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Aging, Arizona, Birthdays, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Death and dying, Diagnosis, Family, Fireworks, Irish culture, Irish mammies, John Hiatt, Loss, Love, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Muriel Rukeyser, New Year, Newgrange, No Country for Old Men, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, saying goodbye, Soundtracks of our Lives, Starting over, Ted Kooser, Themes of Childhood, Time
Ready to Turn ~ Winter Solstice 2015
Again, the sun will pause for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, outside Dublin, Ireland, they hold a lottery to decide who will experience the solstice the way it was intended by those ancient folk who built it over 5,000 years ago. In its roof, is a little opening, aligned to the ascending sun. When that morning sunbeam shoots through the roof-box, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the chamber below, highlighting the…
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thank goodness, thanksgiving & astral weeks
In the Fall of 2012, my friend and I enrolled in a college photography class. Not a bucket list kind of thing by most standards, but it was something I had been meaning to do for thirty years. I had just never been able to find the time for it. I had been so busy being busy and bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher. At the same time, I had also been waiting for Tom Petty to show up on my doorstep and beg me to be one of his Heartbreakers. I loved the photography instructor. A…
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Coming of age, Dispatch from the Diaspora, La Mon House Hotel Bombing, Paris Attack, Rory Gallagher, Stiff Little Fingers, Terrorism, The Miami Showband, The Troubles, The Ulster Hall Belfast, Themes of childhood
Vive La Musique! No “No Go Area” for Stiff Little Fingers
In the early hours of July 31, 1975, five members of The Miami Showband were heading home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. Their drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family members. On a narrow country road outside Newry, the band was flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) checkpoint. Such an incident was “normal” in the seventies in Northern Ireland, and they wouldn’t have been overly alarmed. But then the men in uniform ordered them to get out of their vehicle and stand by the roadside while the soldiers conducted a check of the back…
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9/11, Anything can Happen, Being young, Belfast, bombing, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Heartbreak Beat, Northern Ireland, Paris Attack, Sectarianism, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Psychedelic Furs, The Troubles, War
Paris – Heartbreak Beat.
“They stopped France when its guard was down,” announces the BBC reporter from a TV in the corner of my house so far away from Paris. Of course they did. I should know by now that a popular concert venue in Paris on a Friday night is not an unexpected place, that there are some for whom Paris is “a legitimate target.” I should know by now not to be shocked that a gunman would fire indiscriminately into one restaurant at the intersection of Rue de Charonne and Rue Faidherbe. And then another. Learning that two explosions were heard outside the Stade de France during the friendly football match between France and Germany, I am reminded of…
