She is of special note because she married my grandfather at age 16 if I am not mistaken (he met her at a local dance) and she had lamented to me she wondered what would she would have achieved if she had attained more education (I think only high school graduate if I am not mistaken).

But her intellect was apparently to all of us and she was a master at everything around the house. She was the one who inspired me to be a Macgyver, because she could fix any appliance and jerry-rig any contraption and she could unravel any knot no matter how convoluted and she was a master at crossword puzzles (and pretty much any puzzle for that matter afair).

I've now suddenly grown to appreciate her even more. I had adored my grandfather because (being a son of a Baptist minister who always gave bags of groceries to the poor) he was so unselfish and so loving to everyone. And he was my actual father and did everything with me in my youth. So I had always been trying to emulate him, but I think this actually was one of my downfalls because I think as great as he was, he didn't have the right culture to pass on to my Dad, as evident by how it turned out for my father (having a strong mother and a weak father).

My grandfather and I had many discussions about morality and I thus I am happy to see it all starting to come clear to me by now. Even back then I was questioning the arbitrary goal of morality. But I didn't understand what to replace it with. Now I think I do. The morality that matters is the one that makes your culture win.

I have always wanted to honor my grandparents and felt like an utter failure for not being able to find a path that would enable me to do so.

From 1985, that is her in the center with the white blouse:



Btw, that is my father and his sister on the left side, both highly educated. My attorney father graduated top of his class at LSU which was a top law school at that time (I think even until now). And his sister has multiple degrees and traveled the world such as to Egypt (and her second husband sitting there was a prominent geologist but you can see the incision on his leg to get a vein for his open heart surgery).

I note that my Aunt Jackie who was probably as smart if not smarter than my father (who I think has a higher IQ than me), had a very bizarre life because again females are not engineered to be organized about being leaders of successful culture. Of all the grandkids, my sister is conspicuously missing from the photo, which is a harbinger of what was to come (dead by 2006 by a combination of drugs and other forms of self-destruction culminating with a murderous, lunatic husband).

I think you can see my grandmother had some sort of Southern French or Italian ancestry. My grandfather is where the Shelby family name originates and that is coming from some where in what is now the UK. And I am mixing with German and Cherokee native from my mother's side. My cousins (the ladies in the photo) were mixing with I think some Eastern European ancestry.


Edit: to recap, I hated my family because they gave me a losing culture. They didn't make me competitive. Also because they judged me and switched from thinking I was a darling to a black sheep when I began to question everything and began to do unstable activities such as travel to the Philippines. I had to go out into the world and try to find my own way. I committed major blunders experimenting without sufficient knowledge of truths. I even hated white people thinking they were all nutcases with Frankenstein outcomes (although really I still love all people but extremely disenchanted at that time not knowing how to explain what had happened to our culture in the USA). Now I come full circle to loving my grandparents and understanding their failure. They had a good set of values, but they didn't know how to protect it.