by Natasha Mayers - Common Dreams' Artist-in-Residence
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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
(234)
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March
(43)
- "Snow, Aldo" and Sparrow for President
- Billy Collins and The Movies
- Earth Hour
- "Things You Didn't Put On Your Resumé" by Joyce Su...
- I feel like a slacktivist.
- There's no such thing as a free horse.
- Bill O'Reilly Inadvertently Endorses Media Matters...
- Bouncing around this morning
- Jerzy and Jeffrey Sachs and I are Trumped or With ...
- David Sedaris Alert
- Not Dead Yet! Words of Wisdom
- YouTube Award Nominees
- Annie Liebowitz, Ron Padgett, Billy Collins and Me
- Matt introduced me to Free Hugs
- Walking with Avery
- The Very Short List keeps getting longer.
- Woman says silly straws are not funny. A Fallacy?
- Don't Quote Me, Quote 23/6
- My grandmother crocheted me a blanket.
- Cats? Nope. Improv Everywhere at the Very Short ...
- Animal Crackers? Music? Nope, the Y.
- Watch
- Anne Carson poet.
- The Onion Election News
- Snail. Really.
- Behind every powerful man is a good woman?
- Listen
- How much do you wanna pay for the war?
- John Lowe, Ballet Dancer at 88
- Duck, Poe, Geese
- Poem
- Be the first on your blog to check out Women on th...
- Urban Dictionary is Awemaztastic
- Some Glad Morning by Joyce Sutphen
- At Fox & Friends, Boys will be Boys and Girls bett...
- My accountant has a way with numbers.
- W. tries to ruin McCain's image
- Bully
- My friend Mr. Adams and My dog Lucy
- I got two books of poetry by George Bilgere yester...
- One Meandering Mini-Rant and a Hike
- Now we're talkin' real words or What did you want ...
- VFS. La Vie.
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March
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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:
Hi - I just checked it out. Common Dreams is a very intelligent web site - good articles. Thanks for the link.
Natasha's art is excellent - I can just feel the emotion - I understand. ~ Mimi
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