To the Editor,

What is success? How do you measure it? My mother so very much loved, and always remembered, her grandfather, Ambrose Cullen Pierce. The first I heard of him were tales of the two of them spending quiet, sweet time together. He would peel an apple; then run the blade across that apple. He fed what that made to her from the back of the blade. It gave me such a good feeling to listen to her tell it. She seemed to be reliving it like he was with her again. She would buy him soft drinks, and charge it to her parents. Her mother told her she was glad she did this for him.

Some people would look at my mother’s grandfather and say he was a failure. Never amounted to anything. He was a small-time farmer. He raised some food and farm animals. He could make furniture, and no doubt build a simple home. Lots of times he and my great-grandmother, Mary Caroline Craig Pierce, probably had no money. Neither would be considered a person who wanted to get ahead in life. Their life together was much like the lives their parents had lived together.

Some people do their life’s work as a result of what seems to be a small amount of learning. Others need many years of what seems to be a difficult road traveled. There’s people who fit into the middle of these two. They all have something in common–a calling.

God gives each person born a talent, a gift, nack to do something well and enjoy it. Each of us must find this thing, this calling.

There’s all kinds of jobs; and there’s all kinds of people. Every time a person finds a job–a calling that God meant for that one person to have–the world inherits another happy person, another successful person.

Mary C. Albertson

Albany, Kentucky