Family

This is my family.  Clockwise from left, there is my father Lynn, my brother Ralph, my mother Carolyn, and myself.  This picture was taken in December, 1998, during my brother's brief visit home over the holidays.  I think this is a good picture, though it was quite hard to choose a shot which flattered all of us at the same time.  I was not a problem, if I may say so myself; I looked equally good in all of them.  My mother, father, and brother, however, were harder to coordinate.  In any case, this is the four of us, with smiles on.

My father teaches chemistry at the University of Texas at Dallas, and if you ask him about the Doctor of Chemistry (hereafter referred to as D-Chem) program, he will delight in explaining it to you.  In fact, he loves to explain anything.  That's why he's a professor, I suppose.  He is an incorrigible punster; as a defense mechanism, I have learned to actually enjoy bad puns!  He enjoys sailing and, like the rest of us, reading.  Like me, he is selectively imperceptive and can, for example, walk through a room where a present is being wrapped, without noticing.

My mother was, for a time, a professor of biology, but she hasn't had to work for twenty-five years or so.  She fills her time with other things such as quilting, reading, gardening, sewing, and volunteering with a non-profit organization called Out, But Not Free, which tries to help ex-convicts readjust to life outside.  (Remember The Shawshank Redemption?)  She also devotes significant amounts of time to taking care of her mother.  This is ocnsiderably stressful, and I admire her fortitude.

My brother is seven and a half years older than I am, which makes him twenty-seven at present.  He left home for Stanford University when I was nine, and since then I have been, for most practical purposes, an only child.  After graduating in 1993, he went to Carnegie Mellon University for graduate school.  He is at present a "Systems Designer" (basically a computer programmer) at a small-but-growing company.  In the past few years he has discovered a propensity for cooking, which has given him lots of pleasure.  He especially enjoys desserts and fancy dinners.  He is the glorious individual who first introduced me, at a relatively young age, to Talking Heads, They Might Be Giants, and Terry Pratchett.  I also usurped a good number of books from his shelves, a few years after he had left; I figured he didn't need them any more.  (I only regret that he eventually took back The Carpet People, my favorite Pratchett book!)

Ralph is, since this February, engaged to the lovely Lori!  I am ecstatic about the prospect of having her as a sister-in-law, and my father is quietly but emphatically happy at everyone.  Lori does social work with children in foster families and has people skills which I would love to emulate.  I can't wait for them to have nieces and nephews for me! :-)

This is my grandfather, my mother's father.  He is, unfortunately, deceased since a year and a half ago.  He was a really great guy.

He taught high school biology for a long time (seventeen years, I believe) in the little town in central Texas where my grandmother still lives.  He taught everyone and his father, so whenever he went anywhere in the town, people would say "Hey!  Mr. Curry!" and talk to him.  He even talked to people he didn't know (yet), a habit which embarrassed my mother and  her sister Frances when they were young, but which I find endearing.  Aunt Frances told me about a couple of bums he met on the golf course, who would sit out there and smoke marijuana.  Granddaddy would just chat with them, and they would offer him some of their drugs, and he'd just say, "No thank you, I don't do that stuff, but don't let me stop you."  And all the time, they had no idea that he was walking around with at least a hundred dollars in cash in his pocket, as was his usual habit!

He liked to write stories and poems.  They can, by no stretch of the imagination, be considered great literature, but they are amusing.  His poems, especially, are cute rather than profound.

My grandfather was extremely proud of all his grandchildren.  This is a photo of my grandparents and my brother in Austin, Texas in the spring of 1988.  My brother was on his high school's Academic Decathlon team, and they had won state (thus the medals around his neck).  My grandparents had come up for the banquet, and they were both bursting with pride, especially my grandfather.  I love this picture because it shows him at his best, puffed up, swaggering, exuberant with delight.  This is how I prefer to remember him.