sharing a wonderful discovery

14 CommentsSaturday • March 3, 2007 • by michelle

In honor of the Ultimate Blog Party, I’m going to direct you to one of my newest favorite blogs, The Life of Riley.

Now before you mistake “Riley” for one Mr. Bill O’Reilly (and me for a right-winger), let me show you a picture of the blog’s author:

Meet Olive Riley, a 107-year-old Aussie who has been graciously sharing her life and memories with the blogosphere since mid-February. Her friend does the typing for her “blob” as she has called it, and what comes out is nothing short of brilliant.

This is the beginning of Olive’s first post:

Good Morning everyone. My name is Olive Riley. I live in Australia near Sydney. I was born in Broken Hill on Oct. 20th 1899. Broken Hill is a mining town, far away in the centre of Australia. My Friend, Mike, has arranged this blog for me. He is doing the typing and I am telling the stories. He thinks it’s a good idea to tell what’s going on. He already made a film about me a few years back and people liked that, so they might like this blog too, he says. We’ll see.

What we’re seeing is that Mike was right. By its Third Post, The Life of Riley had amassed over 190,000 visits from all over the world.

With photos and stories from the last 100 years and topics ranging from Olive’s sipping shandy on a trip to Brisbane to see her son to her campaigning for a local “lettuces”-grower being kicked off his land to how she ended up with the same set of teeth since 1930, how could we do anything but read, read, and read (and want!) some more?

Olive’s blog is beautiful and inspiring, and if you don’ t contract a severe case of warm fuzzies from seeing how much she enjoys life, well, I doubt you’re human. It would be wonderful if more of our elders follow Olive’s lead and record their thoughts on this international forum; too much oral history has already been lost.

And especially during a time of war, we could all use a course in real human history.

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