Sue's Narrative
Reading (perhaps falsely) between the lines of Grandpa's memoirs, I get the feeling that he didn't feel my parents accomplished much to brag about. And perhaps they didn't. But it's amazing how much traveling they did within their own country, if not abroad, and how much care they took to bring photos and maps back to share with him. His common interest with them was American history, and they visited battlefields, monuments, and burial grounds all over the country. They took tours and noted facts for him, some of which he didn't believe until someone else confirmed them.
I did a few things when I was young that I was very proud of, believe it or not. I suppose most noteworthy among them was my journalistic pursuit. I became editor of my school newspaper as a junior, which was pretty remarkable in those days. And I wrote the summer Teen Talk columns for the San Jose Mercury for two years, something which I considered a high honor. It was a long column in the Sunday society section of the paper, and although I received no pay for it, I was privileged to have a desk in the society department where I typed my column on yellow copy paper for the typesetter who would set it in hot lead. Then, they started paying me to type the area church notices each week, and once they even allowed me to write a wedding story. That's pretty heady stuff for a 16-year-old, but I suppose it wasn't all that wonderful beyond my little world
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Only formal family picture.
Randy & Jennie, later.
Marriage at 18 kept me from going to college, but not from following my grandfather's example (or rather, benefiting from his genes, since there was no conscious effort on my part) by educating myself to a certain degree.
My other noteworthy accomplishment was passing the Mensa test a couple of dozen years ago. That was strictly an ego gratification for me. I've never participated, and after about 10 years, I dropped my membership. It did, however, procure for me the freedom (for the first time in my life) to
respond, "I don't know," to anyone at any time.The loss of our first son was a blow which made me an extremely protective mother. I was blessed with two more children, both wonderful, and completely different from each other. Randy came along, full of sagacity and maturity almost from birth, and somehow he coped with my protectiveness and survived my lack of it. Then came Jennie, my butterfly, who always makes people happy and possesses more native common sense than the rest of us put together. By the time Jennie was born, I had lightened up some, but she will tell you (if you ask) that I am still protective. I can conjure up possibilities for horrible accidents arising from the most innocent activities of my grandsons, and I know she rolls her eyes when I warn her of these potentials.
When my marriage ended after 26 years and I had to live alone for the first time in my life, I discovered that I loved and thrived on the independence and privacy it afforded me. I'm still happy with that status now, 14 years later, although I could benefit from having someone on hand to police my eating activities.
