By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Over the years, I have traveled to Disneyland in California with several very excited people. The most excited one—over three decades ago—was my then almost 60-year-old…
Posts published in March 2021
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– After watching spring emerge in Northern Utah’s lovely Ogden Valley for almost five decades, I finally witnessed something I had never seen there before—the blessing of…
By Jathan Janove Family rifts are as ubiquitous as they are damaging. In 1971, a spat between my Aunt Inga and her older sister Julie (my mom), effectively ended relations…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– In the middle of a pandemic, economic doldrums, and unprecedented political storms, my first grandson Walter Patrick Dahlberg made his debut into a world that sorely…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– For the first several decades of our fraternity, I loved but was not close to my older brother Kevin Peter O’Brien, Jr. There were many reasons,…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– After years of knowing her only by rudimentary biographical facts (see: Mary Leonard story part one), I finally “heard” my dearly departed Irish great aunt Mary…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– Yesterday (part 1 here), I began the story of how—in addition to learning basic biographical facts—I also first started to “hear” the voice of my great…
By Michael Patrick O’Brien– My great aunt was born in Ireland almost a hundred years before me. I entered this world a decade after she died. Given such deep temporal…