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Straight Talk about Curly Hair
It was with a mix of delight and anxiety that I read online today that the perm is making a comeback. Amid the real-life never-ending Netflix drama that is the presidency of Donald Trump, this hair-rising news takes me back to the morning a middle-aged bald man reached across an impressive stretch of time and distance to announce on my Facebook page, “Hey!” “HEY!!!” “Didn’t we used to call you Crystal Tipps?” Yes. Yes, you did. Relentlessly. It was funnier to you than it was to me. Teetering on the edge of adolescence in the early seventies, I instinctively knew that Crystal’s coiffure, a big triangular purple frizz, belonged only on…
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these are the good old days. . .
January 1, 2013 Two o’clock in the morning. All is quiet – the right time for taking stock. My parents are here, fast asleep having brought in this New Year with the fireworks we’ve been saving for a special occasion and, for good luck, my husband designated as the ‘first-footer’ after midnight. It is a relief to shut the door against a year that started ominously, cancer interrupting our lives in ways we hadn’t planned. When I heard it got me, I cried as though I had just found out someone dear to me had died. At first inconsolable, I assumed those big fat tears flowed from the fear of…
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titanica – keep me in your heart for a while
November 15 2013 That morning, I was uneasy, unable to shake a feeling that something was wrong. When multiple phone calls to my home in Arizona went unanswered, I texted my friend and asked her to drive to my house where she would discover my husband had died. In another time zone, on another continent, on the other end of the line, I was at first detached from news that couldn’t possibly be true, but as the reality of it grew, so did my despair. I wanted to flee, to get away from rainy South Derry and back to the desert, to our cozy little house with its pink door…
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Dispatch from the Diaspora, Northern Ireland, Rituals, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, United Workers Council Strike 1974
No Sanctuary: By The Wayside
"Given the courage, we live by moments of interference between past and present, moments in which time comes back into phase with itself. It is the only meaning of history. We search the past not for other creatures but for our own lost selves."
