6. Gotta Have Goals with Alan Harkness
“It goes back to setting goals and trying to find a way to keep the things that you say are important a priority... that you keep the practice reflecting your intentions”
On today's episode of Messy Middlescence, we talk with Alan Harkness, the husband of our oldest sister, Amy.
Alan shares his inspiring life story, starting with his journey from almost failing out of college to becoming a renowned library director. He discusses his passion for libraries and the joy he finds in his work, as well as the challenges and rewards of leadership. Alan emphasizes the importance of relationships in both personal and professional life, highlighting how building trust and connections with others can lead to success. He shares his strategies for achieving a healthy work-life balance, including the significance of exercise for mental well-being. Looking ahead, Alan discusses his plans for retirement and how he hopes to continue contributing to his community through teaching and other activities. This episode offers valuable insights into finding meaning, navigating change, and prioritizing relationships in middleescence.
This is the first of two episodes with Alan.
This episode focuses more on his professional life and growth. The next episode will talk about recently losing his mother and the journey of having her move in with them for 6.5 years before going into an assisted living home.
Here are some of the highlights from this episode:
Alan struggled his first two years of college and attributes his success ever since to setting goals.
Alan has a strong desire to help in the community.
A special memory was celebrating his oldest graduating from high school AND also the christening of their youngest child the same weekend.
How having a 1.6 mile commute and maturity has helped him have the best work life balance of his life to date, even working 10 hour days.
Alan did not start exercising regularly until his father passed away. His father's death motivated him to take better care of himself.
How Alan started exercising for his physcial health and was surprised at how much it has helped him with his mental health too.
Alan is making a concious effort to work on friendships outside of his family, both old friends and more recent ones.
Alan bought a clarinet and has been playing which is "good for his soul."
After Alan retires from being the library director, he is considering adjunct teaching.
The key to being a good leader is to hire the right people and help them be their best.
He enjoys his job - the variety and challenge. It keeps him humble.
Relationships are a focus both professionally and personally.
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[00:21] Christina Donovan: Are you between the ages of 40 and 60? Are do you feel the need for change in your life, but are not sure why or when or how? Do you feel a pressure of running out of time? Do you spend most of your time doing things that are not important to you anymore? These are all symptoms or characteristics of middlescence. And this is our podcast, Messy Middlescence.
[00:48] Tara Bansal: Welcome. This is messy middle essence. I am here with my sister, Christina Donovan, and our special guest today is Alan Harkness, who is our oldest sister Amy's husband. He is the director of the Chattahoochee Valley Libraries, which encompasses four counties. He's in charge of seven facilities, two bookmobiles, a couple of 24 hours library kiosks, and he's the leader of a pretty significant library system and a beautiful building that I love and admire. I feel like libraries hold a special place in our family's heart because so many of us love to read. And I'm just in a way jealous that you are in charge of libraries and get to do what you do. But we are super happy and excited to have you here. Alan, thank you for coming.
[01:52] Alan Harkness: Thank you. I really appreciate being a part and being invited.
[01:57] Tara Bansal: We generally start our first question with the one Brene Brown did that. How about you tell us what you would like people to know about you? Like, what is your story? And hopefully, I don't know, five minutes or so, whatever it takes.
[02:16] Alan Harkness: Okay, so you want my story in a nutshell?
[02:20] Tara Bansal: Yeah. Not too much of a nutshell, but sure.
[02:25] Alan Harkness: Neither of my parents went to college. My dad got kicked out. My mom tried and left and they got married. Didn't have a role model for that in our household. Knew that I wanted to go to college, did not know what I wanted to major in, did not do well my first two years in undergraduate school.
[02:44] Tara Bansal: And where were you? Where did you go?
