Tag Archives: Family

Tales of the Asylum

Posted on May 20, 2019 by dispatchesfromtheformernewworld

One day in the early 1960’s I came home to find that while I was in school my grandmother had been whisked away in an ambulance and taken to a mental hospital. The news followed several unsettling days, days of … Continue reading →

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Leaving Ireland

Posted on March 5, 2019 by dispatchesfromtheformernewworld

They left to escape the famine, poverty, an oppressive colonial government, then the violence of rebellion and civil war. They left to find work, to send money home to their families, to find opportunities in the big industrial cities far … Continue reading →

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An American Wedding

Posted on November 2, 2018 by dispatchesfromtheformernewworld

The bride wore white. The bride wore red. It was an American wedding. The marriage of my cousin Christopher’s daughter Emily and Kunal, the son of Indian-Americans.  Family members of the bride and groom traveled to the little town of … Continue reading →

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The Cousins Lunch

Posted on June 19, 2018 by dispatchesfromtheformernewworld

“Let me get this straight,” said my husband as he dropped me off at our local Metro station. “You’re going to New York to meet a guy you met on the internet?” We laughed. What he said was literally true, … Continue reading →

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The Message in the Laundry

Posted on June 7, 2018 by dispatchesfromtheformernewworld

One day in 1944 my future existence hung by a tenuous thread. If a message secreted in a batch of laundry had not reached its intended recipient I would never have been born. On such tiny twists of fate and … Continue reading →

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A Funeral and a Turf War

Posted on April 19, 2018 by dispatchesfromtheformernewworld

The newspaper clipping is yellowed with age but carefully folded and preserved in a box of papers left by my Irish grandmother. The box was inside a larger one with an assortment of family papers that sat in the back … Continue reading →

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The Mobsters and the Baby Shoes

Posted on April 7, 2018 by dispatchesfromtheformernewworld

Back in the early 1970s my sister Angela worked for a temp agency in the East London suburbs of Essex. Her first assignment was with a company named Downy Baby Shoes. She imagined an office where grandmotherly women sewed baby … Continue reading →

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