Yesterday was my Grandpa Willard's 80th birthday. I've always looked up to him and my Grandma. It amazes me to think about all of the things they have seen and experienced in their lifetime. The past couple of Christmases my Grandpa has given all of the family members copies of his "book" that he's been working on. I say "book" because it doesn't really follow a book structure at all, but more of a collection of thoughts as they come to him without any editing or chronological order. There is an introduction, but none of the "books" have endings because he plans to continue writing things as they come to him for as long as he is able to. He calls these books, Life As I Remember It Volume I, II, etc. This last volume was especially interesting to me because my grandparents had recently moved out of their home and into an apartment, and as they were moving they found a journal that my Grandma had kept in 1956 writing about her life up to that point. My Grandpa added it to his story and as a prelude wrote "LaDora's Story, written in 1956. It is not yet complete." I really hope she continues her story, because I learned so much about her that I hadn't known in just those few pages of story.
This is one of the paragraphs that I found most interesting:
"I had an incident recently in visiting with a lady of about fifty years of age. She is what I would consider someone that is right on top of things. We were visiting about my varied occupations during my lifetime and the subject of education came up. She seemed shocked when she found out that I had been a dairy farmer, run a John Deere dealership, was an accountant and even served as Mayor, acting City Administrator and on the City Council. Her question was how could I do that without a high school diploma. My response was that no one ever asked if I had a diploma or a degree but were interested in what I knew and what I could do. Today this seems to be different. When applying for a job the first question is what kind of degrees do you have? I feel this is somewhat backwards and anyone that feels when they receive a diploma or a degree that they now know it all is headed for failure. Education should teach you how to learn in the future. You never finish learning."
Very true G-pa.
