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Language of Cancer, Leontia Flynn, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood
poetry – the charm of it
For World Poetry Day 2016. The freedom and the lovely uselessness of poetry is its whole point. ~ Leontia Flynn My parents were raised in rural County Derry, in Heaney country, where they learned to be thrifty and resourceful, and also – when all else failed – to believe in the mystical powers of “folk healers,” those individuals uniquely gifted with “the cure” or “the charm” for whatever ailed us. Consulted only after it was determined that they had flummoxed the medical doctor, the folk healer meted out charms in all forms – plasters, poultices, and in brown bottles. It was to such a man my father once turned after the…
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following the sun, following my grandmother
My grandmother died when I was just six years old. I have never forgotten her – maybe because hers was my first experience with death or maybe because it was my first time to feel completely loved. To this day, the sunshine that spills into my front room every morning, reminds me of Granny urging her daughter – my mother – to “follow the sun.” Once upon a time, she did that very thing. In the 1920s, when she was young and full of hope, Granny emigrated to America with my grandfather, and they settled in Connecticut. But a steady flow of letters from home, heavy with reminders of familial obligation, pulled them back to…
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Coming of age, craic, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Northern Ireland Culture, St. Patrick, Sunningdale Agreement, The Troubles, United Workers Council Strike 1974
by the wayside again on st. patrick’s day
I’m a bit ambivalent about St. Patrick’s Day. What is it about March 17th that renders so many people Irish or some version of it that I do not recall from living the first twenty-seven years of my life in Northern Ireland? Everywhere I turn tomorrow, there will be Americans proclaiming their Irishness , some in T-shirts emblazoned with a command for everyone to kiss them or a warning that they are falling-down drunk. Because they are Irish. Even politicians we never knew were Irish will become bona fide Irish – usually they are American. Imagine for a second just how many frazzled interns there must be in these United States, tasked by politicians…
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Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Cadillac Ranch, Coming of age, Drive All Night, The Price You Pay, The River, The River Tour 2016
“And that’s the river . . .”
I bought Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” when I was 17, and I played it until I had memorized every song. Mr. Jones, my English teacher, introduced me to The Boss sensing perhaps that his plainspoken poetry would appeal to my blue-collar sensibilities. He knew I had never seen a Cadillac or a State Trooper – most likely he hadn’t either – and that I wouldn’t know the difference between a highway and the motorway, but he knew I knew disappointment. I knew about the dole and diminished opportunities all around us. I knew pregnant girls whose boyfriends married them. I knew men who worked at the factory, and when the factory…
