Grandma Reminisces

My grandma is coming to a wedding with me next week and while we were started on the subject, she asked me how to pronounce the word, "congratulations". It took her a few tries to get over pronouncing it as, "con-graduation" but she laughed with glee when I told her that she had finally gotten it right. She proceeded to tell me about how good an English student she was as a young mother in Korea. One particularly fond memory of her's was when her instructor one day called her up in front of the class, patted her on the back and said something along the lines of, "This young woman sets a table for her children every day and still managed to be the only one to get a hundred on this test. What have the rest of you done with your time?" She told me that she had found time to study while she ate and did other chores and when it came time to take the test, she realized she knew all the answers. At the time she was so poor that she wore an old pair of nylon shoes that had soles that would fall apart at the front, constantly threatening to make her trip or stumble but only just. She'd sew them back together to remedy the problem so as to walk another day. Eventually she had to stop going to school because she had to take care of her sick mother-in-law who loved her like she was her own daughter. Grandmother ends this story with, "but, oh, how good I could have been!".