Vote for Joe! April 25, 2008
Posted by catiporter in Musings.trackback
My uncle, Joe Zenisek, is up for a Working Wonders award from the Oregon Education Association. Please have a look at the video (at the bottom of this post) and then click here to cast your vote.
He was one of the greatest uncles a kid could ever imagine having — energetic, goofy, and adventurous. We’d sit on the front porch at my grandma’s house in Cleveland and he’d play some kickass banjo and harmonica. We played frisbee in the street, and the one year I was there in winter he took me sledding. I loved the stories about how he and his brothers hitchhiked across the U.S.
It’s probably because I was so fond of him that I payed attention to what he was doing and wanted to follow his lead. When I was really young he worked as a special ed instructor. A few years later he joined the Peace Corps, which meant living abroad in the Phillipines, where he met and married his wife. He sent me letters and gifts — one of my favorites was a big floppy straw hat — and set me up with a pen pal. He’s been a vegetarian for as long as I can remember, and has devoted his life to teaching science, a passion he passed on to son, Serge, who won every local science fair all through high school, moving on to compete in regional and national competitions, for his work with recombinant DNA.
The summer between Serge’s senior year and his first year of college the family went on a backpacking trip. They had just returned home when Serge complained of feeling funny. He then blacked out. He spent the next few months (the time frame is a little fuzzy, and I can’t find any old e-mail from them to corroborate) in ICU, and then recovery. For a while he couldn’t speak, and even lost some of his short term memory function. Joe took the year off from teaching and he and his wife worked 24/7 to assist in Serge’s recovery. As a result, the following year Serge was finally able to begin at Yale. They were in town briefly last year, and we made it a point to have dinner together. My kids think Uncle Joe is the bees knees.
So watch the video and vote for Joe. You don’t have to be a member of OEA or even live in Oregon to vote; I just did.
you go, joe!
Okay, so now I feel a little girlishly silly that I’ve posted such a gooshy post about my uncle.
Oh well! What can I say?