Stephen O'Brien

My name is Stephen O’Brien. I’m not the Gaelic football star or American geneticist. I’m a retired professor, looking for a little extra cash, so I can stock up on sanitizers and KN95 masks during any future COVID outbreak and quarantine.

I have heard we are what we eat. I am seventy plus years of locally sourced, fine dining on fast food and slow metabolism.

I am told I am a product of the decade in which I hit age sixteen. I am an upward mobile Beaver Cleaver. I watch reruns of MASH and Monty Python. I listen to Fleetwood Mac, Bruce, Pink Floyd and CSNY.

I am told we become what we own in life. I have a laptop soldered to my knees, several remote controls in one hand and a cell phone in the other. I have no idea what some of these remotes control. My son, Matthew, gave me a universal remote. One of the buttons looks like it could launch a missile. I’m afraid to use it.

There comes a point when we all look in the mirror and ask: “How and when did this happen?” It might be a nose hair, bags under the eyes or a crease in an earlobe that indicates, a pending heart attack. “It’s part of aging,” my wife Claire tells me, as she slips kale into my diet.

I am intrigued by our ancestors and their struggle to survive: their hopes and fears, their plight and flight. Something more than DNA passes from one generation to the next. Something more than property and wealth; or poverty and subjugation, contributes to the story of humankind. There is within each of us the hope and fear of our ancestors, the spirit that drove them to an early grave or long life in search of freedom and happiness. And that’s what compels me to write. What was their story? What is our story? How does the story end? Or does it?