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Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Cadillac Ranch, Coming of age, Drive All Night, The Price You Pay, The River, The River Tour 2016
“And that’s the river . . . 41 years later”
"The River, is an album about time. Once you enter that adult life, the clock starts ticking. You have a limited amount of time to do your work, to raise your family, and do something good."
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For my Father on his Birthday: A Harvest Bow
One winter Sunday in Phoenix, I woke to the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel, my father in the kitchen sharpening my dull bread knife because “for God’s sake, it wouldn’t cut butter.” I stayed in bed. A widow for 25 days and stuck in the past because I knew my way around it, I allowed the familiar sound of the long metallic strokes on each side of the knife to transport me back to the kitchen of our house on the Dublin Road a lifetime ago, daddy testing the knife to make sure it was sharp enough to carve the Sunday roast or the Christmas turkey. Like changing a…
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Banking on breast cancer? Stop it.
It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but you already knew that. Some of you are beyond aware, fatigued by the reiterated reassurances that early detection is the next best thing to curing breast cancer. You might even be quietly resigned to accepting “No Evidence of Disease” (NED) as good as it’s going to get, but you might not say so out loud. Breast cancer impinges on the lives of everyone you now, in ways not always immediately discernible, given the complexity of the disease, the politics of its lexicon, the business of it. Thus, during Breast Cancer Awareness Industry Month, you might catch yourself using a strange vocabulary that keeps you…
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The public library: a first responder for all time.
September is National Literacy Month, an annual opportunity to draw attention to the state of literacy in the United States. In Maricopa County, Arizona, where I used to live, one in four adults cannot read these words. One in four adults cannot, therefore, cannot search the internet for news or bargains or jobs. One in four adults cannot fill out a form or sign their name on a receipt or write a message on a birthday card. Globally, a staggering 773 million youth and adults still cannot read and write and 250 million children are failing to acquire basic literacy skills – and basic literacy skills are no longer confined…
