-
Selective recall …
It used to be that I'd file stuff away in a mental cabinet and retrieve it later, usually right after the time I needed it … people's names, titles of movies, passwords, the season finale of whatever series that won't be back until next year.
-
What Goes Around … Murphy Brown
Half-watching The Emmy’s, I looked up when Candice Bergen took the stage in a sparkly dress. Bergen has always had a relevance in my “American life.” In December 1988, shortly after she showed up as Murphy Brown on primetime TV, I took up permanent residence in the USA. And for the next decade, I liked knowing I could find her if I needed her on a Thursday night at nine o’clock. For many women, Murphy Brown was what Mary Tyler Moore had been to Candice Bergen, “I think Mary Tyler Moore really made women feel they were entitled to a career and to be defined without a man.” Following Moore’s…
-
9/11, Anything can Happen, Billy Collins, Healing Field Tempe, Memoir, Remembering September 11th, Seamus Heaney, Terrorism, Themes of childhood
In the Bluest Sky
In the parlance of aviation, a "severe clear" sky, so intensely blue with seemingly unlimited visibility and air so pure, it can blind a pilot.
-
has anybody seen my old friend, America?
I often feel guilty for having left my Northern Ireland. I wonder if perhaps the better thing or the best thing would have been to stay, to strive to see beyond the images that flickered on our television screen at six o’clock every night. But I didn’t stay. I fled. I turned my back on the vulnerable, tiny country that shaped and scared me – my lovely tragic Northern Ireland —and I became an immigrant in an America I wouldn’t recognize after three decades. And then, I turned my back on the United States of America. In retrospect, I spent much of the 1980s planning my escape from Northern Ireland. …
