Busy!

When I read my journals from the 80s I can’t get over how busy we were. The same is true when I read my Dads journals. In November of 1983 my Dad turned 75. He didn’t slow down much. It seems like he was always going somewhere, visiting someone, or working on some kind of project. My mother was the same way. They were very active people in those days.

In my Dad’s entries in his journal of 1983 he writes about Mom going off on a Questers day trip while Dad made copies of some Egli family history for other people and visited with old friends on one of his regular walks downtown.

The next day, Dad writes about winterizing his roses, raking leaves and then walking over to our house. While he was there picking up a book he helped Heather with a science project (she was 10 at the time), and then going back home and cleaning up his basement. His final note for that day says he climbed on the roof and checked the coating and then worked on an eve spout on the west side of the house.

At about the same time I am writing about serving on the pastor search committee. We had meeting with another candidate at Ruth Looker’s house. It ends up being the person we select but, of course, I did not know that at that time. I had a student teacher so that gave me some time to write about some things I wanted to do in my classroom and the AEA Young Writers’ Conference. Like Dad, I write about winterizing our house and putting on storm windows. I write about working on the course syllabus for a class I will be teaching in the spring and about a class I am taking in Iowa City.

The class is in school administration and I find it very boring. I had been taking classes I was really interested in and wasn’t used to taking required classes taught by poor instructors. No wonder so many people made fun of the school administration courses. The courses were easy and the teachers were bad. Most of them had “good ol’ boy” personalities.

My students wrote a letter to MARS candy company requesting they produce blue M&Ms. We got a letter back saying it wasn’t possible. We decided to start a petition for blue M&Ms. I sent letters out to schools all over the country encouraging them to join us in the effort. Schools wrote back saying they had sent in copies of the petition with lots of signatures. Mark Twain Elementary of Iowa City said they sent in 40 signatures. Central School of Forest City said they sent in 83 names and wrote that they were very excited about the project.

I still have copies of the petition and some notes about the project. I guess we were ahead of our time on this one. Today there are blue M&Ms and other new colors, too. Maybe we were part of making that happen?