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Antrim, Belfast, Belfast Peace Lines, bombing, British Army, Bruce Springsteen, Castledawson, Good Vibrations, IRA, Joe Strummer, La Mon House Hotel Bombing, Memoir, Mix tapes, Movies, Music, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Regrets, Sectarianism, Sherman Alexie, Terri Hooley, The Clash, The Miami Showband, The Troubles, The Undertones, Themes of childhood, UVF, Vinyl Records
for the record . . .
Dedicated to the legendary Terri Hooley . . . I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but on the plane from Chicago to Dublin two Novembers ago, perusing my options for in-flight entertainment, I paused when I heard the unmistakable hiss that comes after a stylus is dropped right in the groove, and a Northern Ireland accent infused with Woodbine cigarettes: “Once upon a time in the city of Belfast, there lived a boy named Terri . . .” Terri Hooley. Where do I begin, and what can I say that hasn’t already been said about him? In 1977, he opened his own record shop, “Good Vibrations” on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. The next year, under his own…
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Awesome Women, Being young, Coming of age, Death and dying, Great Advice, Great teachers, Loss, Maya Angelou, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, saying goodbye
for she existed ~ thank you, Maya Angelou
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. ~ from When Great Trees Fall by MAYA ANGELOU (1928 -2014) I first encountered Maya Angelou’s writing as a young teacher in America. In the English textbook provided to me by the school district was an excerpt from “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and even though it was the story of a black woman’s childhood in the South during the 1930s and 1940s,…
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After death of a spouse, Animals, Arizona Humane Society, Best friends, Dog Rescue, Dogs, Friendship, Love, Mary Oliver, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Rites of passage, Themes of Childhood, Van Morrison
dog days ~ an emotional rescue
Sometimes in the early hours of the morning, when I am contemplating all that has happened in the past couple of years, I find myself wanting to be reassured that as his fragile heart stopped working, Ken's last interaction on this earth was tender, with three pounds of unconditional love curled up like a comma on his chest.
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Act Two, Castledawson, Family, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney
a mother’s day dance
This Mother’s Day weekend in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen, but on the sandy edges of California before the fog rolled in on an August evening. Facing each other, a blue blanket stretched between us, she stepped towards me, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we met to make…
