Olive Riley was born October 20th, 1899. Still "blobbing" after all these years.
Friday, April 4, 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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April
(43)
- What's wrong with this picture?
- Better than School. Film School.
- Autism, The Musical at the Y
- So I was looking at Big Think. There was an entry ...
- I'm tired of bottled water. I'm tired of plastic.
- Apology.
- I'm Tired
- Amy Tan on Creativity and All Matter of Things
- I can't say it any better than Martha Rosenberg does.
- Hysterical. Not.
- Contents of My Inbox
- Killing a dog in the name of art is not an urban l...
- Very Short List, Beckett and YouTube Collide to br...
- My Mommy's Boobs are Bigger than Your Mommy's
- At Long Last from The Museum of Bad Art
- Now that he's gone, who will know?
- The Day the Internet Stood Still, South Park Style
- Jerzy showed me this. Magic.
- Gloves, Cans and Farts
- I got a new book.
- Pangea Day
- Game Girl
- Yusef Komunyakaa, Poetry from another war.
- Poems from Guantánamo
- "____" will "____" you
- Happy Birthday Julia Katherine
- Somebody ate my animal crackers.
- Finally
- Smart Starbucks Cups
- Neo-Gideons?
- We Bring Our Elders to Nursing Homes. Donald Hall ...
- Matt Cook reminds me of Raymond Carver
- Corn.
- Don't try this at home.
- Nanoparticles: No Small Deal
- Canaries in the Coal Mine? Songbirds in the Ecosy...
- Nora Marks Dauenhauer Poetry
- Need a new clock? ZFacts.com has one for free.
- The Life of Riley, Indeed.
- My You Be Touched By Its Noodley Appendage
- Michael Savage is no Dan Savage
- Claude Pepper and George Smathers unknowingly prop...
- April Fools Day. I'm so glad this is not my birth...
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April
(43)
Blogs to Blog
- 3 Quarks Daily
- 95 years old blogger
- a little red hen
- Accidental Blogger
- alternative hippopotamus
- Back in the Day
- Backspace
- Big Think
- BillyBlog
- Bug Byte Love
- Changing Aging
- Code Name Nora
- cut back: facing ageism
- Daily Kos
- Day Tripper
- Dykes to Watch Out For
- echidne of the snakes
- Embodied Aging
- Epiphytic Notions
- Fake Plastic Fish
- First 50 Words
- fototropic
- Fragments from Floyd
- Good Bye Art
- Good Magazine
- Happening Here
- Healthy Aging for Women
- Island Writer
- Jerz's Literacy Weblog
- Jesus' General
- Jon Stahl's Journal
- Life Begins at 80
- living in the bonus round
- Making Light
- Match it for Pratchett
- Midnight Tales
- MotherPie
- Musings of an Old Man
- My Elderly Space
- My Mom's Blog
- My Wintersong
- Not Dead Yet!
- Not If But When
- Nothing
- O'Folks, off their rockers
- Octogenarian
- Off the Grid
- Old Dog New Trick
- Older Wiser Women
- Pickled Beef
- Poetry & Poets in Rags
- Red State Rabble
- Scattered Chatter
- Seattle University Law and Sexuality
- Simply Left Behind
- Smashed Frog
- Spotlight on Elder Abuse
- Stop Shopping Monitor
- Teh Portly Dyke
- The Ancient One, Blessed Be He
- The Bonsai Report
- The Compact, San Francisco
- The Crone Speaks
- The Duplex Planet
- The Inverse Square Blog
- The ITT List
- The Life of Riley
- The Loom
- The Old Hippie's Groovy Blog
- The Savvy Boomer
- The Stop Shopping Monitor
- the well-armed lamb
- The Whinging Geezer
- The Wisdom of Whores
- Time Goes By
- Walking Prescott
- Walled-in-Pond
- Where the Blog has No Name
- Woodie Guthrie's Guitar
- Writing Away on Cedar Key
- yagrowsoryadies
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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:
Thanks for posting this, it's been a while since I was at that blog. :)
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