So the story goes like this.

My great-grandmom Prapion, whose husband was clerk and interpreter to US consul Leslie Davis, took the family to the Black Sea coast, where they could board a steamer for Istanbul, where they were less likely to get killed.

The soldiers caught them.

They took the family to a house-- I assume a house whose occupants they'd already murdered-- and said "wait here, we'll be back with transport to take you away."

But great-grandmom was a formidable woman, and no fool. Shs knew what these men were doing to her people.

Sidebar: great-grandmom was a trauma nurse, and was college educated in a time when even most American women weren't.

Anyway, so she was told "wait here."

But great-grandmom was no fool. She looked them in the eye and said "Okay" without batting an eyelash. And then when they left, she snuck the family through the house, found a horse and cart in the street behind it.

And by gods, great-grandmom Prapion piled the family in and committed Grand Theft Horsecart to save her children from death at the hands of genocidal maniacs.

Great-grandmom made it to Istanbul, and thence to Philadelphia. She lived a very long time, saw even her grandkids grow to adulthood, and now rests in a cemetery near her son's old home in New Jersey.

When people ask me "how do you do it? How is quitting in the face of fear not in your vocabulary?" I think of her, steely-eyed, staring down Ottoman genocidal maniacs and then calmly getting to work to save what could be saved.

I am an heir to everyday heroes.

I am indomitable, like my foremothers before me.

/thread