Category: Memories

Lying Still

Hospital Bed

When I was 17 years old, I dove into a swimming pool and broke my neck.

Until that moment, I’d been relentlessly active, my days taxed with dread of missing something somewhere. I was on the student council and participated in a wide variety of school clubs. I always secured a part in the school play and rode a unicycle in talent shows. I ran cross-country in the fall, track in the spring and was co-captain of the basketball team in between. I was an honor student who worked full-time in the summer and caddied most weekends in the spring and early fall, except on certain Sundays when I served as an altar boy. I’d never had a drink or a smoke, and I rarely swore. Yet that pleasant summer day, for reasons still unclear to me, I plunged into a six-foot deep above-ground pool and slammed the top of my head on the sloped concrete bottom. Continue reading “Lying Still”

Breaking my Neck (Again)

I broke my neck in high school and spent the next ten weeks on my back, tethered to a hospital bed.

I wrote about this incident in a post called ‘Lying Still’ and recently, IrishCentral, the leading Irish digital media company in North America, ran the article:  How I broke my neck and learnt the surprising truth about life.

IrishCentral caters to Irish Americans and the Irish diaspora and is definitely worth checking out for those interested in Irish politics and topics.

An Elegy to the New York City Club Scene of the late 1980s

“The `80s were the last identifiable period.  If you see a picture from that era, you know it instantly.  The art, the clothes, the hair; they were unique.  After that, everything started to look and feel the same.”

That’s what the author Jay McInerney said (or something close to it) when I saw him at a book reading here in La Jolla.  He seemed wistful.  And why he wouldn’t he be, having hurdled like a latter day F. Scott Fitzgerald into the New York literary scene with his 1984 bestseller, Bright Lights, Big City?  As he spoke, I too waxed nostalgic for the time, the scene, and recalled a woman who once leaned against the bar of the Surf Club on the Upper East Side.  It was 1988, and I thought it was her birthday.

The Surf Club’s preppy, Wall Street trader vibe wasn’t for me – I preferred the scruffier downtown scene – but there she was: button nose, sneakers, shoulder-length blonde hair and looking like she knew something the rest of us didn’t. Continue reading “An Elegy to the New York City Club Scene of the late 1980s”

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