-
inarticulate speech of the heart – happy father’s day
A favorite poem for Father’s Day … Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
-
Art, Awesome Women, Blogging, Breast Cancer Treatment, Chemotherapy, Family, Fathers and sons, Friendships, Happy Father's Day, Loss, Love, Memoir, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Social Media, Writing
a promise kept for father’s day
I never met Hugh James Sutherland who died on Sunday, May 5, 2013, but I know he loved the New York Times crossword puzzle, Scrabble, Starbucks, and walking at dusk with his wife. Nor have I met his wife, Karen, but she is my friend. We first bumped into each other on the blogosphere, via a comment she left on my New Year’s Day post. Signed TC (diagnosed with ST IV metastatic BC, december 16, 2012, now NED) it reminded me of the first time I ventured into an online breast cancer forum where all the guests signed their names not with the typical first-initial-last-name standard, but instead the ironic pedigree that included in the following…
-
American Dream, Belfast, Friendships, Memoir, Music, Northern Ireland, Soundtracks of our Lives, summer camp, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, Writing
coming to america … the reprise
I arrived in America in the summer of 1984, before my final year at Stranmillis College in Belfast. The first words spoken to me in America, “Keep on rollin’, lady,” fell impatiently from the lips of an unwelcoming security guard as I collected my rucksack and proceeded through Customs and Immigration at John F. Kennedy international airport, confirming for me that already, I was too slow for the big city, for the country I had dreamed of for years. Now I’m wondering how it would have benefited anyone in the airport that night, had I walked a little faster. I spent that first night in America, in the YMCA on Times Square…
-
and What I Wore, Art, Awesome Women, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, Culture of breast cancer, Facebook, Memoir, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Nora Ephron, Soundtracks of our Lives, Theater, Writers
what I wore, a mountain of life & missing Nora Ephron . . .
Last night, my best friend and I went to see the enchanting and poignant Love, Loss, and What I Wore, Nora and Delia Ephron‘s stage-adaptation of Ilene Beckerman’s book by the same name. Like each of the five women on stage, I can peer into my wardrobe and hang on the clothes and shoes and handbags bulging from it, some of the most important moments of my life. Especially my boots. There are my favorite brown leather boots with the beautiful patina, worn with an attitude the morning I was fired by someone who might possibly have been great were it not for the misogyny that made him so small.…
