent me a text last night, telling me she has a visceral memory of the two of us telling ourselves that one day it will be decade since it happened – and we will hardly believe it. I remember that conversation too, my then teenage girl telling me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, twenty years, forty years,…
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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,” there at 6 o’clock every evening when we turned on the news or the odd time our kitchen window shook because a bomb had exploded somewhere close. There was the time the car-bomb exploded outside Halls Hotel, and then years later when my brother, as a new 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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Haunted.
Given the courage, we live by moments of interference between past and present, moments in which time comes back into phase with itself. It is the only meaning of history. We search the past not for other creatures but for our own lost selves. ~ Roger Shattuck 1958 (Source: Listening to Van Morrison, Neill Marcus). Halloween is upon us – where I’m from, a holiday derived from the ancient pagan festival of Samhain, that time of year when, on the cusp of winter, the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, the souls of our long-dead ancestors emerging through it, seeking warmth and communion with us. Trick…