[02:46] Alan Harkness: This was in Clayton County. I went to Clayton Junior College at the time. I left Clayton Junior without a major and a 1.8 grade point average, transferred to Georgia State by that point, I had been working in libraries for a couple of years, shelving and I really enjoyed the staff that I worked with and I loved the idea of the work. The whole sort of all the disciplines are inside a library. And decided that I needed a goal. And so the goal was to get through undergraduate school and go get my master's in library science. Doesn't matter what your undergrad is in. And with a goal, I really started checking off boxes for myself and my grades went up. I left Georgia State with almost a 3.5, and then went on to Florida State University to get my master's in library science. And a short term goal of, I'll give it five years and see if this is something I want to do. Got out of graduate school, moved to rural part of southeast Georgia for a couple of years, left that, and ended up in Gwinnett county in suburban Atlanta, and worked for a library system there in Gwinnett. That's where I met Amy. And the five years has now turned into 34 year of work. Excuse me, 39 years of working in public libraries. Have to do the math. Next year will be my 40th year working in public libraries in this state. It's all I know. I've worked for five different systems and have had a lot of really great experiences with a lot of great role models, people who mentor you intentionally and some who mentor you unintentionally. Things that you would do and things that you wouldn't do along the way was with the wrong people. Finally met the right person with Amy, we fell in love. Nine months later, we were married, had a house, had a family. I turned 30, all in a month, and life was good. So we moved along our first house for almost five years, and then started moving around Gwinnett and trying different jobs. There was there almost 15 years. Took us several years to have our next child, Emily. We had some issues that prevented us from getting pregnant for a while. We figured that part out, and after five years, we were able to have Emily. So I'm kind of interchanged between home and work. Worked with Gwynette to almost the point where I had been there almost 15 years, and my director got fired. And I realized that I was being professionally complacent, and I needed to do something different. Eric was our oldest, was about to become a freshman in high school, and said, dad, please don't move us. Please don't move us. Let me stay where I am. So I'm trying to find jobs nearby. There was a director job to our east library system that's called the Piedmont Regional System. They had just had their director retire and was looking for somebody who was on his way up, and that was me. I didn't realize that that career wise was what I wanted to do, but it checked a lot of boxes and allowed us to stay in our home and for Eric to continue to go to school where he was. I was director Piedmont for four years. Then we had another kid, and then we got pregnant with Quinn. So three children. I realized my cost of living was going to go up but my standard of living was going to go down, so I started looking for jobs, interviewed outside of Georgia for a few things, ended up landing at the state library, and was at the state library for four years. And then I had a short list of places I would go professionally in the state if I stayed, and Columbus was one of them. So after four years at the state, end up moving down here to Columbus, and family has really thrived and been happy. Amy's happy. The kids have been happy. It's been ten years now, and I'm looking at about five, six years before I retire, probably. And it's been an amazing career, and I never really set out to do this. It's a fascinating profession and no regrets. It's been more than five years. I gave it five years, and it's certainly been more than five.
[07:34] Tara Bansal: Yeah.
[07:35] Alan Harkness: So I don't know if that's the nutshell you're looking for, but that kind of paints the picture of having kids and being married. And this is our third house and my fourth job since we've been married. Fifth. You know, this is where we'll be when I retire.
[07:54] Tara Bansal: And you said you're looking to retire in about five to seven years. Is that what you said?
[07:59] Alan Harkness: Yeah. So, inside baseball here in Georgia, all the libraries in the state are in the teachers retirement system. And in 2029, which is picture of the way, I will have 39 years in the state's teachers retirement system. You can buy a year of sick leave if you have enough sick leave banked from all the places you worked. So I'll be able to round up to 40, and 40 years is the magic number. You can't accumulate any more time with the state teachers retirement system, and I'll be at 80% salary by that point. And financially, it doesn't make sense to stay much longer than that. So I think we're looking at probably end of June 2029 for my retirement.
[08:52] Tara Bansal: Very exciting.
[08:53] Alan Harkness: Yeah. It's another chapter. So trying to figure out what's next after that, and I'm starting to look into some adjunct teaching work. I always enjoy teaching. I was a staff development in charge, staff development at Gwinnett more than once, and really enjoyed working with adults and connecting them. So I may dabble in that post retirement, but I don't know. I need to have goals. I need to have stuff to focus on, and I still will have something to contribute to my community. So just right now, that's my story I'm sticking to.
[09:28] Christina Donovan: I have a quick question. When you started working in libraries, did you pick libraries because you loved books, or did you just happen to stumble into that, like, your first jobs as a.
[09:42] Alan Harkness: No.
[09:42] Christina Donovan: I know you like to read now, but were you a reader back then?
