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Addiction, Dead Poet's Society, Death and dying, Depression, Good Morning Vietnam, Good Will Hunting, Loneliness, Loss, Love, Mental Health, Mrs. Doubtfire, Robin Williams, saying goodbye, Self-medicating, widowed
“i had to go see about a girl” ~ thank you, robin williams
Crawling across the bottom of the TV screen are the words “Robin Williams Dead at 63,” and as celebrity doctors weigh in on reports that the actor died at his home in Northern California today, apparently due to suicide by asphyxiation, I am drawn back to my first encounter with Robin Williams on the TV in our living room in Antrim. As they speculate about his battle with severe depression, I am a teenager in Northern Ireland once more, and he is an alien from outer space on the Mork and Mindy show. Brilliantly, he was Mork from Ork. Pam Dawber, as Mindy, was the perfect foil. Easy to like, she shared my taste in music with the…
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Art, Belfast, Belfast Peace Lines, Berlin Wall, Borders, Bruce Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Coming of age, Gaza, Human Rights, Kai Wiedenhöfer, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Photography, The Troubles, United States-Mexico Border, W.B. Yeats, Writers
‘peace comes dropping slow’
I always thought Robert Frost was very sensible to ask so plainly in a poem we had to memorize for school, why it is that good fences make good neighbors: Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down. If walls could talk, what stories would they tell? I never pondered this more than in 1978 when I traveled with the North East Ulster Schools Symphony Orchestra to Germany for our annual summer trip. Ordinarily, we spent a week in Ballycastle, County Antrim,…
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Children of The Troubles, Damian Gorman, Devices of Detachment, For too many Palestinian and Israeli Parents, Gaza, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Poetry, Tony Parker
Gaza ~ how long must we sing this song?
One child has been killed each hour in Gaza over the past two days Kyung-Wha Kang, Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator told those gathered at an emergency meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council six days ago. Far away, I begin the mental mathematics. Adding it up, I know for sure only this about Gaza – children are dying. The news comes fast and furious, twenty-four hours a day. Mainstream media. Social media. Mixed-up media. From their early morning studios, Starbucks in hand, the “experts” weigh in, all the while equivocating their way out of circumstances they cannot comprehend. How could they? How can we? We, with…
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Belfast, Friendship, Good Vibrations, JJ Cale, Loss, Memoir, Milestones, Music, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Regrets, Social Media, Soundtracks of our Lives, Terri Hooley, The Clash, Twitter, Vinyl Records, Waking Ned Devine
belated . . . but thank you, jj cale
On my way home from work, I stopped by Half-Price Books, remembering that I still needed to buy George Orwell’s 1984 (the obligatory summer reading for a high school Senior). My lucky day, I found a well-worn paperback copy, published in 1961- the only one in the store – and I paid a dollar for it. Just a dollar to enter a world of newspeak and double-think, of propaganda and psychological manipulation, of “Big Brother’s Watching You.” Sometimes I think George Orwell wrote to remind us of our worst selves. Handing over my dollar, I spied a record section and asked the young man sorting through donated books to hang on for a minute while I…
