Barbara J. Hamby

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Thanks, Mom

It’s been awhile since I consciously realized how grateful I still am to my late mother for insisting that I take typing in high school. It helped me write papers all the way through school and I used it for many years of my working career. Now my keyboarding skills are a great help to me as I write blogs, poems and memoirs.

While I was scrubbing oven racks earlier with my aching arthritic hands, I thought how great it is that I didn’t have to do something like that for a living. Somehow the amount of pressure it takes to punch a computer keyboard is so much less likely to make my hands ache.

From time to time, I’ve appreciated that Mom coaxed me to take Latin. It was above my scholastic ability at that time, so it brought my grade point down, but I’ve never regretted having some familiarity with it. Working in law offices where I had to read and sometimes compose legal documents and condense medical reports would have been a nightmare or even impossible without that knowledge.

I know Mom wanted me to be a nurse or, failing that, a schoolteacher. None of her daughters ever became a nurse, but the youngest taught school her entire career. Somehow I knew at a young age I’d be a lousy nurse and an impatient schoolteacher.

My memoirs will reveal some of the many jobs I held while I was going to school. Some of the pitfalls of secretarial and paralegal work may also show up in those pages.

Tomorrow I hope to post more travel journals. I’ve been editing some of them today. Now that I’ve finished with Shanghai, the rest should be easier.