I believe I told you that as Easter approached I had to move my classroom. Unfortunately, the room to which I was assigned was no where near as nice as the one I started in. The newly assigned room had been the nap room a few years ago for the daycare center the church was running. After the daycare center closed, the room was not used very much and no one really claimed it. After cleaning and rearranging, I was able to get the room ready for Easter and then spend a few weeks adding to it. The room now looks like this:

However, this is where the story ends, after this next and last Sunday, for me. With the change of rooms at Easter time came a change in the program for children. The majority of Sunday morning is now taken up with an inflatable jump house and game time. There is only about 25 minutes for a lesson or a craft, which is really hard to do with first and second graders.

I have made the best of it these past nine weeks since the change, but it’s not been easy. It’s not just the time factor, but the fact that the students from grades one through six are all together, roughhousing and goofing off, in the fellowship hall for a total of two hours each Sunday. There is a high noise level, a great deal of running amuck, and almost no supervision. A few of the less rambunctious youngsters sit at some tables in the back on which has been placed some coloring books and playdoh. Again, no direction, just free play.

I like an organized environment. I like students to be supervised and trained to behave well. I like to know what is going to happen each class session and to plan accordingly. I like to have more time to spend with my students, in the classroom. Instead, I spend a good five minutes getting them lined up and ready to go to the classroom. You may remember this picture from my Easter post:

I can no longer get the class to line up and proceed like this. They are so rambunctious and disorderly. Then it takes another five minutes once we are in the classroom to get them in their seats and calmed down to proceed. All the training I put into the class at the beginning of the year seems to have disappeared. Especially for the second session, which I usually have. Another teacher who has the first session switched one Sunday with me and said she wouldn’t do the second session again. It was too disorderly. All because of the chaos of the jumping, running, bouncing off the walls in the fellowship hall.

So, one more Sunday, and then I can breath a sigh of relief. The chaos of the past nine weeks has made me feel ill every Sunday. That’s certainly no way to live.

Cherries and apricots have arrived so we are filling up on those each day. I bought a few apriums and one squishy one was left in the fruit bowl so I threw it in along with an apple, carrot, half bag of cranberries, and 4 kale leaves. The end product looks sludgey and tastes a bit green:

May 13 2009

We won’t be there today to celebrate with Leeya. I left a card with four, one dollar bills for her to open this morning when her parents and baby brother sing Happy Birthday to her.

Last week, when we were visiting in the bay area, Leeya spent one night in the hotel with us. I snapped a photo of her and Terry, on their way back from breakfast. It made me think of an earlier picture Terry had taken of Leeya and me as we walked along the salt marshes in Alviso when Leeya was two. I photoshopped the two pictures in celebration of this birthday and how happy we are to be grandparents.

Leeya walking with grandparents

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is getting ready for a major renovation and will close for three years beginning June 2. A major photography exhibit by Garry Winogrand has been at SFMOMA the last few weeks and one we really wanted to see. Winogrand died in 1984 with over 4,000 undeveloped rolls of film sitting in black plastic bags. Another 2,000 rolls had been developed into contact sheets but not edited. All of this work was culled to be included in this exhibit. It was amazing and we thoroughly enjoyed seeing it. Just as we completed our tour of the fourth floor exhibit, the fire alarm sounded and we

Evacuation

were evacuated from the building. Since it was free Tuesday, we decided we had gotten our money’s worth and went on to enjoy the Yerba Buena Gardens which are across the street from the museum.

A lovely spot for lunch in Yerba Buena Gardens

Yerba Buena Gardens

Shortly after WWII Fresno First Baptist Church, where I have worshipped since 1975, sponsored a family from Latvia through the Displaced Person Act of 1948.

While working on the church’s 130th anniversary last year, I had read in the archives of this family’s arrival and all that the church members did to prepare for them and take care of them. Harriet Barker, one of the original Allied Arts Girls, was the point person for this project.

Yesterday, while cleaning out one more box of stored records, I found the entire file on the displaced family. They remained in Fresno for a very short time, moving on to southern California. The last correspondence in the file is from the County of San Mateo in 1959.

The family’s name was Prujinskis but was changed to Pruett after their arrival in the US. In 1959 the family members names were: John Pruett, Gay Pruett, David Pruett (born 2-14-49), John Pruett (born 5-3-50) and Ruta Pruett (born 7-9-52). The last two children were born in the US.

So, the point of this post is to tell others about this family. I would think the children are still alive and it would be wonderful if we could get this file to them. It tells a lot about their life in Germany before coming to California. The picture is of Gay, John, and David Pruett, in the front row, with Gay’s mother and siblings, taken March 2, 1950, in Augsburg Germany. Gay’s mother’s name was Doroteja Urbans, born 1898.

I have many Cowbird/Facebook followers, and I would love it if each of you would share this story and photo with people you know, perhaps posting on Facebook if you use that social media site. I know the power of social media. Someone out there must know of the family. My prayers are going with this as I feel God has brought all of this material to this place at this time in history .

The recipe called for a bundt pan. I hate those pans so poured the batter into lined cupcake pans.

I put the extras in the freezer but they had to come out yesterday to make room for the beerocks I made.

A fresh batch of orange buttercream frosting makes the cupcakes just as good as the day I baked them.

Strawberries, kale, basil, fennel, apple.

We bought the house in which we still live in October 1980. The prices were high (we had made over 100% profit on our condo) but so were the interest rates. We were able to buy the house because it had an assumable loan with 11% interest. New loans had interest rates of 15-16 percent. A few months later Terry’s brother would buy a house with 18% interest on the loan. It was a tough, tough time. Sure enough, only a year or so after the purchase, our house was worth considerably less than we had bought it for. We had put almost twenty percent down, so that helped somewhat, but it had not been our intention to stay in this house but for a few years. We had hoped to sell and move up. Thirty two laters, with the house paid for, it’s all a moot point, but back then it was painful.

Terry lost his job in 1982 and we really struggled. His next job in retail didn’t pay all that much. There were times I had no idea how we would pay the bills. Jennifer was removed from private school; the dance lessons stopped; we didn’t go on any vacations. Since I shopped at Mervyn’s for Jen’s clothes, I bought my things there, too. Certainly nothing fancy.

I wasn’t happy with my job and wanted something different, but every interview I had was pretty much for the same kind of work, just a different company. Years went by. One day I finally realized I wanted a job that would give me more time off with Jennifer, and teaching seemed perfect for that. I had worked long enough for the cottonseed company that I had a large amount in my retirement fund, enough to live on for two years, the time it would take me to get a teaching credential. In late 1987, things began to click. There were again possibilities.

By 1989 I had the credential and a job at the inner city high school where I would remain for 21 years. Terry had returned to school, too, and was working in computer programming. He would change companies quite a few times in the next two decades as the businesses kept changing, but our finances were in good shape.

I also had begun to feel better about myself and what I was accomplishing. The  1980s, and my thirties, were behind me. Maybe that made a difference, too. The thirties seem like a tough time, now, in retrospect. You’re no longer young, but you haven’t found your niche yet, or at least I hadn’t. The financial part was the biggest hurdle of that era and one I would not relive for anything. I get upset, though, when I hear of people just up and leaving a house on which they owe more than it’s worth. That was our situation for a few years, but it never occurred to me that we should abandon our debt responsibility. We stuck with it, and today the house is paid for which makes retirement at a young age possible. I guess that decade of discontent taught me that things can change and you are never stuck forever.