Steve & Masha Monica Jeanne Phylllis Clare
Steve is the eldest, born in 1975. He took his M.D. degree from the University of Texas at Houston, did his residency in emergency medicine at a hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan until July, 2009. He is now a fellow in the tactical medicine program at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. His wife, Masha, also has her M.D. degree from UT Houston, is an anesthesiologist. Both are graduates of the University of Dallas. If Steve seems long in the tooth still to be in career preparation, you have to take into consideration that he served four years' active duty in the Marine Corps Infantry. Steven and Masha are going to present us with a grandchild in early 2010. Masha's family fled the former Soviet Union not long before that federation broke up. Having seen the desperate and disastrous failure of socialized medicine, Masha has some strong words for American proponents of that kind of health "care" system.
I can recommend Steve's web log, or "blog", very highly. Here is a link to Bloodletting.
Monica is next. She was enlisted in the U.S. Army and studied Korean at the Defense Language Institute at Monterrey, California, after which she was deployed to Iraq for 15 months. She returned engaged to John Lervold, also on Army deployment in Iraq. Her daughter, Rebecca, and son Donald Louis, and John's son John Jr. comprise our grandchildren until Masha delivers in early 2010. John and Monica and the kids live in Sierra Vista, very near Fort Huachuca (God bless you!), where they are both civilian contract employees.
Rebecca and Phyllis at a birthday party for Jo Ann a couple of years ago. I know I need to mount new pictures here.
Jeanne Marie, also a graduate of the University of Dallas, is the one who bugged me to construct this page and brag on my kids. Jeanne works in commercial real estate and lives in Frisco (Texas), north of Dallas.
Phyllis graduated in 2007 from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She worked in Ghana, and then was employed by Alley's House, a not-for-profit organization in Dallas serving principally teen mothers. After that, she went to Bangkok, where she is taught conversational English to a sixth-grade class at the Palace School. She is, in a somewhat attenuated way, a successor to Anna Leonowens, who taught the royal Siamese children from 1862 to 1867, and whose experience there was teh basis of the book Anna and the King of Siam, which in turn is the basis for the popular musical stage play and movie, "The King and I." Phyllis is now living in Austin, working as an event planner with a large corporation.
And then there is Clare, our youngest. She took her high school diploma from TAMS (Texas Academy of Math and Science) and will graduate from Baylor in December, 2009 with a degree in Spanish literature and a minor in mathematics. She studied in Spain in 2008 and loves the country.
And I could not forget - I cannot - Michelle, born in 1983, who was carried off by Sudden Infant Death Syndrome on January 7, 1984. I asked the grief counselor when I could expect to get over her death. He said I would never get over it, but I would learn to live with it. The former is certainly true, the latter is still in question. After all these years, I cannot think of her without having tears well up.