Carol Sobo:  

February 1, 2010 Hi friends, I am getting excited about having a forty year reunion so I really hope it happens. I have three children, Erin (30), Sam (27) and Joe (24). Erin has one child and is expecting number two just days away from grandson Colin's third birthday. She is following in my footsteps, because my kids are all three years apart......it seems like such a short time ago they were 3,6,9 and I could sing that silly rhyming song.....three, six, nine: the goose drank wine, the monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line, the line broke, the monkey got choked, and they all lived together on a little rowboat. I wish my short term memory was not "gone, but not forgotten", or should I say, "long gone and forgotten?" But I do digress...... I broke my back a year ago when a lawn chair I was sitting on collapsed. My butt cheeks embraced the metal bar like a long lost friend! It felt like I had been hit by lightning, although I don't really know what that feels like. Knock on Wood. My grandson was with me when it happened, and he started screaming (saving me the trouble) because he knows big people aren't supposed to fall down. He is so clever! Unfortunately, he screams way too often for anyone to take notice, so my husband just sat (oblivious to my brush with death) at his computer, happy in his own little world of bits and bytes and no breaks. We did have lightning hit a queen palm tree about 5 feet from our front window a few years ago. I was out shopping with Donna Leyja Walker (class of '74), who was here to escape the harsh Michigan winter, to work on her tan, and to visit me.....not listed in order of importance!) My neighbors told me about all the excitement: our Gilbert fire department came and thought they put the fire out, but shortly thereafter, the palm tree burst into flames again, so the Mesa fire department had to respond because Gilbert was too busy with other lightning strikes and various other situations steming from the destruction of the storm's aftermath. Shifting gears. I am an orphan now, and it stinks. My Dad died in 2000 (one year before our beloved Diamondbacks kicked Yankee ass and won the World Series). My Dad was a tried and true lifelong Yankee-hater. My Mom joined him in heaven three years later, in 2003 (although she really was mentally gone before Dad because she had Alzheimer's). She would have died on the same month and day, July 11, but an on-call nurse at the nursing home didn't know she had a DNR. So she was resuscitated just to live one more painful day. We then also lost my mother-in-law in 2003, and my father-in-law just months later in 2004. We also lost a nephew to cancer in 2001 (he was only 27 and newly married...so devastatingly sad). So the new century did not start well for our family. My husband, Hugo, is Jewish and his parents survived the Holocaust and met each other in a relocation camp after the war. Steven Spielberg started a project right around the time he did Schindler's List documenting as many stories from Holocaust survivors as he could find. My husband's Dad (I will refer to him...Expand for more