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Author: Kevin Donahue
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Today is my Uncle Tom Stansfield’s birthday. He would be 87. The fact he passed away last year (June 14, a Sunday) doesn’t lessen my wish to celebrate him on this day. So here is a rough reprise of my parts of Tom’s eulogy, delivered along with my brother Chris, at Holy Family Church in…
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It was the evening of our 24th anniversary and my wife and I were going through a familiar ritual. “You’re sticking around, right?” I asked. “I’m thinking about it,” she said. “But it’s almost 10 o’clock. You need to make a decision.” “I know.” Eventually she said sure, she’d re-up the vows we made in…
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I was dead asleep on a Monday night when the phone rang. I’d been asleep only an hour, but as I was startled awake, it felt like much longer. It was my oldest son calling to say that his car had died on the way home and he was stranded on the side of the…
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Putting them down here, so I can’t claim to have been right if I was wrong. Best Actor: Leo DiCaprio. Overdue and deserved. Best Actress: Saoirse Ronan. Looking for an upset over Brie Larson here. Best Picture: The Revenant. I’d like to see Spotlight win, but I think the momentum of Leo and director will pull this overlong, over-somber film…
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I’ve been circling Medium for about a year now. The self-proclaimed platform for thinkers and thoughtful discussion has a formidable back-end—it’s the best WYSIWYG editor I’ve seen, and it has the smartest commenting system I’ve seen. And there is plenty of content there, including posts from Hillary Clinton, Politico, Jeff Jarvis, and many others. But…
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Even though I’ve been back home for nearly a month, people I haven’t seen in a while keep asking how January’s service trip to Haiti was. My response is along the lines of “Do you want the 20-second version or the 9-hour version?” They think I’m kidding. I am and I’m not. Trying to explain…
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One of the amazing things I learned in Haiti happened in a little room located at the headquarters of the Papaye Peoples Movement (MPP). It was a workshop, actually, where a small team put together and repaired solar panels for use by peasants. The technicians told us that they have been doing this for several…
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I tried out a Microsoft Lumia 830, which came out last year, with a FitBit Flex activity tracker. It’s a mixed bag. I like the Flex, though not as much as the Jawbone UP24 I had last year. The Jawbone was easier to get on and off, and it was simpler to integrate it with…
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A poem about the fragility of my attention. Brains have bones. That’s dumb, right? Except—how else to explain the form of my thoughts, the broken-ness of my attention? It explains a lot, how goddamn lost I get in this head, to learn that I broke the bones in my brain. The bones in my brain…
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A poem I wrote after our scary Wednesday in Haiti. The boy lies limp in the dust Of the road. An argument engulfs him. The boy’s Papa screams, “Who did this? What have you done to my boy?” But no one helps the boy. Ayiti lies on the road under a midday sun, Blood from her…
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There were several times in my time in Haiti when I felt like the world as I had known it was turned upside down. One of those came on Monday, when the current director of the Papaye Peasant Movement visited with us and explained his group’s take on education, specifically adult education. This is one…
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One of the most interesting parts of our stay with the Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP), in Haiti’s Central Plateau, was the group’s principled take on agriculture. As a child of industrial agriculture (and also as an employee of a company that publishes Organic Life magazine and whose founder, J.I. Rodale, started the organic movement), it was…
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