My Week in Roswell

Here I am on Saturday night after eating Take-Out from a Chinese restaurant in Roswell, Georgia. I will miss the different places to eat here. We often find restaurants nearly empty around three o'clock in the afternoon so we can go in and feel safe.

It was a beautiful almost spring-like day with temps near seventy. Lexie and I had a short walk, not long enough for her, but long enough to stir up some pain in my foot. 

By the time this post is published, I will be home in Hayesville. I will get my COVID vaccine on Monday! I am so excited about that. My friends on Facebook are also being vaccinated and showing photos of their doing it. Maybe the more we see it being done, the more people will want to take it. I believe that now we are on the path to putting an end to this chaotic time and bringing some order into our lives. 

Life here at my sister and BIL's house is easy and fun for me. Having lived alone for more than ten years now, having conversations after dinner instead of turning on the TV or going off to bed to listen to Podcasts, is a treat. I interviewed Stu last night about his life before I knew him and, as I was sure it would be, he told of an interesting youth growing up outside Chicago, going to school, running track and he even had his yearbook handy so I could see the teenaged boy who has become such a fine man.

Gay and Stu Christmas 2020

I didn't interview him as if I were going to write an article about him, but I am encouraging him to write about his life. He remembers the names of all the friends he had in high school, the girls he dated until he met my sister years later in Mississippi. 

Every year until the pandemic, he has met with his closest buddies from high school for a reunion. The men and their wives have gone to various cities for several days together. The amazing part of this is the women get along well and have become friends.

After Stu finished high school and four years of college, he joined the United States Navy and became part of the Seabees where he used his Engineering education in various places in the US, but he also spent months in Vietnam. Right after his marriage to Gay, he was sent to Guantanomo in Cuba. He was twenty-three years old and in charge of 150 men. That says something about the leadership he possessed at an early age. At the same time, Gay earned her Masters Degree in Counseling. Stu went on and earned his Masters at Georgia Tech. 

Gay told me she had learned more about her husband in the past week because of me than she learned in the forty-plus years of their marriage. Stu said she had never asked him the right questions. 

We all have stories to tell and nobody can tell them except us. Stu has nieces and nephews who love him and would like to have his life stories to pass down to their kids one day. 

I will begin teaching a new writing class on Tuesday, January 26, on Zoom. I have six students and that is a good number for the two-hour session each week. 

With the help of prompts or ideas given to them to stir up memories, each week everyone will write a true story about their life.  I look forward to the interesting people and their stories.

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Our first prompt is to write about a birthday, yours or another's, and tell us the details, the fun or the bad parts, the people who were there, what happened, where it happened, and ask yourself why do you remember this particular birthday.  

Readers, if you aren't in my class, you can try this prompt at home. It will be fun. Send me your story. I would like to read it.