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van morrison & ghosts of a Hallowe’en past
Sharing a Hallowe’en story that haunts me still . . .
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hand ballet: magic & loss & lou reed remembered
Graceful and elegant, my daughter’s fingers catch the sun spilling through the window. For a minute, everything stops. My little girl’s hands are those of a young woman. Strong and steady. Earnest. She is the real warrior in our house. Just a twinkling ago, she first discovered her beautiful hands. For me, her besotted mother, it was a magical milestone in her development. She was surely the first child to ever make such a discovery, her little fingers in constant motion. We called it “hand ballet.” Transfixed, as though under a spell, she paid rapt attention, staring intently, unblinking, at the dancing fingers that would soon cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, make…
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A Call, Aging, Being young, Birthdays, Castledawson, Family, Father Daughter Relationships, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rites of passage, Seamus Heaney, The Harvest Bow, Themes of childhood
happy birthday da
It is my father’s birthday today. Unimaginably, he is 76 years old, but like the rest of us, I’m sure there are times when he feels not one iota different from the handsome young man with a shock of black hair, smiling that smile at his beautiful girlfriend ~ I will send his birthday greetings via my mother’s Facebook page. He won’t want to admit that he likes the “new-fangled” social media – but secretly he loves it. After all, he can read his favorite passages from the Bible on my mother’s iPad or Google the answers to questions about the Japanese Maple trees he tends in his garden. Without question, he is one…
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Bunratty Castle, Celtic Tiger, County Clare, craic, Dromoland Castle, Ennis, global partnerships, homesickness, hurling, Irish American relations, Mark Twain, Memoir, Phoenix Sister Cities, recession, Shannon Airport, The Burren, Tourism, trad, Travel
a long, long way from clare to here . . .
It’s not taking time to rain today in Phoenix – I might as well be looking out at the playing field that stretched between our house on the Dublin Road and Lough Neagh. It is – according to the 11 Levels of Irish Rain “REALLY lashing . . . hammering down.” On such a day, I can expect inexplicable pangs of homesickness, that old, unchanging feeling that I know will pass, the way it has done countless times since I first came to America. It is as real a feeling as it was when I first experienced it twenty five odd years ago, reminding me of what Stephen King says – that homesickness can…