[09:46] Alan Harkness: So. I've always been a reader. I was a sick kid, and I couldn't go outside a lot. My mom was a reader. She was an avid reader, so she went to library regularly and took us. I read stuff David didn't, my brother. And so, yeah, I was an avid reader in the summer of 84, when all my other friends from high school, when we graduated, they went on cruises. I ended up working at McDonald's, and I worked at McDonald's for three months, and I think after my one month raised, they put me at 345 an hour. My mom was taking a computer class at the junior college, and she's like, the library over here. She saw a posting. The library over here is paying 411 an hour. And maybe you would like to go work over there. I'm like, yeah, I've been using that library my whole life. Why not? And so I went to go work for those folks, and the rest, as they say, is history. I just ended up never leaving. I wondered. Another job I had applied for was at the Sherman Williams paint store, and if I had dabbled in paint, if I'd still be in paint, I don't know.
[10:58] Tara Bansal: Do you love books? So what do you love about your.
[11:04] Alan Harkness: Like, there's a lot of things I like about my job. Most people who work in this profession have a level of curiosity about them that I appreciate. I'm always wanting to learn and be exposed to new things and not be afraid to say, I don't know, something. I love the reading and everything, but that's kind of a cliche. But it's also nice because I'm where all of the good stuff is. And then what's developed for me over time, especially since I left Gwinnett, is the idea that you're helping the community, and then you look at libraries everywhere, get to adapt to what their specific community's needs are. And here in Columbus, we have almost a 25% poverty rate, and most of the elementary schools are title one. There's a lot of need here, and so I have found the things that I have gravitated toward try to meet those needs for the community. So whether it's with the library or my work with Rotary, the food bank, I was chair of the food bank for several years and have enjoyed that work. And so finding a community that has needs and trying to find the strengths of where you work and how you can leverage that to help the community has just really professionally been very rewarding for me.
[12:24] Tara Bansal: I love that you give a lot to the community and make such a positive impact, and you're a great leader. I think that's another thing. And I just wanted to hear what you loved about it, about leading. Well, just about your job. You are a leader as a director.
[12:43] Alan Harkness: And again, I'd always interested in what everybody's jobs was professionally. What do they do? How do they do work in that Department? So I've worked in a number of areas and libraries, and that got me my first director job because I kind of knew what everybody was, what it was about. And then when I was at the State Library at the time, they had a state librarian, the deputy State Librarian, and I was the assistant State Librarian. And I realized I kind of liked being in charge, and I missed that, and I didn't think I would. There's sort of this vacuum for me personally. If there's a leadership vacuum somewhere, I don't mind filling it. And so I didn't realize professionally that meant I wanted to lead. But leadership is really about how you enable the excellence of others and how you develop them and everything. So my whole leadership to date has been about how do I hire the right people and then how do I help them be the best they can be. Because if they are, then our organization benefits, and then the side benefit is that I also look better as a leader. So if you're doing it through them, then eventually it comes back to you in greater ways because you can't do it. All learned from being in charge is that you can't juggle all the things, and you need other people who are smart and talented who can help you do that.
[14:05] Tara Bansal: I agree. Real quick, can you say the ages of your kids now?
[14:13] Alan Harkness: Oh, yeah.
[14:14] Tara Bansal: And I feel like family is a theme of our podcast. And just to make that clear for people who do not know you.
[14:23] Alan Harkness: Yeah, certainly. I mean, I never set out to have four children, and that has changed my life in innumerable ways. But I also recognize, professionally, I wouldn't be where I was now if it wasn't for having the kids, because that's motivated me to be better and do bigger things at larger places. Salary is one thing, but also just trying to make sure that our quality of life has stayed up. So when we got married, Eric was five, and then a year later, I adopted him, and he's now 32. And Emily, our next child, just turned 21. And then two more boys after that, Ian just turned 17, and then Quinn is 13 and a half. If you tell the universe what your plans are, it's the best way to make God laugh. And I wouldn't change any of this for the world, but certainly it's kept me either aging me faster or keeping me young. I'm not sure which. And y'all know this as being part of the family, but the funny thing is that Quinn was born the year that Eric graduated from high school, and so we had family coming for Eric's graduation. We ended up doing the christening for Quinn the same weekend. And we have this wonderful picture of him in his gown, holding Quinn in his gown. And it's a sweet juxtaposition of our life and how it's just all kind of fallen in that way. You make the most of it and keep going. You laugh for a while, you cry for a while, and then you just keep laughing again. I love my kids.
