Rye Road - The Saga

Some of you know the saga of Rye Road.

Here is an excerpt.


Thursday Tirades

-- Can you hear me! We all have a voice
at the Housing Society AGM – no coffee,
hard chairs in the school gym, and a mike
no one dares to use. A mother of two toddlers
wants a parking space. The megalomaniac
General suggests an underground parking lot
under the entire area. My handy plumber
neighbour told me, Come and fight
for bigger balconies, and anyway: It’s Stand Up
Comedy Night. He grabs the floor and tells
a nervous anti-barbecue lady: You can't take food
smells? Then you need to move
out to a lonely red log-cabin in the woods!




Finally Friday

At five I wait for a drum-roll
of vacuum-cleaner wheels against my ceiling
and shrill hymn-singing. I don't know flat 1313, only
her habits -- and now the jingle of the weekly
icecream van has joined the jamming duo. So much depends
on starting weekends right. Until the mustard
Beetle parked across the road hoots a jaunty solo as it leaves
for some country cabin, I can't be sure. So much
depends. Oh cool. At five-oh-five, the pizza boy drrrrrrrr's
on my doorbell, in sync with car horn, cleaning sounds and Nearer
My God to Thee.

To Lori, Peter and Carol -- On Dates and Birthdays

First, thank you for calling round on mine!

My mother tells me she read somewhere that the 10th of September had become an expression in the United States, as in "That's so September 10" meaning "soooo innocent".

Isn't it typical that 364 days -- unbirthdays -- pass unnoticed, each of them changing us, or maybe confirming us as what we are -- and wham! one day, say, 9/11, or in my case, 9/10, impacts.

"You have been attacked -- you are now officially hurt and paranoid!" to the States on 9/11.
"You have turned fifty - you are now officially menopausal and old!" to me on 9/10.

Oh, I know. Get a sense of perspective here! Oh, I do. I have.

Still, dates and birthdays are odd things.

Aisha

Internet Cafe Recommended

An entry from two weeks ago:

"Thank you for looking in as I blog on. The We Blog started on our poetry vacation did not do much, hasty comments added in retrospect (was it Tuesday we saw the alligators or was that the cemetery...)

But hopefully when I return from Sunnyside, Greenpoint Avenue where I am looking openmouthed at a manageably-sized view of the Empire State Building seen from the Queens side-- in-between visits to the Romanian bakery and this excellent and cheap internet cafe at 41-16 Greenpoint Ave, Sunnyside called Marcatel, I shall blog our We Blog on to my Blog."

Photo I took of Manhattan from here, risking my life in the middle of a busy street (thanks to Rich for help with resizing)

Creatures I like

An excuse to practise posting pictures.

I took this geese and goslings photo at a bird

sanctuary last spring -- a lake

only ten minutes' walk from here.



Hey, it works!



Aisha

Patterns Recognized: A Lesson Alligators Taught Me

Saving Jambalay and filet gumbo for later... :)
This is serious stuff:

My blog address is memepools --

[memes, term coined by Richard Dawkins: who said, " Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.
Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of people all over the world.)"]

-- but alligators got me thinking about gene pools too.

I know I inherited things from my father, things other than my nose, the look of my fingernails. The way I put a book away at the most exciting point and do something else for a while. The way I stroke my hair back. A sideways skeptical look. And now I find out, apparently my fear of alligators too.
And the alligator fear is not a meme: these are things I discovered in him after I saw them in myself. Most people think you are insane if you don't erad on at the peak of suspense in a thriller. If he had been into cassette players (yes, dates me), I suppose he too might have made a tape of one song only, and played it to death.

I love spiders, as does my mother. In Norway, they are lucky. So that may be a meme, not a gene.

Aisha