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airing laundry . . . mother’s day in america
Old Smoothing Iron by Seamus Heaney Often I watched her lift it from where its compact wedge rode the back of the stove like a tug at achor. To test its heat by ear she spat in its iron face or held it up next her cheek to divine the stored danger. Soft thumps on the ironing board. Her dimpled angled elbow and intent stoop as she aimed the smoothing iron like a plane into linen like the resentment of women To work, her dumb lunge says, is to move a certain mass through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and feel exact and equal to it. Feel…
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favorite teacher, Frank O'Connor, Great teachers, Memoir, Mr. Jones, Music, Short Stories, Teacher Appreciation Week, Teaching, Themes of childhood
mr. jones and me . . . in appreciation of a teacher
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. This week, I will not be the only one to invoke Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides. All over America, during Teacher Appreciation Week, we honor teachers and their craft with public fanfare and more personal gestures as well. It’s the time of year when some teachers are counting down the days until school’s out for summer, while others are figuring out how to make every instructional minute matter until the final bell rings…
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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…
