Grace and Anguish

From the blurb:

"No-one is sure what "Hoosier" means, except it is someone from Indiana. I've spent 55 years in Indiana, so I guess I qualify. My Great-grandmother was named Jessie Bone. My parents were high-school sweethearts in Tacoma, Washington, their senior year was 1944. Dad was 4-F: he had a PhD six years later. He took a job at Purdue University teaching literature. That was my first twelve years in (Northern) Indiana. In 1967 he took a job at Temple University in the North Philadelphia ghetto. We lived in a close suburb during the Sixties (1967-1973). Woodstock at 13, LSD at 15 (glad I took it). I don't know how I ended up at Indiana University. I went for three semesters, married a local girl at 21. My next marriage lasted a good twenty years. We had a daughter. I took jobs in service-maintenance at Indiana University. I was a security supervisor at the Art Museum for twenty-five years, retiring in 2011. My partner and I live in Nova Scotia. It turned out that Jessie Bone's son had a daughter, my mother, born in Alberta. Recent law changes made her children Canadian. Folks in the fine town of Bloomington, (Southern) Indiana, get the joke when I say I've always been Secretly Canadian.

- Mark Beebe"