Sharon (Scott) Brooks

36 years and counting ...
How does one sum up 36 years of life? Do you do it through your employment? telephone operator, accountant, preschool teacher, microcircuit maker, business owner, teacher? Or do you sum it up in terms of your progeny? 4 children; one a graduate of West Point, two students at West Point, one still in high school on student council, running varsity track and maintaining the 4.2 GPA?

Or do you look at yourself in terms of your volunteer work? La Leche League, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts? Or perhaps your passions? reading of almost anything, going to the cinema, going to dance productions, writing haiku and short stories, designing houses on paper, painting, crafts, cooking exotic meals, baking bread, reading cookbooks, hiking, camping?

Or maybe your crazy endeavors - taking a group of scouts out on a 14 mile hike past Devil's Punchbowl to Devil's Chair or starting a catering service. Maybe one could look at how a person weathered personal storms - parents dying, child being born too soon, a horrendously disastrous accident that changed her family dynamics forever. Even adding all of those perspectives up it would still fall short of the whole.

People are so much more complex than any system of synthesizing can describe. That is part of our beauty and mystery. It is unfortunate that we get so little time to know each other well.