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Amy Winehouse, Antrim, Awesome Women, Back to School, Coming of age, Education, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Sephora, Shopping, Valley of the Sun, Whoopi Goldberg
breaking bad & back to school . . .
It is 7:30pm, it is dark, and, unbelievably, it is 108 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s 42.2 degrees Centigrade for my friends back home – and no, dad, I didn’t do the mental arithmetic the way you taught me. I used bloody Google). I am hot. I am bothered, and I just don’t understand why we can’t wait for September to send our hot and sticky children back to school. Late September. My friends on the East Coast tell me that schools there start after Labor Day, which, at least suggests a break in the calendar, a new season, a time for a Fall into something cooler. While there was no Labor Day in Northern Ireland,…
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Birthdays, bombing, IRA, John Hewitt, Loughinisland, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Peace, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, UVF, W.B. Yeats
omagh – this is our life
In the summer of 1998, I took my new baby daughter home to Northern Ireland, my lovely, tragic Northern Ireland. It was my mother’s sixtieth birthday, and between my father, my brother, and a handful of relatives who could keep a secret (an impressive trait in rural County Derry) we planned a “This is Your Life” style surprise. It was delicious, knowing we had all swallowed the same secret, and that my all-knowing mother was completely in the dark. The Troubles had tainted previous visits home, but this time was going to be different – no bombs, no shootings, no petrol bombs, no more girls tarred and feathered for falling in love…
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Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Governor Jan Brewer, Immigration, Memoir, Politics, Racial Profiing, SB1070, Seamus Heaney, Sectarianism
SB 1070 & the music of what happens
It was just three years ago. I was sitting in my office, only half-enjoying a visit from a former student – each of us was tense, awaiting Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s announcement regarding SB1070. Surely she would do the humane and right thing? Surely she would refuse to sign an insidious and un-American piece of legislation that would criminalize undocumented immigrants and would require state and city police officers to check the immigration status of a detained, stopped or arrested individual, if they reasonably suspect he or she could be an undocumented immigrant. Surely a Governor of these United States in 21st Century America would veto any legislation that had…
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Borders, Bruce Springsteen, DREAM Act, Human Rights, Kai Wiedenhöfer, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Photography
achtung baby . . . if walls could talk.
I always thought Robert Frost was right to ask so plainly in a poem we had to memorize for school, why it was 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. And, if a wall could talk, what stories would it tell? I suppose the first time I pondered this question was when I traveled with the North East Ulster Schools Symphony Orchestra to Germany for our annual summer trip. Ordinarily, it was two weeks…
