I skipped Beth Abraham...actually I didn't wake up until close to eleven on Shabbos. Getting up at 5:30 three days running after keeping summer hours wiped me out. I never actually got dressed at all on Saturday, I wore my jammies around the house and ate things with calories. It was extremely pleasant.
This morning, the gardeners arrived again. I'm kind of getting used to being awakened by the crunch of workboots on the gravel, and hushed conversations in Spanish about garden hoses.
Today I had to go to a memorial service in Alameda. This was for a lovely woman in her fifties who was the attendence secretary at the school I work at. She worked in the district for nineteen years. A nice lady. Warm, bubbly, like an aunt to all the kids...I had only been working at the school for four or five months when we learned she had pancreatic cancer and wouldn't be coming back to work. She died last Wednesday.
It was a warm, pretty, service. Her daughter and two sisters, husband, nephew, sister-in-law, and someone she had worked with for many years all spoke. Lots of tears, lots of stories. I learned that she was a trout fisher, and loved camping. I heard how her family left South Dakota--I suppose this must have been about 1960 or so--looking for work in California. Everyone was weepy.
Now I'm trying to get everything together for the first day of school, and I'll be thinking about her all day...I think we all will. We owe it to her to give the kids the best.
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