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favorite teacher, Frank O'Connor, Great teachers, Memoir, Mr. Jones, Music, Short Stories, Teacher Appreciation Week, Teaching, Themes of childhood
every day is teacher appreciation day
There’s no word in the language I revere more than ‘teacher.’ My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher, and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming a teacher. I won’t be the only one to invoke Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides during this Teacher Appreciation Week We should honor our teachers and their craft. Navigating multiple challenges and crises wrought by COVID, millions of them learned to teach from their homes, to harness the power of whatever technology was available to them to maintain a connection with their students, many of whom they didn’t see for months,…
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where the kettle’s always on
It is Mother's Day in Northern Ireland. With all good intention, I had marked the day on my calendar but still forgot to send a card, time running away from me like Bukowski’s wild horses. The water is wide, but it will take only a second to transport me back to my mother's kitchen. I'll pick up the phone to tell her about my good intentions this Mother’s Day and sorry about the card. She'll tell me in the parlance, to catch myself on. I make a mental to note to call the florist in Magherafelt tomorrow.
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How to Open a Book
Some years ago, science fiction writer, John Scalzi, penned a homage to the libraries of his life prompting me to do the same today, World Books Day. Not a bricks and mortar library, my childhood library was a bus full of magic that visited a housing estate on Antrim’s Dublin Road every week. Although a world away from the United States, it was probably what Thomas Jefferson had in mind: I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country…
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Primavera Forever.
Edna St. Vincent Mallay, who brought us the candle burning at both ends, was born on February 22nd 1892, a woman before her time. Enchanting, bold, and brilliant, her poetry was described by Thomas Hardy as one of America’s two greatest attractions—the other was the skyscraper. In Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Mallay, biographer Nancy Milford clocks the poet as the herald of the New Woman: She smoked in public when it was against the law for women to do so. She lived in Greenwich Village during the halcyon days of that starry bohemia, she slept with men and women and wrote about it in lyrics and sonnets…
