Kevin Carrel Footer

Category: Little Epiphanies

  • Into the Shadowlands

    Into the Shadowlands

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    I love soft patience, eternal wanderings, desperate seekings. I love the beauty that is present in the inward arching flesh of a woman’s upper-inner thigh or the hubris of an 18-wheeler in its proud regalia of lights. I love frank handshakes, mischievous glints and shouts of mad, righteous fury. I love the honest meeting of…

  • Death in a Foreign Land

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    BY KEVIN CARREL FOOTER CAIRNS Where the cobbled street loses itself in the sand down by the river, I make a cairn from stones that once lead somewhere we thought we wanted to go. To warn off would-be travelers, I have been prying stones from the road and leaving the old cobbles in piles. Where…

  • Eleonora’s Dog

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    I met Eleonora at the time of my life when I spent far too many hours in La Confiteria Ideal dancing tango. Back home, they say “Show me a good pool player and I’ll show you a man with a misspent youth” (Mark Twain). I suppose the same can be said of tango dancers. If…

  • Stones Do Not Lie to Bones

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    [et_pb_section admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”] After decades of wandering, after life itself had turned me down, I retraced my steps back to the octagon altar. Vines had overgrown the stones that I had once known and a coldness hung in that space beneath the trees. In my mind, I shambled…

  • Last Dance at the Confiteria Ideal

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    [et_pb_section admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_image admin_label=”Image” src=”https://www.kevincarrelfooter.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IDEAL-25MAR2016-9887.jpg” show_in_lightbox=”off” url_new_window=”off” use_overlay=”off” animation=”left” sticky=”off” align=”left” force_fullwidth=”off” always_center_on_mobile=”on” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”] [/et_pb_image][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”] by Kevin Carrel Footer For 20 years, Diego Alvaro Zoraida Fontclara have hosted the Friday afternoon milonga at the Confiteria Ideal, one of the sacred places of tango. Like me, many…

  • Slingshots

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    by Kevin Carrel Footer Like those great outer space explorations where they shoot a rocket around a planet and then use the momentum created slingshot-like to careen ever deeper into space, I have long ricocheted through a constellation of women. Twinkling, blinking, shimmying in the heavens, they have filled my night sky with a celestial…

  • Far-Off Trains

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    I grew up in the Oakland Hills in a genteel community called Piedmont. If you parted the trees that surrounded our town, you could see San Francisco shimmering across the bay. Most of my friends’ fathers worked there in the skyscrapers that shaped that famous skyline. Their mothers, like mine, were housewives or community leaders.…

  • Count None but Sunny Hours – Fragment #1

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    “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” – Gospel of Thomas 1. The Octagon Altar In the garden there was a place where the spell was strongest. Here…

  • Even Angels Have to Charge a Fee

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    I once had a tee-shirt, now long lost, that I picked up at the annual gathering of hobos in Britt, Iowa. On the shirt was an image that showed a hobo with a staff striding down the railroad tracks. Around it were the words “Graduate of the School of Hard Knocks and the University of…