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There’s a better home awaitin’
Ben, my favorite uncle, died this morning, and the world is instantly dimmer. I have been thinking about him a lot recently, unable to watch the Ken Burns documentary on Country Music without being mentally transported to Ben’s kitchen in Magherafelt, where he would deliver to anyone who would listen, a lengthy treatise on the contributions of Flatt and Scruggs Ben was a talented and versatile musician, his guitar or his banjo an extension of himself. He started playing when he was a child, able to do so because my father, – just ten years old at the time and good with his hands – made him a guitar. And,…
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Actors, Art, Children's Books, Gary Shteyngart, HBO, James Gandolfini, Maurice Sendak, Memoir, Soundtracks of our Lives, television, The Sopranos, Themes of Childhood, Where The Wild Things Are
james gandolfini ~ forever with the wild things
The only non-book that ever occupied my bookshelves was the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sits – still – among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart once pointed out, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever. Once upon a time, at 8 o’clock every night, my late husband would ask, “Well? Are we ready for Tony and the boys?” and we would tune in to HBO to watch, again, a re-run of an episode we had seen before more, already knowing what was going to happen to whom and why, but lured in nonetheless by the evergreen charisma of…
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A Sense of Wonder, Aging, Barmbrack, Belfast, Best friends, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Good Vibrations, Hyndford Street, In the Days Before Rock n' Roll, Irish culture, Little Feat, Madame George, Memoir, Milestones, Music, Norn Iron Soul Food, Northern Ireland, Paris Buns, pop culture, Pop Music, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Snowball, Soundtracks of our Lives, Terri Hooley, Themes of childhood, Van Morrison, Vinyl Records, WagonWheel, When the Healing Has Begun
Caught One More Time . . . Happy Birthday, Van Morrison.
From Cyprus Avenue on Van Morrison's 70th birthday - when the familiar refrain streamed across a continent into my kitchen in the desert, and the appreciative whistles from the Belfast crowd, my whole world stopped for a second. Back street jelly roll . . .
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A Poem for Michael and Christopher, Act Two, Door into the Dark, Postscript, Seamus Heaney, The Underground
Dear Seamus Heaney,
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you. ~ From his remarks to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduates, May 12, 1996 Dear Seamus Heaney, Six years…
