Shelby C.

I lived on an island with a small village on the St. Simons Sound a few miles from the Artlantic Ocean. Back in 1956 my aviator father could afford a house 2 blocks from the beach. There were 4 churches who rang their bells every Sunday morning. I would cry every Sunday morning because I wasn't in church where i thought that people wanted me to be. There was just something about it that got stuck in my craw. Virgins don't have babies. I enjoyed seeing the pictures of my ancestors, cave men. Anilmals that looked like me and I grew up wanting to be an Anthropologist. I got married in1969 too young and my father was where he had been what seemed like all of my life. He was in Vietnam and he was 50 years old getting his 29th year in the navy. I was going to community college at night while my young bride was in nursing school. In 1970 after we had been married 7 months I came home and my father had been medivacced to Bethesda naval hospital with leukemia that he contracted from being at Bikini Atoll in 1950 to witness the hydrogen bomb test. He had been in Hawaaii at the end of WWII and so had beeen exposed to radiation there also. In Jjanuary of 1970 I took my bride and our 7 week old daughter to Bethesda in a VW bug. Babies diarrhea front seat of a volkswagon with the only grandchild he would ever see. He died in 1972 and I was awarded the GI bill As a Vietnam War Orphan. I transferred to UGA as a junior and enrolled and got my degree in Anthropology with honors and started graduate School with a pregnant wife. She became very ill and successfully delivered a boy child whose middle name was the same as my fathers had been. I am 71 now and the discover magazine has on it's ccover my questions all along Why are we, who we are? Exaxctly. Like my ancestors where is Thunder from, Why do earthquakes happen. How can I go up there to the moon. Homo sapiens in 50,000 years figured it out. My shirt reads from stones to the moon in 50,000 years Wow! Besides Discover I read Smithsonian, Archaeology, Nat Geo, Natural History, Scientific Ameican, American Archaeology, and Ancient American. There are others that write things that i am interested in and i read those when I see an interesting cover like "We were not alone", Like my wife, I became a RN so that I could write checks to Ga Tech when our daugther wanted to become a Physicist. We started with 2 Abraham Lincolns and without borrowing money we paid for 8 college degrees. All men are created equal endowed with Certain inalienable rights. Of which are Life. Liberty, and the Persuit of Happiness. It is not when you get married but who you marry that matters most. I knew that the woman I married would do whatever was necessary and I went into the hospital for brain surgery and finished in patient rehab 186 days later and I had a visitor every day. 6/4/69 was nearly 53 years ago and we love each other.