User:Ladrona

Biography for SYG2001
My mother’s father is a big history buff and, as such, can tell stories of my ancestors dating back to the 1700s. My father’s side doesn’t have the same flair for record-keeping and aside from an alleged connection to Robert E. Lee on his mother’s side, I know nothing about that part of my heritage. My ancestors came from Sweden at the beginning of the 19th century and by the 1830s had worked their way into southern Georgia to a town called Macon. They established a small rice plantation that eventually grew to hold around fifty slaves and lived quite comfortably until the Civil War when the plantation was razed by Sherman’s army. During the postbellum period the family somehow regained some semblance of financial stability through rice cropping again, although this time the operation was run on a much smaller scale. Fast forward a few generations and my grandfather was born in 1932, the first of six children. His father was both physically and verbally abusive and my grandfather was often covered in bruises trying to defend his mother and younger siblings. His father wasn’t a bad man per se, but the Great Depression affected him deeply and he took to drowning his sorrows in the bottle. My great-grandmother was an extraordinary woman, though her anachronistic views on race and sexuality made social gatherings awkward some years later, e.g. the time my uncle brought his African American girlfriend home for thanksgiving dinner and “Marnie” kept handing her her coat or empty plate and barking orders. Marnie also refused to learn anything about technology and to this day poses as for a portrait when someone tells her she’s being recorded by a video camera. My grandfather is an extraordinarily bright man, and certainly the smartest I’ve ever known. He was highly successful in high school, graduating at the top of his class and receiving a full scholarship to Florida State as an All-American volleyball player in the early 50's. There he met my grandmother, Carol Anne Young. Both of my grandmother’s parents were heavy alcoholics and her father died when she was fifteen of cirrhosis though her mother was able to fight her addiction. My grandparents married when they were in their twenties and almost immediately had Ray Jr., followed by Darwin, my mother, and my Aunt Berta, each approximately 18 months apart. My grandfather established himself as a prominent psychiatrist and in the early 60's the family moved to the Buckhead area outside Atlanta and the family lived happily until 1972 when he began conducting an affair with a woman twelve years his junior. My grandmother was devastated and threw herself into the typical mid-life crisis, wearing skimpy clothing and dating a lot of shady characters. Though she claims she’s only had four sips of alcohol in her entire life, she began attending AA meetings regularly, a habit she would keep up for ten years. She would bring home people she met at AA and let them crash on her couch or stay in the apartment above the garage for weeks or months at a time, and thus my mother was exposed to some very different lifestyles at a very young age. My grandfather immediately married the other woman, who was in fact a wonderful woman, and we’ve all come to accept her as part of the family. He speaks five languages fluently (French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian - and English) and the two of them are forever jetting off to serve some bleeding-heart cause or another. He and my step-grandmother had another son who is ten years my senior and probably my closest relative. As an interesting side note, my Uncle Clay was a multimillionaire fresh out of high school as he made it been in the dot com boom of the late nineties with a site called knowpost that, interestingly, was something of a forerunner for the wiki sites of today. Of course the trend didn’t sustain itself so he lost a large bit of that money, but fortunately retained enough to startup another internet advertising company that is currently handling a lot of business of the Democratic Party. My mother attended a largely black high school where she was extremely well-liked and rewarded with traditional high school honors like homecoming queen and hall of fame. She then attended the University of Georgia where she met my father. My father’s mother’s life story is far more difficult to unravel. Born and raised in the rural town of Montezuma, Georgia, she carried Old-Guard-esque ideas of properness until she died and thus I’ve always been under the impression that she kept a great many secrets. She was the youngest of three, with twin siblings Mary and Walter ten years her seniors. By her accounts, her mother was meek and kind and her father, though she didn’t consider him abusice, was quick to pull out the switch. Allusions to the Great Depression were infrequent, but I gathered that the family was hard-hit. Mary worked hard and sacrificed her own education to put my grandmother through beauty school which led to her fifty-year career in the industry. She married young, at age 19, to a 30-year-old man named Buck and they had a child together, Linda Louise, before divorcing five years later. She remarried ten years later, this time to a war veteran and insurance salesman named Edwin Bode. She gave birth to my father at age 38 and did an excellent job of sheltering him. He would never have discovered that she had been married prior to his father or that Linda Louise was only his half-sister had he not stumbled upon some documents in a box in the attic when he was fourteen. My father was very close to his father. He grew up in an affluent white suburb of Atlanta and basically never left that atmosphere. His father died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack long before my birth, when my father was only fourteen. He was devastated by this, but rarely speaks of it now. He graduated from Georgia State University in 1982 with respectable but unimpressive grades and through a combination of hardwork, charisma, and god fortune worked his way up the corporate ladder as a financial officer for Tenet Healthcare. Though socially liberal as it applies to the general public, my father would be disgruntled, to say the least, with a homosexual or interracial marriage in the family. My mother and father met at UGA in 1978 before my father transferred to GSU. They married in 1984 and waited to establish secure financial standing before having me in 1987, followed by Kyle in 1991 and Whitney in 1993. We grew up in the third richest county in Tennessee in a suburb of Memphis called Germantown, known for its lack of racial diversity and astonishing amount of square feet of church per capita. My mother and I are extremely close and my father and I get along well, especially now that I’m attending a respectable university for free. They are happily married despite both spending time in single parent households. As a product of a real-problem free environment, I’ve done decently for myself both academically and socially. As is currently foreseeable, my future seems fairly steady and I’m almost reluctant to say that excepting some rare and terrible occurrence, I’ll live fairly comfortably. It sounds snooty and self-assured, but I certainly don’t attribute my comfortable lifestyle to my own merit. My background has given me advantages that other people don’t have, and because of this I have a self-perceived strong sense of social justice, though it applies more on the global level than a domestic front. I’m studying international relations, specifically African and Latin American affairs because ideally I want to spend time in the Peace Corps and then move into a career in international law, or some other area of expertise that will allow me to travel frequently. Current precarious relations between the United States and many African / Asian countries make this job dangerous but more pertinent than ever. Additionally, I’d like to spend some time in China, ideally volunteering in an orphanage for a time.