Ánh Tuyết

            July 18, 2007
             
                 
 She was born while I was away in the war
and I gave her a name for someone I knew and
 respected there, in Việt Nam.
She had no connection with that land except
that her father was there and loved the place
where he was and the people who live there.

Of four children she was my first
and she was my winner.

Latin, history, and math in high school, she chose a tiny
Catholic college in New Hampshire
and paid for  it on her own as a nanny for the dean's
nine then ten then eleven children.
She remains the school's all-time valedictorian.

After a year's hiatus to take a full time job and build her savings
she went to graduate school down south where she worked
in the  credit union and earned her MBA.
I had envisioned her  an archaeologist or literateur.
She had those talents, too, but she knew where
her talents and interests converged.

With that degree in hand she meant to travel
for a year
before getting serious about  the serious wơrld.
She drove back to New Hampshire to visit the old school .
The dean said, "There is someone I want you to meet..."
When her year was up she went to work
for that someone in a small management firm that was about
to get a lot larger.
She met her husband there and birthed a  prodigy that is
my grandson, now five years old.
               

After a time she left that firm
in the care of her man and joined a dotcom that survived
the millennial Great Extinction  and  made  it thrive.
Her man applied his hand to his work  and became a regional
vice president in a company that  before had
had no use for the designation "regional" anything.

They came this year to Florida for 
a vacation on the lake

 
and she drowned in that lake.
                           She was 37.
.................