The Byrne Diaspora

Scenes from the fall

On this last day of November, I thought it'd be nice to post some bric-a-brac from my camera...scenes from Melleray and from my own neighborhood in Chapel Hill. See here!

A California Thanksgiving

Meanwhile, on the other coast...Julie spent Thanksgiving in SoCal, near San Diego, lingering on for a visit after the annual AAR meeting was done. From the pictures she sent, well, I'm jealous. Here are also some "narrative images" she sent:

seeing los angeles through the eyes of my interviewee, an asylum lawyer, really opened the place up. great salvadoran food, for one thing; a black market in flowers (stolen, donated, dropped, sold, resold) at the guadalupe shrine; an explanation of activity in the plaza, used to the same effect as plazas in mexican villages, where those who have made it across the mojave desert during saturday night arrive on sunday morning to ask after their relatives: have you seen my tia maria? do you know my tio juan? but the results in a city of ten million people are quite different ...
driving back south and taking in the palm trees and hearing "feliz navidad" on the radio ;-) ... taking a surfing lesson, doing not half bad, feeling the pacific a magnificent endlessly playing-with-me-mother, laughing my head off, and taking a long hot shower and four advil as soon as i got back in the motel ...

See her cell-phone snapshots here!

A Carolina Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving this year, Dad, Donny and I were welcomed to the Rajendran-Greenslade household for their big feast. It was really wonderful, with everyone cooking together and contributing something. There were rosemary mashed potatoes and exquisite chutneys, raspberry-apple pie and fried shrimp rolls, moist coconut cake, herbed red snapper baked in kosher salt, deep-fried turkey, fresh chocolate berry tart, sweet potato fritters...I could go on and on. Like, that's only half the menu! Suffice to say that the feast was extraordinary; and so was the company, with four of the Greenslade kids and two of the Rajendrans, plus of course Vimala and Rush, and Manju's sweetie Rishi, me, Dad and Donald. I couldn't have been more glad.

After eating, in our torpidity we managed to play a game of Apples to Apples that roused much passion; and then a game of Scramble that went on for nearly three hours into the late hours, with tea and coffee kindly provided by Rush. What a happy night! You can see all my pictures here...

Happy birthday Clare!

Happy birthday sweet Clare! I will be still today, and listen hard, as if I had a seashell to my ear...

The Adsum poems

I am honored to announce the latest work of Donald E. Byrne Jr., The Adsum Poems. I read them on this cold sunny Sunday morning, and was very moved; cried eyes red. Thank you for such beautiful poems, Dad.

He also sent a final addition to the cycle Black Snake in the Sweet Gum. You can read the whole thing, with the new tenth poem, here!

You chicken?

Last weekend I went to Melleray for a wonderful supper - steak, eggs, sweet garden radishes - and a chicken-feeding! They are very active these days, laying eggs, exploring their sexuality, and knocking each other off of perches. We fed them green beans while the sun was setting, and a magnificent sunset it was. See pictures here!