[16:01] Christina Donovan: Do you feel like you have a good work life balance? Alan?
[16:05] Alan Harkness: I think coming to Columbus has helped me do that. What I didn't realize is how much the commutes in Atlanta were killing me. My last job before I came here, it was 45 minutes into work in the morning and an hour coming home in the afternoon. It meant less productivity at work, it meant less productivity at home. And a lot of nights I didn't have dinner with a family. Here, I'm 1.6 miles from work, which is fantastic. I tend to work ten hour days most days, but I'm usually home for dinner or a late dinner. And also, as the kids have aged, everybody's active in so many different activities. I think tonight, last night, I wouldn't see anybody because everybody was somewhere else. But, yes, I've also focused harder not having those commutes. I've been able to work harder at exercise, and I think I've had better work life balance here than anywhere else I've ever been. I think also that some professional maturity and some just maturity as a human being for myself.
[17:10] Christina Donovan: Yeah.
[17:10] Alan Harkness: Making sure I do those things that are important to me. And now I didn't start exercising until my father died, and I needed to make some life changes. And I can't imagine not getting up and exercising every day now. So most days of the week, five, six days a week, I'm up and I'm doing something to keep the heart pumping. Get moving. I lose sleep, but 05:00 a.m. Is my wake up call.
[17:34] Tara Bansal: That's early. I'm not a morning person.
[17:37] Alan Harkness: Yeah, I'm not a morning person, but I have become one.
[17:40] Tara Bansal: And I didn't know that you started working out regularly after your father died. So that change.
[17:49] Alan Harkness: My dad's mom had pancreatic cancer. My dad had pancreatic cancer. They were always overweight. My dad never did the exercise that he should have done. And I'm like, I need to minimize my risk. And so I started running and I started doing CrossFit. CrossFit is really hard on your body, especially at 50. But in three months, I ran my first half marathon and done another one. Since then, I've done some running. I don't do process anymore, but I do some stuff at home. And we have a rower and a treadmill, and I try to stay active. Yard work, it's good for the body. And what I didn't realize is how much that would help me mentally, especially through COVID. I did a lot of running during COVID because you could go do that and not worry about catching something, and that running really helped keep my head clear.
[18:47] Tara Bansal: Yeah, I know I work out for my mental health, and I need that.
[18:52] Alan Harkness: I did it for my physical health, but I didn't realize that the mental health is going to be such a wonderful benefit too.
[18:58] Tara Bansal: Yeah. So what do you love to do when you have the time?
[19:06] Alan Harkness: That's the caveat, is when you have the time.
[19:08] Tara Bansal: Okay, so if you have all the time in the world, what would you love?
[19:12] Alan Harkness: One of the other benefits of working here is we have a very generous leave policy. And if you don't use a lot of it during the year, you lose it. And so first couple of years, I lost it. But I've done a better job of taking time off. And when you take time off, you do more things for yourself or for your family vacations. Cooking. I really like to cook. I really like to do yard work and stuff. During COVID to keep my sanity, I ended up building a retaining wall in our yard. I didn't realize how much I would love doing that. Never done anything like that civil engineering sort of thing before, but I studied on it, and I think I can do this. And so figured it out. And I like finding ways to be with the kids. I like finding ways to be with Amy, and we'll be looking for more of that down the line, trying to find more activities. I have a high inclusion need. I need to be with people. I need to talk. I need to listen and just enjoy that. I wish I was better at developing friendships and being with other people who aren't in my family as much as I love my family, but I'm working on that, too. It's a hard thing to do as an adult.
[20:27] Tara Bansal: And how are you working on that?
[20:30] Alan Harkness: I have a couple of guys that I know, and we try to get together. It's not always planned. Their lives are busy. My life is busy. But I know I can call my friend Scott across the street, and we'll go hit a movie or just go grab a beer. Well, he'll grab a beer. I'll grab a Diet Coke. And friend Patrick's the same way. We just got to make that conscious effort. I have some old friends that I've been reaching out to, and I'm hoping that we'll reconnect. During COVID we all kind of withdrew more, and that was harder on some of us than others. I have some family members that I still love and I want to see again. It goes back to setting goals and trying to find a way to keep the things that you say are important. I think Covey says it best. Keep first things first and try to make sure the priorities that you keep the practice is reflecting your intentions.
