Kathryn Taylor:
CLASS OF 1969
South Kitsap High SchoolClass of 1969
Port orchard, WA
Kathryn's Story
This is for my old friends who asked for the "rest of the story", since there wasn¿t much opportunity at the class reunion.
Forty years in a nutshell, huh? OK.
Extensive life testing has proven conclusively that I was born without the ambition gene, so there really is nothing dramatic to report. I attended college for a year and was active, and still am active, in the environmental and anti-war movement, which gave me my first taste of tear gas. I was briefly married a little over a year after high school graduation. For almost five years I lived a pretty nomadic existence- lived in approximately 16 different locations (including a tent for several months), worked mostly minimum wage jobs, sometimes two at a time, learned to dumpster dive, shop at Goodwill and swallow my pride when necessary. The relationship ended in late 1974. For almost five years after that I was your typical single mother, working two to three jobs at a time- one to pay the childcare and two to pay the rent, feed the children etc. I recorded bedtime stories so the baby sitter could play them for the girls while they paged through the books so at least they would hear my voice last thing before bedtime. In 1978 I had a physical collapse due to exhaustion, what a surprise! While I was recuperating a dear friend set me up, through duplicity, on the only blind date I ever went on. Glenn and I were married in 1979. We just celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary. He adopted our daughters a few years after we were married and is really the only father they have ever known. I hope you will excuse just a little bragging for a moment; our two daughters are brilliant, beautiful, empowered women. Both are college graduates, employed in professions they love, happily married for 12 & 14 years respectively- both to men named Joe as it happens, with in-laws that we love, and they have given us three wonderful, hilarious grandchildren- two girls ages 9 & 7 and a boy age 6½.
As for a career, I will borrow Mark Twain¿s words, "I am a mile wide and an inch deep." To the surprise of any of my math teachers who may still be living, it turns out that I am inherently good with numbers- I owe this to my father's genes. For many years I made my living as a bookkeeper of one sort or another. I have worked with computers since the days of key punch and magnetic tape and pinging to find a connection to the web. I have worked various corporate clerical and administrative positions, incl...Expand for more
uding a short time as a program comptroller for a large defense contractor. Over the past thirty years I have been a credit manager, an office manager, a credit union associate, a licensed real estate sales person, an escrow agent, an administrative assistant, the lead legal assistant for a defense attorney and an automotive title clerk. The list could continue. I decided years ago that when the Personnel Department becomes the Human Resources Department, it is time to leave, and have been much happier for making that decision. I've been a Notary Public since 1992 and my most recent vocational incarnation has been as a Notary signing agent- helping to prepare mortgage documents. What great timing, huh? Right now I'm trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up ;<).
For everyone at the reunion that asked me if I still sing; I answered, "No." and that is not accurate.
Of course I still sing. I sing lullabies and silly children's songs for my grandchildren. I sing chants and songs at protest rallies and marches. My hubby and I sing bits and pieces of old songs, and some new songs, to each other around the house, working in the garden, and when we are driving, or camping in the mountains.
When my father had a liver transplant in 1993 I spent more than forty nights in a UW Hospital ICU singing Christmas songs to him to keep him calm so he wouldn't rip out his tubing and so my mother could get some sleep. My father, who was Santa to literally thousands of children in the Tacoma area (he even had his own suit), passed away Christmas Day 1993. When my sister was dying of Cancer a couple of years ago, I spent a week of evenings in her hospital room, talking and singing Beatles songs to let her know she was not alone, so her husband could get some sleep. Over the seven years that I cared for my mother, as her dementia became more pronounced and she became more infantile, I sang to her. First it was the songs from her favorite musicals, then the songs my father sang to us as children, and the songs he sang to her, and finally the songs her father sang to her when she was a child, any song that found its way through the fear and confusion. When she passed away three weeks after my sister, I held her hand and sang her favorite prayer for her.
So, yes, I still sing. Perhaps not well, but always with love, which, I believe, is as it should be.
Well, there it is, in a nutshell. I didn't say it wouldn't be a coconut.
Hope you all liked the cake.
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