Generations of Knowledge: From Gramma Hawes to the Mantis Shrimp, How Vision and Learning Shape Our World

In How the Light Gets In, by Louise Penny, Lambert’s team believes they have the cyber intruders. Chief Inspector Lambert key taps are rapid footsteps chasing the intruders. Sylvain punches the speakerphone off as Tessier enters his office.

On the snow-covered secondary road Gamache reflects that everything from here on in needs to be considered and deliberate. He spots a convenience store and pulls into it, showing the clerk his Sûreté ID.

In The Long Way Home, Beauvoir and Clara stay up half the night plotting their course. They go to bed at two am, having finally organized their plan. When Myrna is woken by the alarm at six, she asks if the house is on fire.

On a trasnport ship, Jean-Guy informs everyone that the view before them is Agneau-de-Dieu. No one has spoken for the last fifteen minutes. They had all been silently watching the coastline, listening to the hull as it passed through the now tranquil water.

In More Stars Than Grains of Sand, Al Forsyth remarks that mantis shrimp use five times as many sensors as humans have to see. The sixteen color receptors allow it to see a fantastically multi-colored world beyond our imagination. It can also move its claws at the speed of a rifle bullet, creating a boiling shock wave with enough force to break through thick aquarium glass.

This last weekend, during our ACLU retreat, we honored two members who were terming off the board after seven years of service. They will be missed—but not too much. One of them, a fierce advocate, is joining the Utah Stonewall Dems Board, and I am looking forward to seeing her in action on our board.

During the retreat on Saturday, we were each invited to share a cultural item, and I learned a lot about my fellow board members. For confidentiality sake, I will only share what I shared about myself.

The story I shared was of my great-grandmother Della Tenery, who was born in 1875 and married John Byrd Hawes. I passed around a photo of her I had discovered on ancestry.com and also shared what I had discovered about her. In the picture, she is sitting in front of a window with a book across her lap. She looks to be in her fifties or older. She carries my features, in her nose and chin—or I should say, I carry hers. Apparently the “Hawes” chin is in actuality the Tenery chin. There is no escaping our genetic link. Della’s husband, John Byrd, ran a restaurant. By 1930, she had had 11 children, and her youngest, Billie Jean, was 18.

Gramma Hawes: My great-grandmother Della Tenery Hawes

According to the 1930 census, Della lived with her son-in-law, who was the head of the house, her daughter Elizabeth and BIllie Jean in Dallas, Texas. She was a nurse in the private family industry, a job that required a nursing education, was more entrepreneurial at the time, and whose professionals were often treated as skilled domestic labor. She would have registered at a placement agency, and been paired with families who needed a live-in nurse. By the 1940s, many could no longer afford a private nurse, and were soon recruited to work in the hospitals.

At the bottom of the photo, in cursive, are the words “Gramma Hawes.” It is unclear whether she wanted to be seen as an avid reader, or whether her children wanted to remember her that way is unclear. Perhaps both. She clearly loved and valued self-education and passed it down to her family.

My grandfather read an encyclopedia set filled with lectures on home construction in the 1930s and became a master builder and carpenter, working as an independent contractor from Texas to New Mexico. Two of his brothers served in the military in WWII, one in the South Pacific one in Europe. He had another brother that went into business repairing electrical equipment. Haskell Tenery (named after his mother) later educated himself on ministry and raising bees.

All of my father’ siblings went to college. His sister became a teacher, and his two brothers became officers during WWII. Uncle Rayburn worked with the Civil Corps of Engineer, and eventually retired as the City Engineer for Tucson. Dad didn’t graduate from high school because he lost the notebook he was supposed to turn in for graduation, and when encouraged to copy someone else’s he refused. Instead, he studied for his GED and in less than a year had joined the US Air Force. As a young man, he taught himself mechanics, and learned photography enough to become a combat photographer with the commandos during the early part of the Vietnam conflict. He worked in intelligence, feeding punch cards to computers, and excelled in audiovisual services until he retired as the Audiovisual Services Manager at Carswell AFB in Texas.

When my Uncle Lonnie and Aunt Judy came to live with us, Dad taught himself a lot about personal computers, and learned how to create a database application for his business on a TRS-80 Model IV. I had typed in the Basic programs in the programming book for a TRS-80 Model II. While I was going to college, Dad was taking a correspondence course in circuits.

Dad loved to read, and valued education. He made sure I never forgot it. At night, he would go to bed with a stack of books by his side, and when he wasn’t watching sci fi, he was reading it. He enjoyed some fantasy as well. Mom tells me that he once read every sci fi in the local library. He loved reading, exchanged books with my aunt and hungered for more.

My parents enrolled me in a book of the month club as a child. At 12 I discovered and loved reading the Xanth series by Piers Anthony. I wasn’t as much a fan of science fiction yet, but I would be. I enjoyed science books, but not science fiction--yet. Dad told me in high school that I would do well as an engineer or a scientist. At first, I sought the prize, astrophysics; but the funds for education weren’t there. By the time I could afford college via a stint in the US Navy from 1989 to 1993, I wound up settling on a degree in computer science and engineering. Dad was there to see me for by Bachelor of Science degree, but was no longer around by the time I earned my Master’s. Fast forward to today, and I am now a Principal Software Engineer.

My love of reading, like my Dad’s increased over time. I read partly to educate myself and partly for education. This last year I finished 96 books, an all time high, and across many genres. I really enjoy reading and strongly value education just like my great grandma did. And I love sharing with my kids what books we are reading. It’s exciting to see something so entrenched in your culture passed through you to your own kids.

The Mantis Shrimp that I read about also teaches us a valuable lesson: the more we can see the more we can move around in this world and the more we can change for the better. While we can’t individually see the world in as many colors as the shrimp, working together and sharing perspectives, learning from one another, and those who have gone before, we can see a lot more that we can alone.