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Arizona, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Concerts, Fourth of July, Immigration, Rolling Stones Farewell Tour, SB1070, Slane Castle
america – another year older
When I think of the 4th of July, I think not of fireworks that flash and fly across an American night, but of those that kiss the sky over Slane Castle in County Meath Ireland, after a long day of music. My first concert at Slane was in 1982 for The Rolling Stones “farewell tour.” Seriously. Warming up for them were the J. Geils Band, The Chieftains, and George Thorogood and the Destroyers. Two years later, I was back, to see UB40, Santana, and Bob Dylan and the sweet surprise of Van Morrison joining Dylan on stage to sing “Tupelo Honey.” As I recall, Bono showed up as well. But on June 1, 1985, America came to…
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Cancer Language, Culture of breast cancer, Damian Gorman, Damian Gorman, Death and dying, Memoir, Poetry, Road trips, Soundtracks of our Lives, Summertime, Van Morrison, Writing
rest easy, Dermot Healy
Breast cancer forever changed the connotations of certain words for me – “staging” I no longer immediately associate with the theater; “fog” I am more apt to attach to a state of cognitive loss instead of the stuff of Van Morrison’s misty mornings or the cloud that can obscure parts of Pacific Coast Highway as we head north in the summertime; “cure” no longer the idiomatic “hair of the dog that bit you” but a confounding and elusive thing all wrapped up in a pink ribbon; “Mets” no longer the other New York baseball team, but a tragic abbreviation for metastatic breast cancer from which no one survives yet of all the millions of dollars raised for breast cancer research…
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California, Father's Day, Happy Father's Day, Love, Memoir, Milestones, Mix tapes, Morro Bay, Ordinary Things, Phoenix, Pismo Beach, Rites of passage, Road trips, Rolling Stones, San Luis Obispo, saying goodbye, Songs for the Road, Summertime
on the road again
From June until September, when the temperatures soar well above 100 degrees, most Phoenicians suffer a kind of amnesia about why they live in a desert city where, for most of the year, the weather is the kind that people from rainy, grey places covet. In the summer, all hot and bothered, we retreat to our air-conditioned offices, and grumble that our backyard pools aren’t quite cool enough. I know – ‘first world problems.’ Invariably, someone in Phoenix, probably someone on vacation who has never encountered such sizzling temperatures, will make a point about the excessive heat by attempting to fry an egg on the sidewalk. On June 26, 1990, Phoenix recorded its all-time high…
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Belfast, Crafts, Family, Fathers and sons, Happy Father's Day, Memoir, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Social Media, Soundtracks of our Lives, Themes of Childhood
inarticulate speech of the heart – on father’s day
This will not be a happy Father’s Day for my father. From far away, he will worry about my daughter and me and how we are doing on this, my daughter’s first Father’s Day without her dad. He’ll wish he could be in Phoenix, to fix things for us, to paint the laundry room or clean the windows or mix cement to repair the brick mailbox. Naturally, he won’t understand why I don’t understand why all those things need fixing. And naturally, I won’t understand why he won’t understand that they don’t. The truth is that each of us wants to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children will never…
