“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
You Can Listen Here I know better than to invite a Swedish detective into my life in the winter, especially this winter. Kurt Wallander is one year younger than me. He rides in the passenger seat beside me because he exists within the book The Troubled Man*. He is losing his memory and experiencing shooting pains in his left arm and on the left side of his chest. The great love of his life, […]
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You Can Listen Here Two days before the storms that gave us a foot of snow and then 2 inches of ice, the three of us walked for hours across windless fields where mud and grasses were beginning to show through. I let my coat fall open. We crossed a rivulet ripe with flowing water and stones covered with layers of flamboyant green moss. We did not have to fight the elements. The dogs […]
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You Can Listen Here As a student-teacher I taught my first class ever with my fly all the way down and my white-haired, very proper supervising professor signaling from the back of the classroom, her charm bracelets making metallic crinkling noises as she waved. Thoroughly gob smacked by the ninth graders responding to me as if I were brilliant, I had entered a fool’s-dream. I thought she was offering encouragement. For my second interview […]
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You Can Listen Here The royal O’Donnell’s sank roots in the far north of Ireland, but not us. Our uprooted family traveled here in 1857 on a packet ship#, poor, refugees, the Potato Famine* keening at their backs, and when they finally arrived in Lebanon, PA, they stayed put. One historian of the Famine concluded “that before [it struck] … the Catholic and Gaelic-speaking Irish were … exceptionally reluctant to emigrate” because of “their profound […]
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