Page 22 - Discover Winter 2021

Kate’s Corner CONTINUED
“thanks but no thanks”. She just couldn’t
warm up to the idea of giving money that
she had worked to earn to a union. Yup!
That sounded like Sharon.
She ended up teaching 3 and 4 year
old students the Suzuki Violin, a technique
developed by a Japanese man of the same
name (Suzuki) whose theory was that
children could learn music just like they
had learned their native tongue, through
constant repetition.
Apparently the technique worked,
as Sharon had taught at the Blair School
of Music for nearly 30 years (obviously, the
school was not unionized). Blair is one of 10
constituent schools of Vanderbilt University,
and is of the same stature as a conservatory.
Sharon retired in the late 1990s and moved
back to Michigan, near Grand Rapids and
her sister. An illness during her late 70s led
to her need, today, for the use of bottled
oxygen. She sounded well, however, and
clearly gets out and about independently,
as she complained about people who refuse
to wear face masks in public during this
pandemic that we’ve been going through.
Yup! That’s our Sharon for sure.
I found Donna’s husband first, and he
led me to Donna. The two were separated
this year through no fault of either of them.
She had been having some health issues
and, therefore, moved closer to their son
while hubby stayed behind to put their
house on the market. Enter Covid 19, which
rearranged their plans, along with everyone
else’s in the world.
Besides rearing three children,
Donna, a graduate of the University of
Illinois with degrees in psychology and
computer science, had spent much of her
career years researching and advising
A ma r y l lis
Amaryllis
educators and students. Her work had
necessitated moves from Illinois to
20 Discover Smith Mountain Lake WINTER 2020
Maryland, and then back to Michigan.
In between the births of her children,
she worked in curriculum, research, and
finally student affairs. Besides hours upon
hours of research, her work involved writing
computer programs, gathering data, running
statistical analyses, and writing reports in
the area of university student retention. She
had worked until she was 72 years old.
After retirement, she became
interested in traveling. She began listing the
places where she had been: Spain, Morocco,
Granada, Bucharest, Romania, Budapest,
Hungary, Italy (“the Alps, Dolomite, and
lake region”). She was packed and ready to
go to: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan
and Turkmenistan, she said, reeling off
the names just like she had the names of
dinosaurs all those years ago. Yup! This was
our Donna. Sadly, she had been forced to
cancel the Asian trip and instead have open
heart surgery.
Like Sharon, Donna sounds as
sharp as ever. She likes to play a computer
game called “Wizard” that her grandson
introduced her to. It’s an online game, and
I’m sure that it must have lots of exotic
names and complicated plots. She confesses
that she hopes to travel again some day,
once Covid is a bad memory. She walks for
exercise, and also works out on a rowing
machine.
“I had to get a really small rowing
machine that would fit in the condo,” she
says, “and I can only use it for 15 minutes
before its piston gets hot.”
Then, in perfect Donna form, when
she saw a list of all our classmates who have
passed away, her response was, “We’ve lost
60 percent of our class.”