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The World Cup. According to America.
The morning after every World Cup feels oddly quiet. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to arranging your life around football – and how strange it feels when there is suddenly no match to arrange it around. Then you start remembering what you’ll miss and somehow you find yourself convinced that the entire world has been waiting for your postmortem on the World Cup. Ergo … For me, it begins with Mexico. Look. Football-loving countries already know what a World Cup feels like. Mexico simply reminded us. Naturally, I began the tournament in my green jersey, cheering for Mexico. (Had Ireland qualified, I would have been in the same…
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The Long Way Home.
WordPress wished me a happy 17th anniversary this morning. Seventeen years. I confess I had completely lost track. I’ve also lost reading glasses, passwords, and the occasional parked car, so this felt entirely on brand. Still, it’s funny how one little notification can send you wandering backwards. I am a marker of time. It’s probably a very Irish habit. We remember dates. We attach meaning to them. We keep track of anniversaries, arrivals, departures, and the exact year something happened, even if we can’t remember why we walked into a room. Which is why I noticed that today comes with a few milestones attached. Thirty-eight years ago today, I became a…
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I Don’t Actually Like Sports. I Like People.
Click to get new essays for free My friends are asking why I keep writing about World Cup football. They know me after all. It’s a fair question because I’m not really writing about football. I’m writing about people. Which is probably why I’ve always loved great sports writers, even though I don’t really love sports. They’re writing about hope, failure, obsession, redemption, identity, grief, joy – all the things the rest of us spend our lives trying to make sense of. The setting just happens to be a baseball field or a soccer pitch or an American football stadium. The game is just their canvas. I’m sure these writers…
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dog in the headlights
For Dog Rescue Day “And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old—or so it feels.” — Mary Oliver Edgar came into my life one October morning that now seems so long ago. It wasn’t. There he was, standing in an already busy intersection on 16th Street right before the sun came up. We had just left the gym when my daughter spotted him, alerting me to that fact by screaming at me to stop the traffic…
