I learn many things new through the course of my day everyday. I have always had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, even since I was a small child at 4 years old, learning to read, and then learning phonetics. I learned the meanings of the prefixes and suffixes when I was 6 years old.
I learned the value of a book and the extraordinary concepts within each cover, and libraries became one of my favorite places, and still are.

Hot off the press I just created this image to go with this story from a photo I took in Vista, CA about three years ago now.

Photography & Digital Arts by Paulette Motzko

There was never a dumb question around our house and every night around the kitchen table, before we would eat dinner we would bless the food, thank God for everything we had, and look at each other and thank God we had each other. How I wish it was that way today. But people change and so you change with it.

My dad would ask everyone what we learned that day. He would go one by one, and ask each one of us who’s the most extraordinary thing we learned that day. If we didn’t learn anything he would say “go pick up a book” or “how are you doing in school” and things like that.

Every night at dinner time we would sit around our table and we would share what we had learned that day.

Yes, how I wish life was like a projector that you could go back in time and make my siblings remember when they had a heart and soul, but that’s not how life works. Change is the only thing we can count on and those who adapt the best do the best.

Yes, we sat around with a painted picnic table that was painted by my mother and communicated with each other, laughed, my brothers told jokes, and we were there in the moment.

Our family couldn’t afford a kitchen table like the kind they sold in a furniture store, but being the industrious people that the Le Pores are, my dad bought a picnic table that my mother painted white.

As always mom had this way of creating something out of nothing, and when she was done, the table was painted and varnished and had a really pretty flower arrangement on the top of it.

She then bought some yellow gingham sheets that she found on sale, and transformed them into beautiful drapes for our huge kitchen windows.

25 years later, after my parents sold that first house they bought for a mere $20,000 and sold it for $100,000 years later, those drapes are still there. People did not want to take them down and loved them and bragged about how beautiful they were. It was my secret, that they’ll never know they were made out of sheets.

These remain to this day some of the most Stellar memories I have of my childhood.

My Nanny always told us a family who prays together stays together. It’s something she swore by. It was imprinted on the Rosary she prayed on everyday that glowed in the dark. Her words to this day have lit some of my darkest days much like her rosary beads glowed up in the dark as she prayed Hail Marys.

We prayed together then and stood by each other. It’s just too bad, my older siblings sold their integrity getting the profits of my parent’s huge duplex, after my dad’s death. My brother in law was like Hitler as power of attorney and and my siblings fell for his half cocked, uncompassionate and unfair treatment of both myself and my mother with Alzheimer’s disease. I was the only one who looked out for her it seemed and spoke for her with a voice she no longer possessed.

We could see each other, side by side, and when my dad made money selling major appliances and the table went outside…we sat farther apart. Then the house began to be filled with state of the art TV’s and a huge stereo. The television was on more and we talked less.

I saw this big solid maple, fancy kitchen table being delivered with big clunky, heavy chairs I couldn’t lift, and we sat apart from each other. I liked the picnic table better.

Necessity creates innovation and ingenuity. Some of the kindest people I’ve ever met in my life are some of the poorest. They know how to do it, that they know how to be industrious, and they know as I’ve learned, to do without and make do with what they had.
They have more compassion for others in the same situation.

Back to reading and knowledge..

Mom read it to me everyday, and my sister bought me Golden Books that I read, each one of them looking at the pictures and being immersed in the stories, sounding out the words.

If I didn’t know what the words were, we all played a game where I would figure out what the word meant by taking the prefixes and saying what it meant. Most of time I would get it right with a little fine-tuning. That would add to my vocabulary everyday.

When I knew how easy it was and the extraordinary potential that a person would possess if they could read, assimilate and have the command of the English language, the world was my Pearl.

Like Helen Keller having Anne Sullivan spelling out the word
w-a-t-e-r in her hand in sign language, she knew everything had a meaning.

