Liebster Blog Nomination

What an honor! I'm uncertain on how I'll repay Penny for this dubious recognition, but something will come to mind.

She thought she presented five questions for her nominees to answer but she sneaked in six by dividing the first question into two parts - shame on you.

1. How many blogs do I own: I have four blogs going; Writing My First Book, The Great Promise, Autobiography By Me and The War To End All Wars. b) What made me decide to start blogging?: I wanted to reach a wider audience with my story. Prior to blogging I developed a website and only found limited success so I thought that blogging might be more lucrative. The number of sites I have is a testimonial to their popularity - sort of a trial and error. It also offered me an opportunity to hone my writing skills.

2. What is the cause dearest to my heart?: Reaching as many Americans as I can in order to raise their awareness of the history of World War One. The majority of people in the US know know nothing about this war. I know I didn't until I immersed myself in researching the war in order to write my story. With the hundred year anniversary just two years away, it seemed important to me that Americans understand the magnitude of sacrifice other countries endured.

3. What am I most passionate about? See above question for answer. I'm also passionate about my art. I always tinkered with different art mediums and techniques. However after I forced to retire do to Parkinson's, I took an oil painting class and a whole new world opened up for me.

4. Who are my heroes? This is a tough answer because my heroes revolved around the things that are important to me. a) My friend and climbing partner is a hero because he developed MS and his positive approach to life helped me through accepting my illness. b) My grandfather has become one of my heroes for the horrors he faced during the war and was able to rise above them and created a family legacy. c) Those men and women that learned how to live with Mother Nature by respecting her power of life and death. d) My father for teaching me countless lessons of life, such as not to judge others. I could go on but you get the drift. I'll end on this note, "My heroes have always been cowboys and I guess they still are today."

5. What do I want to be remembered for? I'm an infinitely insignificant bit of flesh of humanity. My arrival and departure from this earth is known and matters by few. Even though people have entered and exited my life over time, I hope I've impacted their life in a positive way. As for greater humanity, I will not be remembered directly, but indirectly for passing down my values to my children, and they to their children.

Another Passion:

I believe that people are a summation of all the events they experience during their life. These experiences and how a person responds to them create a story. Therefore we are a conglomeration of our stories. Individuals that enter your life are but actors entering a scene in your current story. They act their part, however long that is, and exit.

In a small way each story in a person's life is a bit of history for they describe what it was like a point in time. An example of this is my grandfather's journal. Each documented war experience was a short story that described  an event significant to that moment in time, thus it represented a part of history.

This is why it is important for everyone to write down their stories so those that read them can gain a better understanding of that segment of history. In my case, "what was it like growing up in the 50s and 60s?"