Rosemary Forrest:
CLASS OF 1969
Dickinson High SchoolClass of 1969
Jersey city, NJ
Rosemary's Story
At my birth, there must have been a mischievous fairy wishing me an interesting life, for I have certainly had that. I traveled the country, attending school in D.C., studying pottery in a ghost town in Nevada, living atop a mountain in New Hampshire, and finally marrying and settling in the South to raise my two daughters. Here I established a career first as a journalist and later as a science writer for the University of Georgia. I spent nearly a decade tromping around a restricted government site in S.C., boating on the Savannah, following scientists as they logged the effects of radiation on the environment. I held alligators and snakes and kept the office possum at my desk. When that job ended during the Great Recession, I had to once again reinvent myself.
Just to make it more interesting, my 95-year-old mother moved in with me. For a while I worked for FEMA, following the devastation after Katrina in Mississippi. It, too, was interesting work, but Mom's age required that I not travel. I was no stranger to caretaking, as I had spent many a vacation traveling to the bottom of Florida to see to an ornery uncle in a little fishing village I dubbed Purgatory. After he died, I gave a kidney to my niece, spending an excruciatingly boring recovery in California with way too much family around! Caring for Mom was substantially different.
Mom had a difficult time reconciling herself to living with me. It didn't help that I decided to go back to school at this point in my life to study pottery once again. It was almost like I was back in high school. I would come home from school and Mom would make dinner. She had a harder time bossing me around, though! Her life would last about as long as my schooling and after she died, I traveled around the Southeast on the craft fair circuit hawking my pots.
Since then, I have become a grandmother seven times! My younger daughter, the lead operation engineer for the HiRISE uplink team, plans and commands images of Mars taken from orbit. She lives and works in Tucson and is responsible for three of my grandkids. My older daughter lives near me in Augusta, GA, and has four children. She is an educational counselor but is currently not working because her younger two children have a rare and seriou...Expand for more
s genetic defect. How rare? My grandson was one of only about 50 people ever known to have this and survive. It was so rare that when I looked for information on his disorder, I found little. So opened yet another chapter in my strange life.
I was working as a grant writer for a nonprofit homeless shelter and decided that the world needed a book on this class of genetic disorders, so I wrote one. Even with my background as a science writer, I knew little about genetics and had to first learn that. I spent the next two years pouring over esoteric academic and medical papers, trying to make sense of the disorders under my examination. I was rewarded, finally, with publication in 2017, of Genetic Mistakes. I got the contract on the book on the same day I got word that my brother, Jim, was ill. I spent the next two months revising, editing, and formatting my highly technical book all while staying in Florida as my brother slowly died. It was not easy.
I am currently freelance as an editor and copywriter for a national veteran's organization. Mostly, I'm retired. I still do a little pottery but that's a craft for younger people! I do a little painting, a lot of playing with my grandkids and two dogs, and enjoying life just as it is. For the last 30+ years I have shared that life with a great guy my younger daughter set me up with when she was in high school. He's an internationally ranked fencer and a published composer and musician. Fortunately for me, he is also known as Granpa Rudy to my grandkids and as they will freely tell you, "Granpa Rudy can fix anything!" And that is true.
Some days I have a bone to pick with that damned fairy, but most of the time I have no complaints with my life. My beanies, as I call my grandkids, are all smart, good-looking and surprisingly healthy, despite the defect shared by two of them. I attribute that to the great care their parents provide. I feel lucky to see them so often. I witnessed the eldest enter the world and now she is a teenager. Her affected sister was born in 2019. I have had adventures, love, accomplishment, come back from failure more times than I care to count, learned new things, and shared my life with many a two- and four-legged creature. I count myself as fortunate.
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