Mom was my Anne Sullivan, especially as an unpopular kid recently diagnosed at 9 with epilepsy. There was no such word as bullying in school; kids just did it and nobody cared or did anything. Apathy to the max in the school systems.

9 WAS A PIVOTAL AGE FOR ME. LIFE DEALT ME ONE CURSE EPILEPSY BUT IT ALSO BROUGHT A PIANO IN THE HOUSE AND MUSIC, THEN MY LOVE OF COOKING EMERGED AND WRITING WAS SOON TO FOLLOW. IF GOD WAS A CARD DEALER THE DECK WAS STACKED IN MY FAVOR AT A VERY YOUNG AGE.
I just took until I’m almost 55 just see it that way.

Paulette Anne Le Pore at 9 playing a song I composed called “My Melody” after mom showed me 4 chords and Nanny explained how the pedals worked……

In 3rd grade at Show and Tell I Showed and demonstrated to my class what the piano did by playing all the songs I wrote. Bringing in bullfrog were boring to me!

Every thing ever built or ever created has a name. The more we understand what those things are the more we can understand our place in the world. Also, the more languages that we speak the more than we can understand others and their cultures and find a common denominator within the two.

As in most days I don’t quite ever know what I’m writing but I never worry about it; I just write.

People who put on the editors cap and are over critical too early in the creative process or worry about what other people think of what they do– never do anything because the creative process is squelched.

Create because you think it has merit, or you think it’s beautiful. It doesn’t matter that the world doesn’t think it’s beautiful or does think its extraordinary. Create it because you feel your artwork is in the very essence of your soul waiting to escape like a butterfly in a meadow and you want to share the reverie with others…and the people in the world are the flowers in the field.

you know it is that’s why are you think I can help somebody or you feel it’s good. And once you create something you throw it out in the universe and you hope it touches the lives of people and inspires them or shows them a new way. When it does then it’s extraordinary because then it’s a triple win. It’s the people whose viewpoint on what you do make what you write and every word you hand chisel come alive.

When I was a small child I held a book in my hand with a feeling as though I had the whole world in the palm of my hand. I also knew there was so much more available to me and I was just touching a small microcosmic particle of the knowledge available in the World.

Now have a century later, with me at 54 years young, I hold my Galaxy Note 4 phablet with over 100 apps on it, ebooks, over 5,000 high definition photos, and programs I used to have on a clunky big computer that I recently sold. I installed Microsoft Office and MS Word, allowing me to create documents with vocal recognition software for the first time in my life.

You’re talking about a person who types eighty words a minute but can now type with this new technology. My phablet types for me and I edit. History breaking stuff. Pretty cool, huh?

Thanks to engineers, and IT specialist and computer scientists who created the internet systems with satellites in the sky like my ex-husband the rocket scientist help put up with Boeing, we can do things that we never ever thought possible.

I’m old enough and I’ve seen both sides and it is all pretty extraordinary.

I have had this Google Talk app on my phone for better part of a year and I didn’t know that it was a translating device that I could talk to people in their native language in any part of the world for free.

Now that’s a huge piece of info because I have over 800 friends on Facebook and many of them were in Italy, Thailand and the Philippines and Africa. I can learn their language by using it and that’s what’s so extraordinary about it. It comes in handy for business as well.

I can learn figures of speech in in their language, adding color to my writing. This matters to me. I have some baker friends who are artisan bakers in France and I would love to know and understand more of the French language and the pronunciation of how the words sound. Google Talk helps with that.

I hope that this article made you look at the world little differently. If it did, that makes me really happy and that is the coolest thing in the world.

When you change someone’s mind or you Enlighten them to a new fact that they didn’t know,
You’re in essence opening a magic door to new horizons that were unexplored before. I hope you can use some of this in your life, that you find new ways of thinking brings subtle changes in your life.

Written by Paulette Motzko
All images photographed and created by Paulette Motzko, PLM Studios, Las Vegas, NV

April 26th, 2016 at 8:26 a.m.
10:20 a.m.