It's only been an age since I last posted. Ah well.
Our city is wearing snow well this year, and just in time for Christmas, for everything resembles a Christmas card. The trees are coated in frost, the lawns are thick with white, and the moon shines brightly enough to illuminate a bedroom at night.
In between laundry and wrapping birthday presents and all the other things 'to do' this morning, I found a pocket sized notebook from my post-college days, when I was teaching in Galway. There are a few pages where I wrote about seeing Seamus Heaney do a reading on Salthill beach in 2006. It goes a little something like this:
Sun beating down, casting short shadows on the pavement. Jackets off, sweaters around the waist. A gathered crowd at Ladies' Beach. Schoolchildren form a sea of green uniforms.
A gentle breeze shifts the sands. An elderly man kicks a red football toward the brown seaweed scattered shore - his grandchild runs barefoot after it.
And Seamus Heaney, standing on the daisy studded verge between the strand and the street, began to speak of a poem written on the Salthill Prom: "the golden moment of 1965 when I saw them come out of the water, gleaming." Girls Bathing, Galway, 1965.
Wind blows strands of hair, strollers pause, hypnotized; dog leashes lay in the sand. Bicycles park along the wooden benches that run the length of the beach. Dogs lay on the sun-warmed pavement while some go on interrupted by poetry - by the poet. Schoolkids turn cartwheels in the grass, and photographers snap pictures.
Afterward, crowds gathered to get him to sign books, pages struggling in the Atlantic breeze. People wait patiently for his attention - a handshake, a scribble, a nod.
