DWAINE L. McDONALD
The person who influenced me the most was my mother. During the course of her life, she went through so much tragedy and adversity. However, instead of becoming bitter or stuck in the past thinking what could've been, she remembered the fun times she had as well.
My mother was born in a small town. She had an older brother Gerald and a younger sister Mary. When I was young, my mother seemed like a private person. But sometimes she would open up. She once told us a funny story joking she was a "bastard child." She lived with a man who was her dad, but her mother was married to another man. She lived with her dad because back then divorce was out of the question. The funny thing was when grandma finally decided to divorce her husband, he died. This made it possible to marry the man she really loved. After they married, they had a third child, my mom's sister Mary.
Mom also told us about how her parents died. Her dad, my grandfather, on his fiftieth birthday, wondered if he would live another fifty years. He was a road worker. His job was to blow holes in rocks to flatten them out. He worked with dynamite. He would drill a hole in a rock, put a charge in, then he would take cover and detonate the charge. After this was completed, he would check the rocks to see if the explosion did what it was supposed to do. The day he died, he went over to the rocks trying to figure out why some of the charges didn't go off. As he was checking, the charges went off, blowing his leg off. He bled to death on his way to the hospital.