Chath pierSath is the author of several books including the poetry collections “Echoes Lost to the Wind,” “On Earth Beneath Sky: Poems & Sketches,” and “This Body Mystery: Paintings and Poems.” His paintings have been exhibited in Europe, Asia, and North America. He holds a graduate degree in community social…
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Pulled from an old notebook, here’s a “Time Tunnel” account of a random train ride from Lowell to Boston about 30 years ago. — PM Lowell Line (1994) A long train slides through the Thorndike Street station as I wait for the 9:07 a.m. run to Boston. Doing an errand…
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With his book Estate Sale, Dan Murphy won the 2024 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry at the University of Utah Press. A writer with Lowell roots, he lives in the region with his family. Former US Poet Laureates Natasha Trethewey and Robert Pinsky call the book “a lovely…
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Long Purples by Paul Marion My wife Rosemary and I live in a townhouse condo atop a former ski slope in Amesbury, Mass., just uphill from the compact but busy downtown. Called Powow Hill for the original residents in this area, the 330-foot hill is crowned with a small public…
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Looking Back to 1968 by Paul Marion In late November 1968, my friend Susan April walked three miles in the rain from her home in Dracut, Mass., to buy the new Beatles double album at a Lowell record shop and hitchhiked home when the paper bag from the store began…
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Sky Bar by Paul Marion The barbershop on upper Merrimack Street had a candy vending machine against the long side wall where customers waited in padded steel chairs. When I had a dime, I’d slot the coin and pull the handle for a Sky Bar in a yellow wrapper with…
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This month is the 50th anniversary of the occupation of Phnom Penh by the brutal Khmer Rouge fighters in Cambodia. I was a junior at the University of Lowell in Massachusetts reading newspaper articles and watching TV reports as what we called the Vietnam War expanded in the region. None…
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With St Patrick’s Day and Lowell’s Irish Cultural Week coming up soon, here’s a rerun of a 2019 post on my blog about the ethnic practices in the area along with a couple of images including champion boxer Jackie Brady of Lowell. Click the link here.
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Dark-eyed junco (image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) Whittier in the Woods Making cornbread during a storm, Which dropped a foot of snow on us, I saw the actual John Greenleaf In a wide-brimmed hat step from the woods Behind our house, his bushy beard icicled. When I waved, he raised…
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Web photo courtesy of LIFE magazine, 1965 The Great Northeast Blackout of 1965 On November 9, 1965, when the lights went out from Lake Ontario east to Boston and south to New York City, sinking thirty million people at home or work into darkness, my family was ready to sit…
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