Jean Walston Neese comes from very strong stock as you about to find out (if you didn't already know it). In a prior post, you read about her 94 year old mother, Martha, who plays (and regularly wins) duplicate bridge but her father, HH, just turned 98. He is doing very well too although his bridge skills aren't quite as good as Martha's, but whose are? What an incredible gene pool (and where can I get some?) Jean and her brother and sister have.

In years past HH rode his bike all over town. Being in the auto parts business, it made perfect sense for him to replace the worn out handle bars with a steering wheel. It was the only bike I ever saw him ride so I never thought much about it but in other areas of town, he was a "cause celebre" (yeah, we have those in Wilson) and people loved to see him ride it by and commented about it often. The Wilson Daily Times even did a newspaper article about HH and his bike.

The family decided to have a portrait done of HH and even though the bicycle is long gone, there was a picture made for the Wilson Daily Times article and a very talented Raleigh artist David Shingler painted his portrait from that picture. The picture posted above was taken, with the portrait, on his recent 98th birthday.

While I (unfortunately) don't share any genetics (that I know of) with the Walston and Kirkland families, I'm very grateful to have lived my entire life in the orbit of their family and have benefited from their wisdom, their kindness, their love and their friendship. And for yet another thing, I have so much to be grateful for. So I'm sharing this picture for all of you to enjoy just as I have enjoyed the friendship with this family just as my parents and grandparents did and as my children will enjoy the friendship with their generation of this family and so on and so on.