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Arizona, Awesome Women, Immigration, Linda Ronstadt, Memoir, Parkinson's Disease, Politics, SB1070, Soundtracks of our Lives, Themes of childhood
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of her Voice
I never thought I would hear Linda Ronstadt sing again, but there she is on my television screen, singing a traditional Mexican cancione with a nephew and cousin. It is, she explains, a family thing that she doesn’t want them doing without her. She stops to find a note, they resume, and when the song finishes, she looks at the camera – right at me – and says, with a no-bullshit candor: This isn’t really singing. Believe me. It’s a few notes sketched in. But it’s not really singing. And, I am in tears. I bet I’m not alone. I’ve been cheated. On Monday, work will take me back to…
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How to Greet a New Year
Wherever you are, even if you’re feeling a bit lost, you are sure to find yourself in the final essay from Local Wonders by Ted Kooser. It’s a lovely reflection on life and loss and on looking ahead – where the world is waiting for us. Enjoy: Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away. There’s a windy, perilous…
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When the sun stops for a moment . . .
Dawn light began stealing Through the cold universe to County Meath, Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling, Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stones Millennia deep in their own unmoving And unmoved alignment. (from A Dream of Solstice by Seamus Heaney) This morning, once again, the sun paused for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely reminder that the light is coming. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, in the Boyne valley outside…
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Silent Nights – from Scotland to Sandy Hook.
December 14, 2012 Cold and lifeless, the bodies of twenty little children lie where they were gunned down that morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The crime scene, a day before, was a school. The medical examiner’s team begins its work through the night to make sure there are no mistakes, no shadow of doubt about the names of those children – 12 girls, eight boys – along with those of six women shot at close range by a 20 year-old man, whose name everyone now knows. Later, a state trooper is assigned to each anguished family in close-knit Newtown, Connecticut, as they wait for confirmation of what they already know. And, stunned families all…
