San Joaquin Morning

On this particular morning in San Joaquin the sun rose up just as it always had for however many centuries over this tiny tranquilo town, but for me it was the first time I got to experience it from the town below, Bajo Pacuare, where a nearby school asked me to pay them a visit.  The bus didn’t go all the way to Bajo Pacuare, but instead, it spent the night in San Joaquin until the next day.  Which means that I walked all day to the town down a dusty road packed with rocks and rain gutters running all down the hill.  The daughter of the woman who rents me out a room in San Joaquin gave me a place to stay for the night after I taught what I intended to be a  30 minute English lesson on adjectives and expressions of emotions.  While I chose to sing and had actions all planned out, a heavy rainstorm pounded down.  I barely introduced myself.  

Now pay attention to how the simple past actions in the second paragraph are interrupted by the in-progress simple past continuous tense throughout.

While the rain was pouring down on the tin roof, we played a game tossing around my participation ball.  It’s funny how interruptions are ironically routine here.  The other day I was standing in line at the bookstore to make copies for my class, when I noticed there wasn’t any line at all, except the imaginary one I made all by myself.   Everyone around me was cutting in and moving their bodies, mouths, and eyes to get what they needed.  I suppose the interruption factor became really clear when I sent home letters to my students’ parents about setting up parent teacher conferences.  Back in Chicago I always seemed pretty professional and organized. But here, I was doing my best to respect their time and schedules, and not a single soul signed up to meet with me.  Not until I was walking through town to explore, and the sweet little eyes of my students were peering out from their windows ecstatic.  Everyone was inviting me in on the fly for afternoon cafecito.  It is nice to know that I wasn’t interrupting them.  In fact, they were waiting for me to just show up.  Kind of like the rain yesterday, it was annoying at first, but I connected with those kids, and we got off to a good start.