Race. I’ll start with my brother, Joe Jr. He was born with Down syndrome and in his youth, participated in the Special Olympics. Track and Field. At the starting line, all the kids in bright colors jumped up and down in glee. With the whistle, they were off and running. Yes, running in their own...

by Maura A. Conlon Her body could wait no longer. That’s how it happens, how a woman Leaves for the hills or the sea, when the One she loves is lured by quicksand,  The quest for heroics, needing to be a lauded one. But far below his crown ascendant shimmered  the sweetest red rose, Perhaps...

by Maura A. Conlon Her studio glows like Grand Central Station in the middle of a plaza in the middle of some Ocean in the middle of the world Astronomers come by for coffee, unfurl their charts Metro bus drivers pull up seeking change for a $20 while composers and candle makers wire light with...

Vince Scully was a bard, a storyteller, a conduit beaming out to many the athletic prowess dancing upon the green fields below him. My parents had moved from NYC to Los Angeles in the 1950s, the same time the Brooklyn Dodgers made themselves similar transplants. An eager journalist, I called Dodger Stadium one day to...

Images tap into the root of our soul, the place of our longing, where we remember how we belong to a force of love greater than what can be uttered upon our tongue. A simple bow to the light that sustains us, to the flow that reminds how each step we take with our hearts...

Our family has loved and lived close to the ocean for generations. Here, sitting, are my great grandmother, originally from Germany, with her daughter, my Nana, and then her daughter, my mother, Mary (maybe age 18 then) all upon the sands of the Atlantic Ocean. Along side stands Uncle Mike. Breezy Point, NY was our...

When I was a teenager, I used to sit in my corner bedroom in our house in Southern California and talk into my tape recorder, sharing musings, thoughts about life, questions about human nature. So much had happened in our family’s life by the time I was 13-years-old. In May of 1973, my father’s brother...

I recall a conversation with Irish-born journalist and author, Claire Dunne, who tells me how in 17th-century Ireland, when the old Gaelic order began to crumble, that “war on harpists and their instruments peaked when Queen Elizabeth I edicted death on them.” She notes how Cromwell from England destroyed their harps, and how people were...

Ireland, 1987 Taunted by the secrecy and silence within the trauma, I returned to Ireland after I graduated from college and visited my Great Aunt Johanna on the ancestral farm. I decided to surprise her with no advance warning of my arrival. When she answered the door, her shock collapsed into flitting anger: “Why the...

Back in the United States, the old conversation remained: “Don’t you dare ask me about that damned country, do you hear?” My Irish grandmother, who’d worked in New York as a seamstress, said this holding a needle, but it may as well have been a knife. I tried to understand the source of her pathos–that...

My mother’s brother, Fr. Ed Hogan, a Catholic priest, invited me to travel with him to Ireland in the winter of my eighteenth year. He would lead a retreat near Nenagh, County Tipperary, where some of our relations lived, and research further our Hogan family genealogy. On the chilly night when we boarded the plane...

Such search for identity–identity being code for how we belong to the world–contravenes the logical matriculations of our conscious days. Virginia Woolf writes of time’s superficial “orderly and military progress” and how deep below resonates “a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights.” My leprechaun tree in the backyard...

That faraway and even dreamier place called Ireland was iconified within the lush surroundings of our local church, St. Hedwigs, in Los Alamitos. The parish lawns were textured like moist linen and lined by endless rows of roses…Sister Mary Ita, my fourth grade teacher, told me about her niece named Mary O’Connor, who lived in...

I grew up on the border of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, not far from those celebrated spindles of the collective imagination: Hollywood and Disneyland.  But by the age of six, the center of my imaginal world revolved around another dazzling spectacle–the apricot tree in my backyard and its spring blooms. In April, I’d gaze...

I’ve been keeping a gratitude journal perhaps since my teenage years, but only lately do I call it as such. There is such power in honoring moments with loved ones, watching the morning birds at their feeders, smelling the wild air of the ocean and rubbing the belly of a puppy dog. Regardless of their...

Growing up in sunny Southern California, we learned to look to the future, to the next wave. But as a kid I ached for stories from my past. I spent afternoons paging through the Conlon Family Album, studying old photographs. My mother’s handwriting upon black pages. My favorite photos were—the dresses. Dresses that belonged to my Nana, Ana...

I was spellbound watching the grace of skater Peggy Fleming in the 1968 Olympics. I was eight years old. It was the first time I saw a woman float, dance, leap, twirl, turn, dance, spin on actual ice. Our family grew up in Southern California playing baseball and basketball but ice-skating (watching it!) opened me...

I’ve been taking cello lessons off and on for about nine years. I consider myself a ripe beginner. Growing up, I played the piano. That was my go-to instrument. Sitting in our corner living room, the light streaming in, I played lots of Neil Young, CSNY, Simon and Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Cat Stevens...

  Write a beginning poem. That is the only way to start what might become an advanced poem—not that advanced poems even exist at all! Poems are beginning. Poems are swimmers in the sea, angling one direction, subject to big swells, the pull of the current—and there you are feeling coldness of the salt water...

A fertile revolution challenging the status quo carved the social landscape of the 1960s. The events that had us riveted to the TV mirrored another one experienced in my childhood home, albeit one with a quieter face. In 1966, My youngest brother was born with what was called Mongoloidism. Mental retardation wasn’t cause for marches...