Old Boxes of Old News

During a bit of autumn cleaning in my new home with the wife and step-lads and Fletcher the dog I unearthed a few weak cardboard boxes full of yellowing newspapers and copies of letters sent and some never mailed. It is an odd trip down memory lane.

Two bits of paper caught me eye. The first is an unfinished letter to a lost, romantic soul named Joe I used to know in a past life. The date up top of it almost makes it an anniversary of sorts. Reading it brought me back to my first cold Dublin flat and a different time. The manually typewritten page reads:

31 October 1993
Dublin

Joe,

Happy Halloween. Seven more dead in the North. The death toll is up past twenty for the week. What a fun little fucked-up island I live on. Happy to be in Dublin but the nerves are still a wee bit on edge.

The cold Rathmines night lights with flashes every few minutes, then a bang or a boom without light. Nobody told me how the Irish like fireworks on All Hallows Eve. I was sitting quietly with a bottle of red wine while picking through the Sunday Times and the Sunday Tribune when the wee blasts began outside. After three of the most tense days in Belfast this week the sounds were the last I wanted to hear. Whistles, bangs and pops were unwelcome.

I grabbed a train North on Monday after the Saturday IRA blast on the Shankill that killed ten. After four restaurant shifts and a bad head cold it was the last place I felt like going. But duty called. The famed Irish Echo needs photos.

The letter ends there but the memories of the time go on.

The second bit of paper is a little older than the letter to Joe. It is a copy of the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodenje. It is the edition celebrating the paper’s 50th anniversary in the middle of the Bosnian war. The main headline is “Oslobodenje Carries On The Good Fight.” The date is 16 September 1993. Thinking back I focused on the date. I wasn’t in Sarajevo then, or even Bosnia. I wouldn’t be back to the war until November of that year. Thumbing through the pages, it turns out The Irish Times printed the Bosnian paper’s special issue in its own Irish editions. Twas a grand gesture of unity among journalists. It had me wondering if there is a brave little paper in Baghdad fighting the good fight. And if there was, were European newspapers publishing their pages in a beautiful gesture of support? I know I would never see it in an American newspaper.

Well, back to digging through the memory boxes…