[21:24] Tara Bansal: Yeah, I agree with that. And to me, that's part of what I hope people will get out of this podcast is hearing.
[21:33] Alan Harkness: I'm bad at it, but I really know about that. The other thing I did is I bought a clarinet, and all my life, I wanted a wood clarinet. And I saw a friend selling one on Facebook, and I asked Amy, I said, I don't normally ask, can I go spend $700 on buying this used clarinet? For a while, I was really practicing, and I want to practice again. There are local community bands and all here, and when I retire, I can be a part of that, but I want to learn how to play jazz. I want to get back into the music because it's so good for my soul.
[22:09] Christina Donovan: You have an actual hard date for your retirement, which is impressive, actually. I mean, in terms of at least a year.
[22:17] Alan Harkness: Well, you do the math, and you see, when will you. No longer does it make sense for you to work in terms of teachers retirement. So that helps set a goal. It doesn't mean I'll meet it, but I'll work towards that.
[22:31] Tara Bansal: Right.
[22:32] Christina Donovan: I mean, are you actively thinking about what you want to do when you retire?
[22:39] Alan Harkness: I don't know if it's active, but I have other people who I know that do adjunct teaching, and they're like, yeah, you should do that. And so what I need to do, I think once we get Ian out of the house and we have more adults at home than we have kids. I can start easing into some of that and kind of test the waters. My job takes up a lot of my time, and I can't always predict it. We have board meetings in the evenings, and it's harder to keep other kinds of schedules. So I think once Ian's gone, he's a junior this year. Once we get him graduated next year, I think I'll be able know dabble.
[23:18] Christina Donovan: Do you feel like you're still growing in the job, that you're.
[23:22] Alan Harkness: Yeah.
[23:23] Christina Donovan: Yes.
[23:24] Alan Harkness: I think leadership is one of those things where the minute you think you've got it solved, you're fooling yourself. And I've seen a lot of leaders do that. The dynamics of what we do changes, and the dynamics of HR is always a challenge because you just never know what people's needs are going to be. So I think it keeps you humble. Budgeting keeps you humble, especially when you're doing big projects like we are. We got a building that we're building, and the price went up by 50% last year. And how do you solve that problem? My work feeds me, but it also keeps me humble because there's just always so much to learn and be better at.
[24:08] Tara Bansal: Yeah, something new.
[24:09] Alan Harkness: Yeah. I got to have variety, and for me, all through my career, I needed variety and I needed to be challenged. And I never thought I'd find somewhere because I never had one job more than four years, and Here I get all the variety and all the challenge I could ever want.
[24:24] Tara Bansal: What would you say is most important to you right now, at this stage of your life.
[24:33] Alan Harkness: At this moment? My relationship with Amy and keeping that strong and making sure that her health is where it needs to be. We have some health scares lately that we don't really know how to solve, and so you have to look at it pragmatically. Let's eliminate possibilities. And so we're doing that and trying to support her, making sure the boys still have support at home and keep my relationship strong. Those are the things that it's all relationship based. I always thought it would be transactional, but it's not. It's really about the relationships. And I got staff here that I've had for a long time and strengthening those relationships, and it all goes back to somebody. Was it Canfield either adding deposits in your bank account, whether people are making withdrawals, and we unintentionally make withdrawals with people all the time. So I'm always trying to make sure that I'm making deposits wherever I can, whether it's with Amy or the kids or whatever. I think that gives you focus and helps you keep the important things. The important things.
[25:46] Tara Bansal: When you said things were transactional instead of relationships, you thought it would be transactional. What does that mean?
[25:57] Alan Harkness: So a lot of what we do here at the library is we helped this person, this person checked out this book, we bought this item, we did this thing. It's all project managing. It's not making widgets, but it's close to that. And so it become. How do you look at the transactions with your customers versus long term relationship? Building and building your brand and building the library in a way that we are at about 20% of households in our community that have a card. And the only way we're going to make that stronger is we have to make sure we have what people want and that we keep them any kind of business. You look at your market share and how you keep your customers, and it's cheaper to keep them than to get new ones. But we want to do both. A lot of what we do is just looking at the hard numbers and transactionally. But at the end of the day, how did that staff person make that customer feel? Let's assume that everybody has the material that they want to check out, but how did they make that person feel? How did that supervisor make that employee feel? If you forget about those relationships, the transactional stuff doesn't hold as much water in my mind.
