One of the joys of being a kid is the sense of absolute freedom – where the only responsibilities you have consist of common-sensical things such as remembering to get dressed in the morning, and not setting yourself fire or consuming shards of glass throughout the course of the day. You are truly “care” free, and the concepts of fear and failure are as distant to you as the prospect of old age and a walking cane. There comes a time, however, when life begins teasing the mind with tantalizing glimpses of possibilities. A time of science at its purest, unfettered from caution, where daring discoveries are pulled from the jaws of death by the pure of heart. When the mind becomes obsessed with the boundaries between what you know, and what you imagine to be possible “with just a little extra effort.” Continue reading »
I was in Ireland, completely alone in life, far from family and friends, when I finally discovered what it means to feel at home. I was almost thirty years old.
I had come over on a scholarship to complete a program of Irish studies, mainly to further cement an emerging self to the source I had come to identify with most closely. Growing up I had always been aware of my family’s background, but had yet to fuse my roots to my identity, and felt a strange sense of disconnect between place and purpose. I was a Southerner, to be sure, shortening sentences and lengthening vowels with the best of them, but it never felt like it was me speaking as much as it did me playing the part of a Southern speaker. A character in a play, if you will. As my studies drew me deeper into the Irish side of my family tree, I began to feel a kinship of sorts with the myths and the legends that sang to me across the centuries. I began to feel as if I knew the characters in the legends, with a level of psychological insight more common to familial bonds than friendship or fandom. I could see them in my mind, anticipate their words and actions, and think the thoughts I knew would be in their heads. I understood them better than I understood myself. When one of my professors suggested a study abroad program as a possible fork in my educational path, I knew right away that I would do it, and where I would go. Continue reading »
When your personal history is written, what would you want it to say? Would you want it to be about your accomplishments; a litany of successes peppered with a few destiny shaping failures in which you learned a crucial life lesson at precisely the right moment? Or would you want it to be more tolerant of the inevitable sloppiness of life; illustrating the not only the times you behaved with the sanctity of the blessed, but also the depravity of the monstrous? Would you want it to conclude with an examination of your relative importance of you social status, or would you be satisfied with a simpler epitaph, stating merely that “he did his best”. And what of your family; how big a part would they play in your story? Would you make an attempt to tell of who they were, as best you were able to determine), making them principle characters in their own right, or would they be relegated to minor roles, trotted out as instruments of plot service or characterization? Continue reading »
Remnants
We see him in the mornings usually, standing at the corner of two major downtown streets. He picks up pieces of trash and, in an inexplicable fury, throws them with all his might at a small brick wall. When they bounce off, he picks them right back up and throws them again. In the several minutes we sit at the light he will repeat this process over and over, in an obviously unbalanced attempt to get paper bags and bits of refuse to defy the laws of physics and pass through to the other side. It’s the violence of his throwing that draws the eye, the force equivalent to that of a major league pitcher painting the corners with a 90 mile an hour fastball. His face is twisted in a rictus of rage, and each time the trash bounces off the wall, he grows more agitated and his throwing takes on an even greater air of desperation. As our light goes green, we turn slowly past him, wondering if there will ever be a day when he succeeds in ramming the remnants of his imagination through an immovable and impassive reality. Continue reading »
