Kate the Elder

By Kate the Elder

                I always tell our small business clients that their advantage is that they are people with stories, and Northrop Grumman is a massive machine with a slick PR campaign.  That is why all their written material needs to project their unique voice, the voice of someone the client could look in the eye, shake a hand, and (c’mon, c’mon) award a multimillion dollar contract for doing something easy.

                So, in making my first blog post all about our company, I didn’t follow my own advice – I should have told you about me (though I assumed since only my family and Kate the Younger, my one employee, read this, it might not be necessary).  I will rectify that mistake now, and at the same time follow my second rule of writing (1. Project a unique, active voice, 2. Never write from scratch something you have already written and stashed on the hard drive somewhere).

                When we joined the Affinity Lab (our coworking space in DC, about which you will hear much more in future blog posts), I had to fill out an application that asked what my most rewarding life experience had been.  That led to a diatribe that I present here as a pretty good, 3 minute tour of my life for the last 49 plus years:

That is an incredibly difficult question for an old person like me who has led an incredibly rich and lucky life.  I’ve given birth, then raised that mewling infant into a confident artist starting this year as a freshman at the Pratt Institute.  I helped a mean ass ewe give birth to triplets (and by “helped,” I mean untangled the three while they were still in the womb, which is like doing a big slimy Rubik’s cube in the dark, and yanked the three out) – we bred one, sold one, and ate one: rewarding on so many levels.  I worked twenty years in the U.S. Senate for the likes of John Glenn and (mostly) Herb Kohl where I got a hug from Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Davey Jones, and Jack Lalane (not on the same day), got to collaborate with Ted Kennedy, Robert C. Byrd, and Dale Bumpers (all personal heroes), and was anthraxed (got better).  I saw the Jackson Five in concert from the third row at a stadium next to the Chicago stockyards when they were still stockyards and smelled that way and when the brothers still wore orange jump suits with fringe on the arms; Sly and the Family Stone opened. I got cancer and (again) got better, but not before losing several internal and external body parts and all my hair (hair grew back).  I went to grad school at Oxford with now prime minister David Cameron (who wouldn’t remember me) and fabulous author and writing teacher Wilton Barnhardt (who would); in a related experience, I had a book dedicated to me, which would have been at least emotionally rewarding had the heroine, also based in part on me, not have died at the end, a drug addicted whore (I am neither, but that is why they call it fiction).  I can cook all the food, well, for parties of 100 or more, and do whenever I can. With my husband, I built from nothing on a wooded track of land in the Shenandoah Valley, a multiproduct sustainable farm with a large and loyal customer base (before deciding we didn’t want to spend all of our time driving produce and meat around and transitioned the enterprise from an unprofitable business to an expensive hobby).  I had chicken cooked in a old oil barrel and pie at my second wedding, which was more fun than my first.  I built from nothing Active Voice, a writing company that works for people we like or believe in, employs people we like and believe in, and allows me to work from anywhere in the world I can get wireless.  I could go on, but I can’t pick a “most rewarding.”  My hierarchy of happiness and achievement is horizontal.