My dad was a ‘Sligo man.’ I was not sure what this meant other than the example he set himself, but we always believed it. He never put a foot in Sligo until he was seventy-four and then he was dead the next year. But his own dad was born in Sligo and we supposed it was an idea of what a man should be, and what we should be—a standard that my dad had grown up to believe in and he tried to pass on to us.
It just didn’t take with me.
My brother Teddy is probably as close to that standard as anyone left now, but not the whole package. Not that much at all, now that I think of it.
I remember the day I first stood eye to eye with my dad. I was just back from college, in my third year, and he came…
There were four feathers on the inside edge of the bar. Each of them were gray, black and iridescent in different ways. Pigeon feathers. They reminded me of a story.
Speechify. It might surprise some of you that this is an actual word, well defined in the Webster’s Third International, Random House, and American Heritage dictionaries. It goes back to at least the early 1700’s and has been commonly used in America ever since. My North Carolina mountains grandfather used it more than once in my presence. And looking up this word to confirm its legitimacy is just the kind of thing I will do a hundred times between now and that fateful evening when I have to give a speech of sorts to a small gathering (hopefully not too small, but then again, not too large either) of friends and the merely curious who appear at my first ‘reading’ for the novel HOUND. Looking up words and doing ‘research’ has always been a good ploy to avoid harder work–like practicing aloud before a mirror.
The first and last time…