[27:12] Tara Bansal: Yeah, I love that. I think the relationships help build and drive the transactions.
[27:26] Alan Harkness: And when I talk to donors about what we're doing and want to get them interested in what it is, people donate to people. They don't donate to organizations. So if you build trust and you're somebody that they see is leading the way, they want it done. In the last four months, we've raised 200 and something thousand dollars in people giving to our south branch construction project because, like I said, I need to buy more money. And it's been going really well. And that's because of the relationships and the connections that you have. You can't just walk in on somebody cold and ask them, you can, but you're more likely to get money from the people who trust that you're doing what they want to see done in their community.
[28:08] Tara Bansal: And they know you like they trust.
[28:10] Alan Harkness: They know who I am and what I stand for and what we represent. And it's just great to be part of an organization that does that. Not everybody gets that. And I don't know how I fell into this. I really don't. But I just feel so fortunate.
[28:26] Tara Bansal: I don't want to spend too much time on this because I feel like we have so many other questions, but 20% are library card holders. Is that household low or households? Is that low or high compared to the national average?
[28:42] Alan Harkness: So it's low compared to the national average. It'd be low compared to, say, Princeton, for example. You have to realize where we are. We're in the rural South. This was primarily a manufacturing and an agrarian community. Education hasn't always been that important. And now more than ever, there's so much competition for what libraries have to offer that we're working uphill here. When you have a high school graduation rate, that isn't where it ought to be, and it's not part of what's on people's radar. I had a city manager tell me years ago, well, why do I need a library? I get all my books from Amazon, and I just looked at them and like, well, what about the rest of your working? Libraries have great PR in that people love their libraries. They tend to associate the library where they are with the library that they grew up. They have this sort of mental model about what good looks like. So that works in our favor. But also, most working men in my community do not use us, and so how do I get them in? What are the strategies to do that? I could talk about that for an hour, but it's a fascinating thing about trying to figure out how to get more. Most people don't know what we do. They don't know how we can connect and be relevant to them in their community. But they like the idea of us, so we have to play on that strength.
[30:07] Tara Bansal: And most libraries now are so much more than just books. And I know the library is only.
[30:14] Alan Harkness: Good as the community wants it to be. And we were so lucky with strong, stable funding here compared to most of the rest of Georgia.
[30:21] Tara Bansal: Our time with Alan went much longer than expected, so we decided to break it into two episodes. Today was only the first part. Tina and I were both very surprised to learn how Goal oriented Alan is and how important goals are to living his life. Maybe we don't get to see that part of him as much at our chaotic family gatherings, or maybe it is just more prevalent for him at work. I don't know. But that definitely was a big theme that stood out for us. The next episode is where we get into some deeper, more applicable topics for middleescents, caretaking of aging parents and dealing with their deaths. Important topics that we know we will be coming back to again and again. We hope you enjoyed learning about Alan, who he is, and all that he has accomplished to help set up the stage for our next time when we get into more emotional stuff. Have a good week. For show notes and other information about our podcast, please go to our website, messymidalescence.com. If you enjoyed listening, please share with others and come back for more.
Today's quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I awoke this morning with devout Thanksgiving for my friends the old and the new. “
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Originally from Forest Park, Georgia, Alan Harkness has worked in Georgia’s public libraries for 39 years in eight different counties. He’s has been Director of the Chattahoochee Valley Libraries since 2013. Alan is a member of The Rotary Club Of Columbus, and is an alumni of Leadership Columbus. He has been a Board Member/Chair of Feeding the Valley Food Bank, his sons’ Boy Scout Troop, and FTC/FRC Robotics League. In 2023, he was selected as Georgia's Public Library Director of the Year.
Alan has a Bachelor’s in Interdisciplinary Studies from Georgia State, and a Masters in Library Science from Florida State. He is married to Amy, a medical librarian at Piedmont Hospital and Gwinnett Medical. They have four children, currently in 2024, they are 32, 21, 17, and 13 years of age. Alan enjoys reading, cooking, gardening, travelling, playing the clarinet and dabbles in calligraphy. Alan’s family lives in Columbus, Georgia.
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