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All The Young Dudes, david bowie, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Drive in Saturday, Lazarus, Life on Mars, Rebel Rebel, Rock n Roll Suicide, Young Americans
bowie – is it any wonder?
The following post was also published on the Irish Times website as part of a collective tribute to David Bowie from Irish writers Julian Gough, Joseph O’Connor, Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle, Eimear McBride, Hugo Hamilton, John Kelly, John McAuliffe and many others – David Bowie: Irish Writers Pay Tribute It was just after one o’clock in the morning. On my bedside table, a tiny screen lit up with a message from another planet and three words that still don’t belong together: “Bowie is dead.“ David Bowie is dead. It was cancer that took him, a cancer he kept private from this world – my world – of which he was so much a…
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How to Welcome a New Year
This is from Ted Kooser’s lovely book, Local Wonders. Wherever you are in your life, you’ll find yourself in his reflection on life, the passing year, and how to greet the future: 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 passage between each car and the next, and we steady ourselves and push across the…
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Silent Night – 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. It is a crime scene that the 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…
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Aging, An Ulster Twilight, Castledawson, Christmas, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Father Daughter Relationships, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood
Another Ulster Twilight
It is Christmas morning, 1967, in a modest house on Antrim’s Dublin Road. With a big satin bow in her hair, the little girl is the picture of happiness, wrapped up in an outfit her mother knit for the occasion. Santa has left a new bicycle. It is her first, and it is equipped with stabilizers. Stabilizers – her first big word. Even now, I like saying the word and conjuring all it connotes – stability, steadfastness, a firm hold, balance. By all accounts, Santa had not read MIT engineering professor David Gordon Wilson’s Bicycling Science in which the professor wholly dismisses training wheels, pointing out, obviously, that they do not teach how to…
