by Dear Friends and Family:
Writing for all of us here, I hope this letter finds you in good health and spirits as we head in to the 2007 holiday season. As the obligatory madness begins for late-starters like us, I’d rather take this moment to write about this year, such an eventful span for all of the Texas Moores, one that I dare say and hope that we will always remember.
It is surprisingly difficult to look back at the year, for so much happened and was done and so little of it can be written down sensibly. Yet here we go anyway – to heck with making sense, grounded as the word is in the opinion of the masses, and what value is that?
Last year at this time all of the boys were playing basketball, the twins for Iola Jr. High and David in Upwards and Little Dribblers, and many games were driven to and watched from the sidelines. Now only Jake is still playing, for Iola, and he is having quite a lot of success. More people that just his parents have noticed, this being a small town and all.
Also, Mitch and Jake both played Jr. High football this fall and emerged from the experience little worse for the wear. Mitch is, I think, going to retire from the sport while Jake intends to press ahead next year. Some of the Iola parents, shocked by the varsity’s 0-10 performance this year, are already looking at the class of 2012 – when Jake and his cohorts will be seniors – to provide a return to football glory. That is, if we can find and keep a good coach, the whining mob having already driven off the new guy who had walked in to an impossible job this year.
At Iola ISD, the boys’ academic experience and success have both been mixed thus far. To the good, classes are small and the district’s test scores are significantly better than average. To their detriment, there is little choice in the program and not all of their teachers meet our expectations. It’s official now: Grades, girls, clothes, and hair – all sources of generational conflict are now in play. Yikes!
On the other side of the Iola campus, Monica fights a daily, uphill battle to bring knowledge and enlightenment to a screaming, howling pack of 2nd graders, some of whom, it sometimes seems, have had as little preparation for proper schooling as wild animals. It is not an easy job, needless to say, but she is finding the rhythm of it now that her first year of OJT is done. Better yet she has made several good friends among the elementary teachers there and in the community as well.
I continue to write Internet software during the day, blog for the PoliGazette at night, and occasionally work on the unfinished novel of doom in odd moments (perhaps it will be done in 2008?). There is also plenty of work around the ranchito, not the least of which is a new project to build the twins’ bedrooms out in the shop.
Indeed, life is very busy for all of us owing to the daily demands that must be met. Happily we have found a pleasant place of peace at Iola Missionary, the small church Monica and I joined back in March. Mitch and Jake also decided, of their own accord, to be baptized into the church in July. We have so many friends there and received so many blessings from the church that it’s impossible to separate life here from it.
Monica and I teach the Sunday School class that David is in, also with interesting results. One of these is that I have now gotten a hint of what it must be like to be trapped in a room for 8 hours with 20 children, 10 of whom don’t want to be there, every day! But only a hint…
The twins are part of the youth program there that’s run by a truly excellent man (with a lot of help from his wife, of course). The three of us recently attended the Great All-Nighter during which the teens head over to the TexasA&M Rec Center and terrorize the place all night. Basketball, dodgeball, rock climbing, swimming, all night – most excellent fun!
In short, we’ve all been blessed by the move to Iola, beyond a doubt, and have found a home here in a way that we never had anywhere else. I still remember the first time I saw the sign that points south to Iola through my windshield and the good feeling I had about the place. We didn’t visit Iola that day and even though when we finally did the stingy owner of the little grocery store there wouldn’t let Monica use the bathroom, the idea that Iola was for us never left me. Coincidence, childhood memories of the Hardy Boys (Iola Morton was Joe’s girlfriend, remember?), or God at work? You be the judge.
There is, of course, so much more to tell, yet so little space: There’s the week at pre-teen church camp that Monica and I spent with David, her friend Tammy, and almost 20 kids from Iola, our family trip to Indiana in the minivan, playing out at the lake in the boat we hauled the whole way back, Promise Keepers in San Antonio with Ray Scattergood and the guys from IMBC, the twins’ youth camp experiences that led them to commit to Christ, and so much more.
2007 has been a long, wonderful, exhausting year. Our prayers for you are that you’ll experience the same kind of blessings in your lives that we’ve been fortunate enough to have in ours.
God bless,
Marc, Monica, Mitch, Jake, and Dave Moore
