an old writer and his words

  • YOU LOSE EITHER WAY

    The timing could not have been worse. But when Murphy does the planning, the timing will always never be worse. You do wonder just who Murphy was. Certainly not the kind old gentleman who owned the pub by that name in midtown Manhattan. Maybe a distant cousin of Mrs. O’Leary. I mean even the cow…

    Lou Faber

  • GALWAY

    I remember it as thoughit was yesterday, not eight years ago,the evening cool, the streetcrowded, the pubs along High Street:Freeney’s, The Front Door,Tigh Neachtain, Sonny Molloy’sstill warming up as the nighttightened it grip, the Guinnesswashed the taps, filled the pintsand people sat along the streetsome with guitars, one a bouzouki,and all with a song whichyou…

    Lou Faber

  • ERSE WHILE

    Growing up, I never imaginedthat I was Lithuanian, I mean Imight have as easily been from Mars. And it was only in my dreamsthat Gaelic was an ancestral tongue,not one my ancestors spoke,at least those who hadn’t yetmade the unthinkable moveto Norfolk and the frigid sea. Now I am all of those, and I knowthat…

    Lou Faber

  • A NIGHT AT THE ROSE

    Three beers over two hours and, giddy, I want to sing along with the Irish house band in my horribly off key voice, just two choruses of Irish Rover or Four Green Fields. It’s beginning to snow outside and it’s a four-block walk to the Government Center station. I suppose it would sober me up…

    Lou Faber

  • YEATS IF ONLY

    Cheever was having a bad day, that much was immediately obvious. Perhaps it was the two martini’s in town before lunch, but he says it only made him giddy. We all know better and by late afternoon his mood has soured completely, his emotions have slipped back into turmoil. He says a few cocktails will…

    Lou Faber

  • In any half respectable pub in Galway, and in Ireland the county of place hardly matters, when enough pints have been passed, and night grows thick, even such as I, claiming to be part Irish, claiming two left feet, can feel the ceili deep within, and step out on the floor to do what I…

    Lou Faber

  • DISCOVERING ME

    They were always almost mythological, heroes of a people I could only imagine as my own, knowing I came from a far different place, one of shtetls and pogroms, of seaside villages, the beaches of Cascais. It was half a lie, but I couldn’t know it then, couldn’t guess my dream was reality, my reality…

    Lou Faber