I walk this planet as if I’m a visitor from outer space, surrounded by the nicest people who treat me as if I’m one of them so either I am or I am not. We certainly seem to be from the same universe and share almost all of the same symbol sets (i.e., memories of similar social/mass media training).
I as this set of states of energy exchange energy states with other people in the form of body movements such as voiced symbol sets, facial expressions, torso/limb placement and electrochemical/heat interaction via handshakes, hugs and kisses.
Also via this blog.
When a feeling of familiarity seems to pull out of my core being, I cannot distinguish the difference between whether I am meeting someone for the first time, neither one of us having heard of or encountered the other, or whether we have heard through hearsay, second opinion, reputation or written/spoken fact about the other.
This afternoon, my wife and I attended a local “home improvement” fall home & garden show in the south exhibit hall at the Von Braun [Civic] Center.
We met a lot of the exhibitors and engaged in both humorous and informative conversations, starting with a guy who joked I must be the father of one of his fellow exhibitors and ending with the guys who plan to look at our roof for much-needed repair work.
In between were numerous insights and observations.
Toward the end of our tour of the show, we stopped at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System booth which advertised and sold home radon testing kits.
The person we met and talked with most was a woman named Patricia “Pastor Doc Pat” W. Smith.
Pat looked at my wife and me as if she knew who we were. She felt something special about us that went beyond the need for a radon test kit.
If I didn’t know better, I would say that she had read my blog and knew something about me or had heard from someone who had read my blog; that or the fact I live my life the same way I write my blog so that I am truly the multifaceted crystal ball that takes light in, reflects/refracts it back in new patterns but all in accordance with who I am through-and-through.
She told us the following story about her life that she wants to share with the world, being a “retired” pastor of the AME Christian denomination and a PhD in cell biology:
- Born in 1944 and raised in Jackson, Tennessee
- Her father, a stockboy at a Kroger-type grocery store, sent all five of his kids to college, including Patricia
- Patricia was sent by bus by her father to attend Knoxville College in 1962
- Patricia graduated in 1967 and went to work at Oak Ridge National Labs testing the effects of chemicals on rodents, including the famous test that proved the white sweetener in the pink packages is carcinogenic and states so.
- While she worked in Oak Ridge, she lived in an efficiency apartment in one of the old barracks where the original Oak Ridge nuclear bomb development employees lived.
- Patricia often processed film slides in a darkroom where her boss, a Japanese man, would sneak in and scare her so she decided she couldn’t stay in that job, leaving in 1969 to get her master’s degree.
- I can’t remember but she said she either got her master’s degree at Virginia Tech, where she stayed at Fox Ridge Apartment, or she got her PhD there.
- Anyway, she moved to Florence in 1971 and worked for TVA, studying the effect of the hot nuclear plant effluent water on local wildlife, including a salamander.
- She later attended seminary school and became an AME pastor, preaching for 17-1/2 years.
- Her son was born in Blacksburg, Virginia, the first black/African-American baby born in the county hospital in over 25 years; he lives in Atlanta and is CEO of some aviation group associated with an Atlanta airport.
- Her adopted son, from Cameroon, who still calls her Pastor Doc Mama, graduated from the University of North Alabama, lives in California and works in the computer industry.
- Her daughter is married to a computer animator, also in California.
- Patricia is working with her adopted son to launch a website dedicated to roving ministry she calls God’s School of Medicine, started in 1994, the website slated to go public next month. The ministry is basically a place where people get to tell their life stories, sharing how they overcame adversity to get where they are so those who are in a dark place in their lives can see no matter how bad you’ve got it, you’ve got hope that someone like you has made it.
- As part of her ministry, Patricia is going to share her own life story, where God told her simply “Change for a change.” What does that mean? Well, if you give a twenty-dollar bill for a three-dollar purchase, you roll the seventeen dollars you received as change into the receipt and put it into a container — bucket, jar, box, whatever. You keep accumulating that change until you’re ready for change. Get it? She can tell you more about it on her website.
- Meanwhile, she misses her church ministry. A bishop told her that she has put enough effort into God’s School of Medicine that God may be giving her the message it’s time to go back to serving a church; in fact, the bishop has three churches, at least one in Walker County, that need her more than she knows.
Until tonight, I didn’t even know someone like Patricia existed, a seventy-year young woman whose father was a humble produce stocker at a grocery store, a black man in the upper South of the United States of America, put his daughter through college, who majored in cytology and got a job at ORNL in 1967 as an African-American research associate, going on to get her master’s degree and then her PhD.
Amazingly, her story almost parallels that of my father, whose father was an illiterate day labourer and grandfather a tin smith for the railroad, making sure my father stayed focused on completing his college degree and going to greater social heights than them. My mother’s story is similar, graduated as valedictorian and got her master’s degree as daughter of a factory worker/farmer with a sixth-grade education. The story of two women and one man, two white and one black/African-American.
Patricia asked for our prayers as she launches her website, twitter feed, and PayPal donation tithe system, meeting with the board of directors as they finalise plans to lease a building to house their God’s School of Ministry in all legal respects to “do as the Romans do” here on Earth, and then, after the website is live and the ministry growing, going back to preach in Walker County.
She told us there’s one message she wants to get out to everyone she knows, including the man who lives down the county road from her outside Florence, Alabama, a prominent Caucasian farmer in the community — he asked for her healing for his blood sickness (leukemia?) and she gave him some verses of the Bible to repeat as medicine, thanking Jesus for taking care of any side effects of the prescribed medication he takes three or four times a day:
No matter who you are or how old you are, DO SOMETHING! Don’t just sit there, feeling hopeless. She’s living proof that no matter where you come from, you have hope to go somewhere else, if you just choose to do something, anything, about it, just as she has and she continues to do at almost 70 years of age, come next year. And by doing something, you make changes that influence other people to get out of their hopelessness, changing themselves and so on.
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
