KATHLEEN SHARES HER STORY

Kathleen is one of those people you might see on the sidewalk outside her home in a downtown Chicago high-rise and you’d have no way of knowing who just walked by. But if you did stop and very politely ask this lady who she is, be prepared to pay attention. She has a wonderfully inspiring story to tell.

To begin with, this 61-year-old resident of Chicago’s urban chic Streeterville neighborhood tucked between Michigan Avenue and Lake Michigan is a much-in-demand software applications trainer with a particular interest in a popular program for creating and managing spreadsheets. Kathleen’s clients tend to be based in the Chicago area, although she occasionally gets gigs to faraway places like London.

But the lady should never be mistaken for being some kind of nerdy geek. Kathleen also is an accomplished pianist, a creative outlet that she discovered in her girlhood growing up in Brooklyn and then continued later out on Staten Island when her parents moved the family into a large home with something she had never experienced before, a big back yard.

She’s stayed with the instrument down through the years, playing it and giving lessons to aspiring pianists, young and old. She embraces her life as a computer trainer as well as her life as a piano teacher, recognizing the truth about herself is that she’s “a born teacher.”

But, it turns out, Kathleen is someone who’s never lost her love of learning, as evidenced by how she basically taught herself most of what she knows about hitting the right keys on computers and pianos. Oh, and toss in the factoid that she just graduated Magna Cum Laud from one of Chicago’s leading universities, and you begin to get the full picture.

There’s more to her story, but Kathleen needs to continue on her way to the lakefront for a bit of exercise and some fresh air. “I do a lot of walking,” she says. “I think walking is something that connects with me spiritually.” The things that Kathleen feels most closely connected to are her faith in God and her love of her daughter.

It was her daughter in fact who noticed that Kathleen’s memory and her thought process seemed to be slipping a bit, and after urging her mom “to think harder,” she suggested trying Prevagen.

“I had tried to think harder, as my daughter said,” Kathleen says, “but when that didn’t work, the Prevagen did, and it has been a real help.”

And that has just been one more lesson Kathleen has learned along the way in her life, another good thing she is now happy to teach others, not just the computer users and pianists in her very full life.