We always called him dad, but who knew that in high school and later in junior college all of the girls would gush “Gad!!” at him. Sunday, Miss Marples also-known-as Anne was in the library, with a candlestick. No wait that’s Clue. Anyway, Anne was in the library, doing a little forensic reading, when she found dad’s two yearbooks. One for his senior year in high school and the other for his freshman year at junior college. The next year he went off to college, when he enrolled in the Naval Academy at Annapolis. Here is his writeup from his high school yearbook:

Ta-wang!!! Quiet, cute, and has a sense of humor…
He’s got what gals like… marked talent for journalism. 

His junior college yearbook entry featured this prophetic autobiographical poem:

THE ENGINEERS
These are the lads with
mechanical minds,
The experts on curves and
parallel lines.
Of ions, of volts, and ohms
they know all,
And can survey a mountain,
no matter how tall.
With brains so loaded right
up to the brim,
The problem remains of
keeping them trim.
They have to be oiled and
wound every day,
Or else the poor fellows will
go far astray. 

Returning from the past to the present via our wayback machine, we hosted our newly hired realtor with his aesthetics coordinator. Apparently, when selling a house, the most important thing is not “location, location, location”, but getting the feng shui right. All those books must go! Especially, that William Shirer one. You know the one with the swastika on its spine. The first thing that she noticed were the library’s stacks. Her mantra was “less is more” and “bigger is better,” (i.e. fewer, but bigger things.) Replace the books with art and thin out the art and the furniture and everything else. Overall, she liked the house and the decor. Although, her presence was rather stream of conscious, she did make many good points, if in a scatterbrain manner. She did leave us with a wee little problem, a real gordian knot. In the master primary bedroom, she wants us to swap out the queen bed that is there for a king that we do not have. Oh, and while you are doing this have the carpet there cleaned, all the while balancing both mattress and box springs on one leg. We are still trying to wrap our heads around that.