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Today's Featured Biography
Paul Garrett
After Helix, I spent the summer of 1966 scraping, priming, and painting air conditioning units on the gravel roof of my mom�s company under the supervision of a would-be Nazi, where I became friends with a Russian-American due to start his junior year at San Diego State. His mom dared me to take Russian and not get killed, so I enrolled, didn�t get killed, and ended up majoring in it rather than art as I � and everyone else � had assumed I would. I never took an art class beyond the Famous Artists Course I was enrolled in while at Helix and used that training only sparingly in the decades to come. I should have joined the Navy as I had considered, to follow my Dad�s path in life�
While at State, I worked on a pioneer Russian-English machine translation project in La Jolla, and learned the basics of programming hands-on. I became involved with the Russian Orthodox Church, converted, married � way too early � in 1969, graduated in 1970, and went off to New York to study Orthodox theology. No one at Helix could have seen that coming! I couldn�t be ordained because of canon law requirements a priest�s wife must be Orthodox, but was sent to Columbia Library School to earn a degree when the current librarian was driven crazy and left. Not seeing what his departure portended, I finished the two degrees simultaneously while working in the library half-time (they couldn�t do arithmetic), and eventually was invited to join the faculty.
I translated and published the writings of a famous dissident Russian priest and wrote a biography of St. Innocent of Alaska, now long out of print. I taught esoteric courses in history and the theory of translation and became involved in computerization, learning on-the-job Informix database programming and UNIX administration. When I fell afoul of politics � imagine, politics in the church! � I accepted a job in a newly-established research center run by the Antiochian Orthodox in Western Pennsylvania, running the library, programming the computer, writing, editing, teaching Greek, picking up some Arabic � until I again got caught up in politics.
At this point, the first marriage succumbed to religious wars. I remarried, tried and failed in the �dot-com thing,� nursed the charming second set of in-laws through their declining years, and was left by Wife No. 2. I wrote an 800-page authorized biography of a prominent Arab-American who spent decades working for a just peace in the Middle East. I took odd jobs editing books and designing databases and websites, somehow getting along.
When eldest daughter Tania called to announce she was expecting, I volunteered to be her nanny. I sold everything and moved to Connecticut, where they had bought a house, and to pay down some debt, signed up to temp until the baby came. I did too well for my own good at the assignment at MasterCard and was hired directly to redesign a database for Risk Management � which got me passed over for nanny as a series of au pairs began coming in an out of their lives. When Risk Management decided the database was good enough, I was downsized. Good and bitter about that, I heeded my sister�s pleas to return to La Mesa and move in with her, her husband, and our aging parents in our childhood home.
Spent six months in La Mesa. The day after I arrived, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, on top of deepening dementia. Worked part-time with my brother-in-law, a contract handyman, and learned to do a lot of things the junior high school shop teacher would never have believed possible. I got buff and tan, started drawing again for the first time in decades, and even started writing a novel. MasterCard gave great severance. I got back in touch with several friends from Helix days and an old classmate from seminary, and was ready to look for full-time work to settle down. Mom died just short of her ninetieth birthday, and for a variety of reasons I returned east, settling in Bridgeport, in walking distance of my daughter, by then a mother a second time. I became the designated emergency babysitter.
Finding my technology skills a bit long in the tooth, I earned an insurance license and tried my hand at selling Medicaid supplements, getting on fine with the old folks I visited, but unable to sell crap to starving horseflies. After designing a database to help the agents handle their business � and getting stiffed financially � I called it quits.
I started writing book summary/analyses for BookRags, Inc., through Guru.com, which almost covers the bills. With the departure of the fifth au pair (two good, one bad, one so-so), I am finally getting my chance to watch the three rambunctious boys. I gave up my efficiency apartment, moved in with them in Fairfield, CT, and continued the BookRags gig during the hours they�re in nursery school, preschool, and first grade, getting socialized. When the Mulrys moved to Los Angeles, CA, I accompanied them and stayed for several years.
I then returned to Connecticut to au pair for Tim and Shoshanna Clark. Shosh was friends with Tania and Mischa in Crestwood, long ago. I began receiving Social Security as Bookrags assignments petered out. Good timing. When the Clarks moved to Israel, I moved to Boise, ID, near Matt and his family. I discovered I have diabetes when I was hospitalized for septicemia. Moved around Boise a few places and eventually met Marilee online.
We married 31 Jul 2015 with almost all of our kids and grandkids present. We live in her house in Twin Falls as she comes up on retirement from teaching special ed. We aching and creaking, but enjoying growing old together. The quaint house is now two-tone purple and there's an orange car in the driveway. And cats, of course...
So, over-all, it's been a life of coulda, woulda, shouldas. Missed opportunities, missteps, and squandered potential. Still, it goes on, and Marilee was making it unexpectedly good ... until she died of a wicked brain cancer. Now I live quietly in Western Pennsylvania with my daughter Mischa.
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