Portfolio

“My sisters and I, nine little girls, often wore what we called hand-me-downs. The older children would outgrow something and my mother would keep it. Georgia Maeser was a fifth grade teacher at Brigham Young Elementary School, and she commented one day that she had seen some of those dresses come through on four or five different girls.

“Life isn’t perfect. There are lots of trials, lots of sorrows, lots of heartache and pain. But I move on to something else—get involved in something that is stimulating and helpful, and try to move away from the heartache.”

Shirley P. 2012

“My childhood was full, happy and secure, and I knew I was loved. It was compelling because I knew there were ways to do things, acceptable way to do things. I don’t know how it was communicated as effectively as it was, but it was. I hate to think of growing up with the expectation of no expectation.”

Mark M. 2012

"Running has been a big part of my life. I’ve run 45 marathons so far. You run a lot of miles before you do a marathon, any marathon.

"I was a big, fat bishop… I was released when I was 46, totally out of shape, 40 pounds heavier, and it took me a long time to get up to a mile. I had coughing and breathing issues and legs burning… Another bishop from the same stake and I decided that when we got out of this we’re going to do something about our bodies. We’ve got to run. So we both started to run.

"I ran my first marathon when I was 51. I have tried to do two or three a year, sometimes five. But some of my kids have taken it up. Both my daughters, especially. We've had some marvelous times on long runs. You get so you can run and talk, and there's no interruptions, no phones. Those are marvelous times."

Jim M. 2011

"Have faith that medical science will catch up a little bit and help you along the way. Prosthetists tend to just pull back and do what’s safe and what they know works. Sometimes you just have to push the envelope a little bit."

Walter B. 2011

“I want our kids to know we love them, no matter what role or turn they decided to take. We love them and value them. Their dearness to us is more important than what we wanted them to do.

“I’m a nest builder and I want to feel my nest was a happy place to be, not too comfortable, you had to get out eventually, but I want them to feel this was a good place. I’ve never regretted motherhood, and while I probably wasn’t the best mother in the world, I loved it. I love being a mother and I love my kids who made me a mother.”

Nanette M. 2011

What's your favorite food?
"I love Italian food, so spaghetti."
What's your favorite book?
"I read a lot, so I don't know. Probably 'Where the Red Fern Grows.'"
What's your favorite virtue?
"Being kind. I mean, all the virtues matter, but my favorite one is being kind."
What's your favorite curse word?
"I don't really swear so much."
What quality do you admire in a man?
"Someone who's a friend, funny, and stalwart, responsible. And reliable."
What quality do you admire in a woman?
"In a girl, probably being friendly and honest."
Who's your favorite character in history?
"I can't believe I forgot his name. Junior something. Yeah, Martin Luther King, Jr."
What kind of work do you want to do when you grow up?
"I want to have a good career but I don't want to be famous, because you don't know who's your friend, you don't know who you can trust and who you can't."
What work would you not like to do?
"I used to think I'd like to be a soldier or a Marine, but as I got older I changed my mind. I wouldn't want to leave my family."

Ian H. 2011

"I think death can be a truly spiritual experience. When our mother died, she had been with me nearly the whole day the day before. She was weak, but I had no idea she was going to die. She had a stroke the next morning. Her friend Isabelle found her.

"They took her to the hospital and put her on oxygen to help us get used to the idea she was going to die. I told my brother Jim 'We have to do something. Mother is probably lying there ready to kill all of us because we’re not letting her go.'

"So we gathered as a family and Jim said, 'Nanette is going to do the prayer.' Let me tell you, if you want a prayer Nanette can do it. It was fantastic. The room was full of people, even some friends that Isabelle and my mother had met at Hires. The spirit in the room was so strong. Afterward one of her friends told me that never before had she had a spiritual experience, but now she had.

"I think I can face my own death better than anyone else. My husband and kids can’t, but I can. I don’t want to suffer. There’s a quality of life and a non-quality of life, and I’ve had the non-quality. I am not afraid of dying. I am just not.

"I’d like my obituary to say, 'She was an ornery cuss.'"

Jeri M. 2011

"I was born in Moscow in 1960. My parents were from Moscow. Mama was a teacher and my father was a constructor of a very big enterprise. I was an only child. The thing I remember most about growing up was that I was alone.

"I thought about my relatives and about my ancestors. Russians traditionally had very big families sometimes, but after the Revolution all men from one side of my relatives were killed and we lost all the children. My father was the only son, and he was the last in his line to carry the family name.

"My father was communist in the best sense of this word. My mom was not communist. My grandmother lived and worked on a collective farm, and she thought that Lenin was our god. When I was in school I dreamed about communism and about how it would make a healthier life for all people in the world. I was very happy to be living in Moscow, the best city in the country.

"I think I was in for many surprises."

Alla S. 2001

I was born in a little village in the Philippines, in the southern part of the Philippines, a village called Tigbauan in the province of Iloilo, on Panay Island. It’s about an hour south of Manila. I am the sixth child in a family of seven children.

The legend of my birth is that, when I came to term mother was alone in the house and I was ready to be born and nobody was around to help. The only person around was a half-blind elderly man next door, who of course came to our nipa hut – we lived in a hut with a thatched roof, thatched grass and bamboo walls and bamboo slat floors – and this man came and helped my mother deliver me. The story goes that he had to catch me in a coconut husk. So this was a propitious sign of my birth.

