Garry N Curren, 1940-2011

I’ve been offline for a while, my father-in-law passed away just before Thanksgiving: “Garry Nathan Curren”:http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/marionstar/obituary.aspx?n=garry-nathan-curren&pid=154722433&fhid=8660. Too early.

I learned many things from Garry – the man was a mechanical master, could debug and fix any piece of mechanical equipment, was a wizard with cars. His garage setup is phenomenal. I am mechanically inept, but not bad at book learnin’ and computery stuff. One day many years ago I was hanging out in his garage, and he asked me how I managed to do so well in school – it didn’t come as easily to him. I replied that I really didn’t know, I just seemed to have good instincts. I asked him how he could look under a car hood and listen and know exactly what to do, and his reply was “I just know which way to jump”.

It really drove home for me that there are all kinds of intelligence – you can be smart about cars, people, computers, organizations, politics, biochemistry, languages, music composition, cooking, etc etc etc. There is no one “smart”, there are many kinds of smart, and all of the different kinds of smart are valuable and have their place.

Garry was also a thoughtful man – dedicated to learning, a great follower of history and science, always picking up something new. This always resonated with me. And he was an incredibly kind man – helpful to everyone, kind to his dogs, loved his family. We will all miss him.