In Orphans’ Twilight, Memories of a Doomed Utopia in the New York Times.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
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Elderbloggers. Our histories. Our stories. Our pasts, presents and futures. Aging. Growing. Maturing. Immaturing. Art. Poetry. Photography. Feminism. Senior Moments. Junior Moments. Life Matters. Grey Matters. All matters. As I put my toe tentatively in the blog pond I invite others to swim, wade, paddle, sputter and splash with me. In my experience, the water’s warmer that way.
Blog Archive
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2008
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January
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- Photograph
- Proof that aging hurts decision making? or Preconc...
- Valentine from Phil in the Circle
- Maxed Out or It's time for Norman Cousins and The ...
- So many articles, So little time
- Got enough Stuff?
- Oh so scientific
- Two Poems by David Budbill
- This isn't what I'd planned to post about today
- Snow Daze or I'm only trying to keep you informed.
- Still orphaned, the child lives on no matter how o...
- Hey, what about us! Do we get ink for being in th...
- The Works or In the days when it was okay to eat h...
- Slowing Down? Nah.
- Arithmetic
- E-mail from Me to Julia
- Creationist museum auctioning 40,000 year old mast...
- What is your mindset?
- More Food
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- I love the blogosphere.
- Two Poems by Tony Hoagland One Sister One Mother
- I went a day without buying a mocha latte
- Slow Down Week or Slow Down Life
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- Thinking Big at Big Think
- A Saturday Hike, Two old ladies style
- Is it possible for one to drown in depth of feeling?
- I like Ron Padgett almost as much as I like mocha ...
- Waking Ned Devine goes to New York
- yagrowsoryadies. a blog to savor.
- A Beatnik goes to Woodstock or this is not about t...
- TheWriter's AlmanacDoes it Again
- Gloria Steinem says Women are Never Front Runners....
- Michael Pollan has a new book! or George McGovern ...
- The Best Presidential Election Commercials or I Vo...
- And the title of the article is "Tigers don't belo...
- MotherPie mentioned Dave Pollard. Good Stuff.
- Who Did You Vote For? or For Whom Did You Vote?
- Julia taught me a new phrase today or How come Sha...
- Sharon Olds
- Consumption or What's your home page?
- Queer video to share or This is so gay
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January
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The young person yawns as the old lady drones on and on about her past. How much of who we are is our history? How does the seven-year-old girl live on in the 57-year-old woman? How do our experiences, our lives lived, matter?
When I got my degree in Biology over thirty years ago, quarks and neutrinos were new, wild concepts. The atom still tried to loom large as the smallest particle around. Electron microscopes revealed blurry pictures of things once only imagined. Hand-held calculators were just arriving on the scene. The student that knew how to use one had an edge over the rest of us with our slide rules. I’d like to go on, wallowing in my memories of the beauty of differential equations; of the thrill of studying organic chemistry and reading the small print on bottles in the drug store and being able to identify the compounds; of growing all kinds of stuff from my house in microbiology. One semester I built cages and filled the center of the biology lab with a dozen chickens. I was going to make low cholesterol eggs. Other students were doing their projects with mice and rats. I didn’t actually do anything to my chickens but wrote my research paper speculating on what would have happened had I fed them some clever concoction of food. At the end of the semester I took them home and put them in a lovely coop I built for them using scrap lumber from around my yard.
I have lots of stories about my chickens. Those were the days. Yawn. The old lady reminisces.
Remembering Matters.
When I got my degree in Biology over thirty years ago, quarks and neutrinos were new, wild concepts. The atom still tried to loom large as the smallest particle around. Electron microscopes revealed blurry pictures of things once only imagined. Hand-held calculators were just arriving on the scene. The student that knew how to use one had an edge over the rest of us with our slide rules. I’d like to go on, wallowing in my memories of the beauty of differential equations; of the thrill of studying organic chemistry and reading the small print on bottles in the drug store and being able to identify the compounds; of growing all kinds of stuff from my house in microbiology. One semester I built cages and filled the center of the biology lab with a dozen chickens. I was going to make low cholesterol eggs. Other students were doing their projects with mice and rats. I didn’t actually do anything to my chickens but wrote my research paper speculating on what would have happened had I fed them some clever concoction of food. At the end of the semester I took them home and put them in a lovely coop I built for them using scrap lumber from around my yard.
I have lots of stories about my chickens. Those were the days. Yawn. The old lady reminisces.
Remembering Matters.
1 comment:
I loved reading that story. The child in me loved it, and the teacher in me loved it. Thanks goodness there are visonaries (and saints) to show us the way. thanks for linking.
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