Sacramento Valley

The Sacramento Valley is one of the hottest places in the country this first week of September; and that's the way I remember it... perhaps that's the way it's supposed to be.  I remember the September of my first year as a full-fledged, fully credentialed teacher at Yuba City High School.  The year was 1957.  The school wasn't air conditioned.  In fact, I don't think there were schools anywhere on earth that were air conditioned.  If there were, I hadn't heard of them, and I doubt that anybody in my part of the world had considered that it was important for high school students and their teachers to be cool.  I'm trying to remember what being cool meant in 1957... and it's somehow slipped my mind.  I do remember what it felt like to have a job and a salary.  I had worked since I was thirteen, but the word salary had special meaning. It was different from just "getting paid."  I think I probably made more picking  peaches in a week than I made teaching high school English for a week, but I got "paid" for picking peaches, and they gave me a contract and a salary for teaching school.  It wasn't much, but it was wonderful.  I thought I was the luckiest guy in the world, and I wanted the students I had that first year and all the subsequent years to believe that they were lucky to have me as teacher. 

I didn't mind the heat of the Sacramento Valley then, and I'm determined not to mind it now that I'm back in it again for a few days... even while I'm driving through The Valley on the way back to Yuba City and I glance at the temperature reading on the dashboard of my car, a car I wouldn't have dreamed of ever owning when I was a first year teacher, and the reading is 104 degrees f. outside and I'm gliding along in absolute air-conditioned comfort.  The pictures today are from a Highway 99 "rest area" a few miles south of Fresno.  Life is good.