[The green fields of Ireland. Photo is mine.]
With a bog, and its buried contents, the past is no longer behind you, but palpably beneath your feet. A secret history is stacked just a few feet below the modern world in which you’re standing.
~~Terry Eagleton
It’s closing in on St. Patrick’s Day and since I will be quite busy in the next few weeks, I thought I’d put out this long-planned…
[From the Nutritional Label of a Trail Mix. Photo is mine.]
If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it’s time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle.
~~Paul Lewis. From a letter to the New York Times in 1992. Lewis coined the term: Frankenfood.
Oh dear! While I was opening WordPress to write this blog post I noticed something. I did not successfully post a blog…
[If you know me, you know this house. 420 Front St. Owego, NY. Photo is mine.]
I can see a better time when all our dreams come true.
~~Fairytale of New York. Shane Patrick Lysaght Macgowan
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
~~Marcel Proust
The photo above. My childhood home. See the brown painted bay window on the…
[On the left, in the distance, just beyond the white house, just hidden in the morning fog, is the riverbank where I played away my childhood. Photo is mine.]
Great Grandpa, what’s an Imaginarium?
Oh, Great Grandson, it’s like a rambling and cluttered room, an old room, a very big room. There are lots of books, on magic and myth, truth and nonsense, ideas and quotes, sad stories and impossibly…
[Unenhanced photo of the moon. Sailing west, looking south. The North Atlantic Ocean. Photo is mine.]
Whenever people look at clouds they do not see their real shape, which is no shape at all, or every shape, because they are constantly changing. They see whatever it is that their heart yearns for.
~~Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion
Whatever it is their hearts yearn for…Hmm.
We…
[The Lychgate of All Saints Church in Minstead, New Forest. This gate is where the funeral party rests the coffin and meets the Vicar in preparation for the burial. Photo is mine.]
‘Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.
~~ William Shakespeare Hamlet
We were staying for five days in Minstead, in the heart of the New…
[Ceiling of the nave in Bath Abbey. Photo is mine.]
Oh! Who can ever get tired of Bath?
~~Jane Austen Northanger Abbey
Like a grandfather clock on the landing of a staircase of an old house, like a circular staircase leading to the dark places in a haunted Irish castle, like an elderly couple at the end of long day of driving, things and people wind down.
We’re winding down. Our fantastic…
[A face carved into clay. Guardian of Hell Lane? Omen? Warning? Demon? Photo is mine.]
Greenways, droveways, stanways, stoweys, bradways, whiteways, reddaways, radways, rudways, halsways, roundways, trodds, footpaths, fieldpaths, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, sandways, ridings, halter-paths, cartways, carneys, causeways, here-paths – & also fearways,…
[South of Shaftesbury the gentle hills of Dorset go on and on. It was a pleasant afternoon drive. The next day proved to be very different. Photo is mine.]
I’ll huff and I”ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.
~~The Big Bad Wolf
The south coast of Dorset. The Jurassic Coast. The smugglers and the shepherds ruled the day here once upon a time. Thomas Hardy wrote novels based on this ancient…
[A detail of an art exhibition in the nave of Bath Abbey. Photo is mine.]
A premature victim of the Exertions of an ardent and fuperier mind.
~~From an epitaph inscribed on white marble, on the north wall of the nave of Bath Abbey. who passed on to his reward in 27 January, 1792. Aged 32 years. He also was A truly Honeft Man.
Back in the late 18th century, they often used ‘f‘ in place of ‘s‘.…
[Standing in the English rain, waiting for the sun. The author standing near the entrance of the Natural History Museum, London. Photo taken by Mariam Voutsis.]
The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
~~Mark Russel
Slainte, Ireland.
Allow me, gentle reader, to add a gentle coda to our gentle trip to Ireland. When last sat…
[Redwood Castle, Lorrha, Co Tipperary, Ireland. Photo is mine.]
So, are ye staying the night?
~~Coleesa Egan
My last blog post, No. 6 in my series. Oh, my last post from nearly a week ago. What can an honest man say about my determination to spend the night in my ancestral castle, reputed to be haunted?
Actually, nothing. We did not spend the night there. I had every intention to do so, even…
[Castle Redwood. Lorrha, Co Tipperary, Ireland. Photo source: Tipperary Tourism.]
This photo is of Castle Redwood. It’s not a ‘castle’ in the popular sense, the way most are depicted in movies. It’s a Keep, intended to hold the owners in safety during an attack. Walls are nearly ten feet thick, slot windows for defending archers and parapets to throw rocks down on the angry crowds during a…
[A roadside flower, ready to spread it’s seed. Co Sligo, Ireland. Photo is mine.]
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
~~from When You are Old, by W. B. Yeats
It was an August day, forty-one years ago when I first walked through the gate of the…
[A very creaky gate leading into an old cemetery. Photo is mine.]
Suaimhneas Siorai Air
~~Old Irish Epitaph “Eternal Rest be Upon Him/Her”
The green and rusted rotating gate made a noise that seemed more like a stifled scream of metal against metal. It pierced my ears. The harshness of the sound, under other circumstances, could peel paint off a wall.
I wasn’t complaining. The gate sounded…
[Where we were. Photo is mine.]
