You canNOT make this stuff up:
The San Francisco affiliate of NBC has been conducting an investigation into where federal stimulus money sent to the Bay Area ended up. They've discovered that $1.5 million went to a study of erectile dysfunction among overweight middle age men.
Stimulus money.
I'm getting ready to be gone. I'm flying to Seattle Friday morning and returning the following Tuesday. Todd is preaching in my absence and will do a great job, despite his anxiety over the assignment. We met again today - the last opportunity before he's totally on his own. This was the third or fourth time we've worked on his sermon, and he's good good solid stuff to go with a very personable style.
I've also created and printed the bulletin, schedules, made up the slide presentation, and lined up the key participants. So I have no hesitation in being absent for the morning because of the very competent people who will take over.
The timing for this trip turned out to be better than I could have planned. Mom is still in the rehab unit and experiencing a host of minor complications that have her struggling physically and emotionally. That, in turn, worries my dad. So while I can't do a thing to change what is, I hope to offer some encouragement and diversion.
I originally planned the trip so I can attend the 50th reunion of the sixth grade class at Daniel Webster Elementary, which will be held Sunday afternoon. We'll gather in the cafeteria of our alma mater, which has long since been decommissioned and is now the Nordic Heritage Museum. But most of the building looks just like it did then, and it will be fun to sit in the same room where we ate lunch five days a week for seven years. One of our classmates, Shelley, has done an incredible amount of work tracking down our classmates from a half century ago and making all the arrangements.
Everybody's reaction to my trip is the same: "I've never heard of a reunion for a 6th grad class."
I haven't either. But back in the day, before our very mobile society, kids grew up together and went as a bloc from elementary to Junior High to High School. Because Ballard H.S. had about 1800 students, (10th through 12th grades) most of the kids you knew best were the ones you could trace back to your elementary school, kids from your neighborhood. Shelley lived on my block. And this will be a small enough group that interaction will be easier.
But wait! There's more!
A year or so back I wrote a post that included a picture I picked off the website Shelley created for our class. (As I said, she's done a TON of work on this.) She forwarded that blog post on to one of the guys in that picture, he read the post, and contacted me through the blog. We exchanged emails and have been corresponding almost every day since, sometimes multiple emails a day.
I don't remember that Jim and I had much contact during our time at James Monroe Junior High. But we both signed up for auto shop class when we got to Ballard, and our excellent shop teacher, Mr. Lynn Mickelson, paired us together as a team for shop work. Most periods began with some classroom instruction and then time in the shop working on whatever project was assigned. I was extremely grateful to be paired with Jim because he had experience working on cars and I quite literally didn't know what a box wrench was. (Why do you need a wrench to open a box??) I passed that course on the strength of Jim carrying the vast majority of our shared shop portion of the grade.
After H.S. we had no further contact until Shelly put us in touch. Now, methinks the highlight of this trip will be meeting Jim for coffee Saturday morning. He lives very near where he did as a child while our family has lived all over the country. But Jim and I have a lot in common, including an interest in cars and all things associated with them. Frankly, it has been one of the nicer out-of-the-blue surprises to have reconnected with Jim after all these years, and our face to face time Saturday is eagerly anticipated.
And, I'm sure, just the beginning.
Yes, I will be posting over the weekend, so expect stories and pictures.
No comments:
Post a Comment