RHONDA SHARES HER STORY

Rhonda likes to say she’s “just an old-fashioned girl from Texas,” but the fact is she’s really a modern-day woman who made a giant U-turn a few years ago and pretty much changed what she was doing with her life. The really interesting thing about her is she didn’t leave that old-fashioned girl behind when she made the U-turn, she brought her along for the ride.

What Rhonda did was to go over to the university in Arlington and get her undergraduate degree and a teaching certificate from the State of Texas. That was when she had nearly come to the end of her Fifties and had grown weary of being a phlebotomist, which is to say she’d had enough of drawing blood out of people.

Today this 63-year-old lady from Irving, Texas, is a special education teacher in the Dallas –Fort Worth area schools, serving children with special needs, which is a high calling in the world of education and a long ways from drawing blood every day of the week. She also finds time to tutor a young student, finding great satisfaction in helping the challenged youngster learn to read. “Being able to read is the basis for everything,” she says with evident pride in helping him find his way forward.

“I don’t have a lot of time for exercise,” she says. “I spend what extra time I have working at my computer, always trying to learn more. I have a strong drive to keep learning, to keep my mind sharp.” She also reads her Bible and enjoys “talking with God every day.”

But that’s not the whole story and here’s where that old-fashioned girl from Texas comes back into the story. The woman loves her animals, and she’s not kidding. She’s got three big dogs and a horse, probably not all that unusual if you’re an old-fashioned gal from Texas.

“Red Cloud is my horse and he is 13 and 1/2 years old he is half Arabian and a Paint so he’s beautiful and he knows it,” Rhonda recites her pet report. “My oldest Great Dane is Faye and she is 4 and 1/2 and then there’s Lovie who’s 2 1/2, and Buddy the Golden Retriever is 9.”

Typical of this lady who loves to keep learning is the story about her decision to try Prevagen a few months ago, mainly to help her with some mild memory issues she was having. “I saw a Prevagen commercial on TV,” she says, “and I gave it a try.” The Prevagen began to help her memory “and my mind got sharper. My mind is working better than ever.”

That’s about what you’d expect to hear from someone who knows what she wants and then go gets it. Kind of an old-fashioned way of living.