Click the link below to see this amazing "cursor revolution. Remember you are viewing a video of the opertion under very high-powered magnification. You will be stunned at how simple the procedure is!

Click here for the microscopic video or your cursor at work.

Just returned from spending the afternoon with Mom. The Montoyas, and son Jon were there.... you know deedle deedle dumpling my son.... Mom was in rare form on this special Mother's Day. She's now 101 and four months and remains an amazing woman. Such an appetite - perfect taste and smell so she enjoys every meal. Such a beautry - skin like a baby with a startling absence of wrinkles. Such a heart for the Lord - former minister and soloist who still sings a beautiful song with felling and beauty.

Get this! We had China Inn dinner tonight and Mom opened her fortune cookie and burst into uncontrollable laughter when it was read. You should expect a very long life!"

Harlan Kreklow, Maude's son-in-law and one Polski from Milwaukee we all tease, captured the meaning of Maude's life in a beautiful way on one of Maude's recent birthdays. I want to share it with you:

Maude, you've lived through the terms of 18 presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush. You've lived through six major wars beginnng with World War I. The Titantic sunk when you were six years old and the last Tzar was thrown out of Russia when you were 11. Names like Man of War, Calvin Coolidge, Enrico Caruso, Fritz Crysler, Al Jolson, Babe Ruth, Albert Schweitzer and a host of thousands of others including the Beetles are not just names in history books for you. They have been your contemporaries. You experienced primitive telephones, gas light, horse travel and crystal radio sets to cell phones, cyber space, hundreds of millions of vehicles of every description, television, the Internet and space travel. What has past before your eyes and enteredinto your mind is truly the "stuff" of great novels. You've lived through the most exciting, exhilarating, wonderful, difficult, tragic, and challenging time in the history of the planet. You have live through 43% of our nation's history. What an incredible run you've had! And, we all so proud of you."

And this is what I have to say about Mom: What a woman -- that Maude Elsie Parfit Plunkett. Born in a small coal mining town just east of Pittsburgh where her dad, Tom Parfit, was an electrical engineer responsible for "air and light" in the mine back when 1800 turned into 1900. Tom was a Welsh coal miner who had the traditional golden singing voice and was a lay Bible teacher. He was the first Parfit to immigrate from the British Isles and was responsible for paying for all of his relatives who wanted to come to the Land of Opportunity and Promise. Two of his sisters tried it and didn't like it so he had to pay for their return passage. I'm not sure I would have done that.

The family later moved to McKee's Rocks where my grandfather served as an electrical engineer for the City of Pittsburgh Water Department. After high school, Maude began working for the dressmaking department of Horne's Department Store in Pittsburgh when she was 16 and in a matter of months became a buyer for all the materials the custom dressmakers used. They then had her traveling all over the back streets and warehouse areas of downtown Pittsburgh searching for materials used in dressmaking from buttons to bows. They were training her to become a buyer.

A woman, a young girl, a big city, a large corporation, an employee in training. My conservative mother didn't know it then and doesn't recognize it now, but she was a trail breaker. There were few women and especially young girls in the work force in the early 20's. She was in this job at Horne's when the Lord directed her to further her education at Moody Bible Institute -- again, not many women involved in higher education at that time in our culture.

In 1923, at age 17, she was on her way to Chicago by train to attend the Moody Bible Institute and enter the mission education program with thoughts of India. That first year she had ministries in downtown Chicago at such historic places as Pacific Garden Mission and Madison Avenue. That first year, sh met my Dad and the "Plunketts of Chicago." I'm so glad she did! From the thousands of feet of 16mm film my Dad took it's so easy to recognize how beautiful, self assured, and vivacious she was even as a teenager. No wonder my Dad fell for her. She was athletic, intelligent, committed to living for the Lord, and so very beautiful.

As a pastor's wife, a mother of six children, an educator, an administrator, and a love for people, Maude Elsie Plunkett has never stopped blazing trails. In total control of her personal affairs and totaly intellectual sharpness (her memory, wit, reasoning and problem solving remain suberb!) at 99 she is in good health physically except for Arthur-itus and sight limitations, Maude Elsie Parfit Plunkett is a Conastoga Woman meeting life straight on and seeing to it her six kids had the tools to face life with the Lord.

Make Font Larger | Make Font Smaller

BACK TO THE TOP

COPYRIGHT 2006