Senior Moments

Several weeks ago my blogger friend Kathleen honored me with the Honest Scrap award.  It’s taken me longer than it should to respond to her kindness, but here goes:

The first rule is to “list 10 honest things about yourself — make it interesting, even if it means digging deep”.  I’m not sure how interesting this is, but here are my ten.

1)  I grew up on a small farm in northwestern Indiana.  I was in 4-H and one year exhibited a blue-ribbon Jersey heifer at the County Fair.

2) When I was in the third grade I asked Santa Claus to bring me a set of encyclopedias.  He did, and I found the World Book Encyclopedia under the Christmas tree.  I forget how many volumes there were in the set, but I read my way through them.

3) I was one of the first people to drive a Mustang.  When Ford introduced the Mustang I was the representative of the Indiana State High School Press Association representative at the roll-out.  I spent three days in Detroit and got to drive a Mustang on a test track.

4)  I’ve admired Robert E. Lee for about as long as I can remember.  My high school term paper on him was 52 pages long.  Some of my classmates complained about the 12-page length requirement in the assignment.

5) After my freshman year at Manchester College I couldn’t find a summer job, so I went to summer school instead.  I graduated in eleven quarters.

6) I majored in mathematics and taught college-level mathematics for 15 years.  During the summer of 1982 the Dean of the College where I taught asked me to teach a computer science course.  My qualifications?  The junior high school  my son attended had a computer.

7) I resigned my teaching position at Heidelberg College on the day my daughter graduated in order to take a job teaching in China.  I spent a year teaching in Tianjin.

8) During the 30 years I taught in colleges, I commuted to campus by bicycle.

9) Many of my Chinese students collected stamps and they got me started as a stamp collector.  I collect the stamps of China, Hong Kong (several of my students moved there), Great Britain (my daughter studied in London for a semester), and the U.S.

10)  I first saw my beautiful bride because of a snow ‘storm’.  The services at the Episcopal Church in Hendersonville were cancelled on the first Sunday I was in Tennessee with my new job because of a quarter-inch of snow.  So I went to the Methodist Church with my parents, where their new associate pastor, Rev. Betsy, was introduced.  The rest, as they say, is history.

The rules say that I am to select 7 bloggers who I feel embody the spirit of Honest Scrap.  But I’ve gotten to know many more of you than that who are deserving of the award.  So if you would like to be an Honest Scrap honoree, please consider yourself selected.

Tags: American Life, Family, Friends

This entry was posted on February 12, 2009 at 3:48 am and is filed under American Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.