Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a memoir treating the family trait of moral vigor against a backdrop of paradigm shifts in American social history, a lighthearted read for the most part. It is a book whose time has come, in that I want to bring forward kindness and restraint, seemingly left aside for a time as our culture delves into new and old acts of discord and violence and moves away from humility and civility. As a teacher, I sense the time is right for a tribute to my late mother and my own life of sixty years. I hope to contribute wisdom for youth and put attention on the noteworthy year of 1948, my birth year. You will chuckle at a memory from my grandmother Beulah's small house in Hillsboro, in south-central Texas. You will feel tenderly toward Zelma my mother, Beulah's last child of seven, who was gifted in genuine attentiveness, and beautiful. I am the third generation, Patricia the author, and my chapters reveal academic orientation, the feel of retro American culture, and a couple of disappointments, mainly in endeavoring to work as a public-school teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. Ann, my daughter, is the fourth-generation woman, and she has "quadrupled," in a word, our maternal side's professional outreach. Ann's life fills me with reverence for life's potentialities, and curiously, the British kind of personal strength my grandmother exhibited also gives me pause. Beulah's birth in 1884 and Ann's reaching age thirty in 2010 encompasses one-hundred-sixteen years, 42,224 days. I like this number: Read it forwards or backwards! Read this memoir and get a glimpse of my mother's six colorful siblings; glimpse my father, baseball player, welder of titanium, Army truck mechanic in India; and glimpse my daughter's inspiring husband. Marriage for life, student responsibility to prepare for higher ed, and preserving religious practices come forward in this nonfiction narrative of ordinary women of moral vigor.
