Category: Memories
-
I Never Met An English Country Church I Didn’t Like
[St. John the Baptist, Buckthorn Weston, Dorset] It’s been said by many travelers that if one wants to know what’s happening in any small English village, just go to the pub and listen for an hour. I think the same is true, to a degree, of social life provided by the Church in these towns…
-
68 Steps Along The Nave Of Wells Cathedral
Three hundred and sixty-five days ago, I was climbing the endless steps of Sacre Coeur in Paris. My wife was at my side. We paused on the 67th step, and, in the warm Parisian sun, we turned and looked back at the City of Lights. We kissed on that 67th step. It was my 67th…
-
Yes, But Why Can’t You Go Home Again?
It’s a cliché. It’s a meme. It’s been repeated a hundred billion times by three hundred billion people. “You can’t go home again” I’ve read Thomas Wolfe’s book by the same name. It was a long time ago. I may be wrong (correct me if I am), but I do not recall Wolfe ever saying…
-
Dance Like A Wave Of The Sea
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree… –W. B. Yeats Three decades have passed since I last walked the streets of Dublin, Galway and Sligo. A great many things have changed in those years. And, a great many haven’t. The smell of peat-fires in Dublin on a December night, the blasts of…
-
From My Cradle To Her Grave
The first woman to see me naked is lying six feet down in the silt of the Susquehanna River. It’s a small cemetery in a small community…not even a town or village…just a cluster of houses several miles down river from the town where I grew up. On the last day of May, I will…
-
A Chain Of Events Has No End
The judge cancelled the restraining order setting into motion a chain of events… I walked into my classroom on a September morning to meet my class for the first time. I looked around the room of faces, hands holding pencils, open notebooks and staring eyes. A chain of events was set into motion… One in…
-
The Old Schoolmaster
You throw a pebble, a small boulder that you can barely pick up, or a grain of sand into a pool of water. If there is no wind, you can watch the ripples move out in perfect concentric circles, ever-widening. The tiny waves keep going until they reach an obstacle and they bounce off into…
-
Arriving, Departing or Just Passing Through
I stood hard against the tiled wall and made room for the rush of human traffic trying to pass me. I was thinking about insanity and the blindness of powerful people to hold sacred something that once had beauty and class. Beauty and class are rare commodities these days. I was in the bowels of…
-
Don’t Cry For Me, Puerto Rico: My Final Postcard
If you want to use Google Earth to find me, just enter 18.44 N and 66.01 W. That’s me, sitting at the beach bar waiting for an order of nachos. I’ve licked my last stamp and stuck it to the corner of this postcard. I won’t be writing to you anymore–from this place. This is…
patrickjegan 