We were a family of meager means with a lot of children. But at the time you could go to the city and claim space on the beach, because there are a lot of beaches in the Philippines and these were essentially squatter areas. The government would not throw you out, so that you could squat, claim a space, build your hut. My father built a nipa hut, a house on stilts in the water, in Iloilo. I was under three years old, but I remember that the nipa hut was taking shape and my father took a little stool, like a bar stool, and stood on it and wrote on a beam just above the door between what was to be the living room of the hut and the dining area. He wrote the date, 1966. That’s the date that we moved into this house. And so that’s the beginning of my life.

Astride T. 2000

I’ve always known that I was going to be an artist, from the time I was a little kid. I really enjoy expressing myself visually. From the time I was little, I noticed things that other people didn’t notice. And I was fascinated by those things ... One of my earliest memories, when I was three or four years old, was at the change of seasons in the fall, when you see the leaves go from that dark green to the light green, to yellow, to orange, to red. All at the same time. And all of a sudden I’d start to see patterns and notice things that, you know, would touch me inside. I’d stand and stare for a long time, and people would think I was staring off in the distance. I guess I was enthralled by nature... I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but the world around me took on more than just the five tactile or physical senses. It was something that turned inside me.

As a little kid I would draw and draw and draw. It was just something that I was trying to let out. The Flow. I didn't call it flow then, but I noticed that I looked at things longer and more intensely than other people. I had this, perhaps this art vision or art sight. It was not only visual but tactile. I would touch things, like the veins of a leaf ...you know, one side of the leaf is smooth and the other side has the veins. I would say, “Why isn’t it the same on both sides?” I had a lot of questions, and I took joy in the process of asking, “Oh, look what this does!” It’s pretty hard to narrow this way of observing down to any one thing. It was more experiential, and I think it came with me when I was born. It came from God somewhere....

Warren A. 2004

I was in born in rural Mississippi. My family was a sharecropping family. It was joke that the depression came and went in my town, and nobody noticed, it was that poor. We had very little. There were five children living at that time, and I am the youngest of those five. Three of us survive now.

For a variety of reasons it was decided that I would be given to a great-aunt to be raised, and so she came to the country to get me. I was about four years old, as much as I can remember and piece together, and I recall they came in a car. I left there in a little flour sack dress. We went to New Orleans where her husband had relatives, and I'm reminded of the extent of the poverty and deprivation I lived in, because when we got to the relative's house, they were having dinner. They had fried fish and spaghetti for dinner, and they put it on a plate. I had never eaten on a plate before, because we would get our food on those little tin pie pans. And you'd take your food -- nobody in the house had read Emily Post -- and you'd find a place on the floor to sit and eat with your fingers. So when I took this plate, the feel of it was different, and I went to sit on the floor and my great-aunt, who at this moment is now my mother, reached and took my arm and said, very gently, "We don't do that any more." And so for the first time I sat at a table and tried to maneuver using a utensil to eat with.

Catherine S. 1999

I was born July 6, 1930 in Tbilisi, Georgia. Both my parents were Armenian. My parents were survivors of the genocide of 1915 in Turkey. My father was an actor and my mother was a teacher. I had four brothers, but three of them died and only one survived. His name was Andronik. He was the oldest, and he was an actor, too, in Tbilisi.

In the genocide the Turks killed my grandfather. He was a lawyer and they killed him. Almost all of my father's family was killed. They captured my grandmother and sent her to a camp in Turkey. My aunt, with her two children, jumped from the bridge not to be in the hand of Turks. My other aunt just disappeared .

In Georgia in 1949 the KGB started arresting Armenian families, whole families and putting them in trains - cattle cars. All the intelligent people were disappearing. Poets and artists and writers, and many of our teachers, were disappearing, just disappearing. After a while we learned that they had been imprisoned.

When the KGB started acting this way, all of my family was worried because we were different, like those who were disappearing. My brother was really worried. As an Armenian man, he was concerned about what was happening all around him, not only to Armenians. They were catching some Georgians, too.

My brother knew that they would eventually arrest him, too. He said if we don't do anything, we can't change anything. He decided to print brochures warning people to be careful. He denounced what the KGB and government were doing, crying out that it was not right. He warned that if they continued the day would come when they will answer to the people for what they did. In the mornings and late at night he would put these brochures on walls around the neighborhood. After that he started going to theaters and to cinemas. In the middle of the show he'd just throw the brochures from the balcony.

I think that he was right in what he was doing. He was the one. There needs to be one to tell the government and the KGB that they were not doing right, and he was the one who did that. He knew that they would catch him. He sacrificed himself for the nation, not only for Armenians. Most of the time he was writing, he wrote not only for Armenians, not only for Georgians, but for all the people of the Soviet Union, all nationalities, not only for Armenian.

At the time [my brother was arrested] I was in living in another area, teaching school, very far from Tbilisi. One day the KGB came into the town. There were no telephones. I didn't know what was happening in Tbilisi, what was happening with my family, with my brother's family and my mother. Two days after my family had been arrested, the KGB came to the village where I taught school, and they arrested me. I was in the middle of my lesson. They just came into my class and they took me away.

I was arrested in November of 1951, and arrived in the Gulag on October 12, 1952. It took three days going from Moscow to Siberia, three days without stopping, to get there. I was very tired and very depressed. All my family was arrested, but I was the only one who got only ten years. Ten years in the prison, and five years probation in the same town, not having any rights. I asked them to please let me say goodbye to my mother. They didn't let me.

Tsobinar T. 1997