Burren (‘b^ren0 n. A limestone area on the North Clare coast in the Irish Republic, famous for its wildflowers, caves, and dolmens.
The Burren is a lot of things. It’s a place in Ireland, a route to tour, and a UNESCO Heritage Site. To me, it’s something else altogether.
It’s mysterious and mythic.
When I first encountered the Burren, it was in 1984 while…
[A steeple in Kenmare. Photo is mine.]
We were preparing to depart Kenmare, but I had found one more place I wanted to visit. The Kenmare Stone Circle. It was a short walk from our hotel, down Main Street (sounds so American), past a hundred pubs, fifty Aran Island Woolen/Weaver shops full of scarves, and Clan throws. If you’re cold and thirsty and you can’t find a solution, than you have some…
[The shortest distance between two points is a curved line (when The Great Circle is in play). Photo is mine.]
To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.
~~Old Irish Saying
Five hours and fifty some minutes separated us from New York City and Shannon Airport. Round it up…six hours. Not many hours, not too many miles, but a thousand worlds apart. Does that make any…
[Photo is mine.]
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair…
~~Robert Service “The Spell of the Yukon”
It’s been a long time since I used a quote by the poet Robert Service. It’s been even longer since I thought about sitting on a ledge, alone, on the margin of the Taku Glacier, in the middle of the Juneau Icefield, about thirty-five miles from the…
[The usual metaphor for a journey. Photo is mine.]
The life in which nothing happens goes the fastest, because it has no landmarks.
~~Katherine Tynan
The last time I reached a milestone, my 600th post, was on Feb. 3, 2023 (at 9:17 PM). Looking back, I have been writing about 100 every several years…it’s been fairly consistent, surprisingly. My first attempt at writing blogs was July 2012. At…
[In Linda’s front yard, flowers abound in every corner. Photo is mine.]
Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life
~~Steve Jobs (Probably not spoken at the Greenport graduation, but I like the quote so here it is.)
Saturday 21 June 2025–
Mariam and I are visiting her colleague and friend, Linda Mugford. She has a beautiful home in the beautiful town of Greenport, NY. It’s…
I never wanted a Guinness more than the moment when I reached the bottom.
~~ Paul Egan. Upon finishing his climb of Croagh Patrick. [Paraphrased]
Once upon a time, when I was a young boy, my father gave me a ‘beaver stick’. For my readers who have never had or seen a beaver stick, it is a…stick, about the thickness of a broom handle, the ends of which are chewed by the aforementioned beaver…
No quote necessary…
~~Patrick Egan
[Photo credit: Google search.]
This morning I was reading an article in The Guardian about Amazon Echo (Alexa). It was written by a journalist from the UK. I learned how much that is spoken by me and Mariam is stored in a server…somewhere. The writer told of how he now knows of his daughter’s musical tastes. It’s all been archived…somewhere.
That, of course,…
[My mother, Mary Hotchko Egan. She is striking a very ’50s pose in our backyard in Owego, NY. Photo is mine.]
“Don’t toss that saucer in the air. You’ll drop it.”
~~My mother to me, sometime in the late ’60s.
Of course I wouldn’t listen. I tossed it up and caught it, until I missed. It hit the floor and broke into many pieces. Mom just sighed and walked into the kitchen.
I felt like crap. She…
[Photo is mine.]
“O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”
~~Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Angel.
I’m not a ghost, not yet anyway, but I’ve come back. Back to my hometown of Owego. I have things to do. Getting the new enhanced driver’s license is on the top of my to-do list. I’m getting cynical these days. We live in uncertain times. Our movements, once freely taken, are now…
to get my fair share of abuse.
~~Mick Jagger
[At the New York Public Library Main Branch. 42nd St. & 5th Ave. Photo is mine.]
I told a few people that we were going to the Hands Off demonstration at Bryant Park. Some commented:
“Be careful.”
“Don’t take a backpack. Not the thing at a demonstration.”
On the #7 train to Fifth Avenue, I was unsure of how it was going to go. This was not the…
[The route. The dark blue line. Disregard the time notation. Source: Google Maps.]
“I remember it was up hill all the way.”
~~ Lenny Schmidt
“There is a cow outside of our tent.”
~~ Patrick Egan
Oh, the exuberance of youth! The innocence of the young! The pure and wild wind in our hair and the open road before us!
This is the story of three boys, who, on the very threshold of their teenage…
[The found photograph. By unknown photographer, probably my father.]
The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect, and as for that object, it depends upon chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves die.
~~Marcel Proust
I bought a new desk to…
[Is this the world we want? Image source: Google search.]
We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.
~~Sheryl Sandberg
A year has passed and here I am once again laying in bed with my heavily bandaged right foot propped on a dark red cushy pillow. I stare out my bedroom window at the empty patio. Leafless and nearly monochromatic despite my…
Don’t cry for me, Argentina
The truth is, I never left you
All through my wild days, my mad existence
I kept my promise
Don’t keep your distance
~~Don’t Cry for Me Argentina. Songwriters: Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice
On an afternoon, sometime close to the first days of December, we sat in our living room in New York City and looked out at a dreary drizzle fall on our patio. Our passports…
