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2017 V by Very Blog Awards Ireland, Blogging, Blogging, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Irish Diaspora, Writing
Shortlisted People ~ Randy Newman, Susan Lucci, & Me.
I love a list. It has a beginning and an ending. It’s a certainty. A sure thing. Naturally, then, I love Rob Gordon, a kindred spirit erstwhile hapless record shop owner in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. A compulsive maker of lists which somehow make sense of a world that doesn’t always make sense, Rob’s “top fives” run the gamut of pop culture, eclectic compilations that include his top five episodes of Cheers, top five Elvis Costello songs, the top five musical crimes perpetrated by Stevie Wonder in the 80s and 90s, and the top five “women who don’t live on his street but would be very welcome.” Like Hornby’s character, I can produce all kinds of top-five lists . .…
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9.11.2013, 9/11, Anything can Happen, Belfast, Billy Collins, Blogging, bombing, British Army, cancer, Diary, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Healing Field Tempe, Loss, Memoir, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Peace, Poetry, Remembering September 11th, Seamus Heaney, September 11, The Peace Process, The Troubles, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, Writers
the last name on the list ~ remembering September 11th
I have yet to be disappointed by what happens when my online world collides with its ‘real’ counterpart. Landing on the virtual doorsteps of people in the middle of lives parallel to my own, I have been beautifully blindsided by unexpected coincidences and exchanges of truths that may not otherwise have seen the light of day. In my virtual home, it is easy to pull up a chair and trade ideas and opinions with people I may never meet about why Seamus Heaney will always matter; about the beautiful, bruised Northern Ireland that both scared me and shaped me; about breast cancer and the pain of it, the politics of it…
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Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, Dr. Martin Luther King, DREAM Act, Human Rights, Immigration, Justice, Northern Ireland, Prop 300, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood
Whose American Dream Matters? #DefendDACA
Each of us from a different corner of the world, each of us an immigrant in Arizona, we wanted to make a point with our simple declaration - "We're all immigrants" - the point being that America makes immigrants of us all.
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For Houston ~ Home Sweet Home
A 2:15 am Facebook update from my friend in Houston reads, “The rain continues.” Flooding thousands of homes and pummeling the area with over four feet of rain, Harvey is relentless. Rekindling memories of Katrina are harrowing images of people stranded on the rooftops of their homes or wading chest-deep in filthy floodwater; and then the heartbreaking stories of Manuel Saldivar, 84, his wife Belia, 81, and great-grandchildren, Daisy 6, Xavier 8, Dominic, 14, and Devy who drowned while trying to escape floodwaters in a van or of the little girl rescued after she was found holding on to her unresponsive mother in the floodwaters of Beaumont, or Houston Police officer, Sergeant Steve Perez,…
