Gilroy
– Dean and Gerri Moon haven’t been counting gifts this holiday
season, they’ve been counting blessings – blessings that include an
old shoe box, a movie and a second grade class at Pacific West
Christian Academy in Gilroy.
Gilroy – Dean and Gerri Moon haven’t been counting gifts this holiday season, they’ve been counting blessings – blessings that include an old shoe box, a movie and a second grade class at Pacific West Christian Academy in Gilroy.
After the horror of losing their family home and most of its contents in a fire just before Thanksgiving, the Moons have learned first-hand that the best things in life were not those lost in smoke and flames.
Thanksgiving was the day after the fire, which was started by an unattended wood stove left burning in the home off Hecker Pass Hwy, but even then the Moons were offering thanks. No one was injured in the flames that tore through the house– all the family was safe as they sat down to their meal at the home of Doug Moon, one of Dean and Gerri’s three children.
“We’re learning to take things day by day,” Dean said. “It’s hard to say that anything good has come of this – it was just an awful accident. But, I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. If there is any good in all this, it’s been the incredible outpouring of feelings and help from the community. People are doing so much to help us, it’s phenomenal.”
As word of the catastrophe spread through the community, fellow parishioners of New Hope Community Church were calling and offering help. Dean and Gerri moved into a small trailer that stands behind the parcel of land on Hecker Pass Highway where their home once stood. A friend in the trailer business has promised to find them a larger trailer to live in while they begin the rebuilding process.
The second week of December, members of the Morgan Hill Police Academy arrived to help the Moon family and friends salvage whatever they could from the charred remains of the house, carrying out burnt furniture and water-damaged bric-a-brac that once made the house a home.
It was during this process that someone handed Gerri and old shoe box that had been tucked away in her closet. Inside were love letters – 99 Dean wrote and 110 Gerri wrote – the couple exchanged early in their relationship while Dean was away at college. Though they were a little soggy, they were intact.
“Those letters were, to me, one of the most important things that could have been saved,” Gerri said. “And we had photo albums in the library on one of the top shelves. The outsides got burned, but I think we’re going to be able to save most of the pictures. Those photos mean so much to us.”
The old desk Dean is using in his new office on Eigleberry Street survived the fire because a piece of glass over the top protected it from hot ash and cinders. The paper he’s using to send out mailers to clients was also salvaged. It doesn’t quite lay flat in the printer and some of it is still a little damp, having survived the flames and the water that extinguished them.
In the midst of trying to recover from disaster, the Moons did their best to observe the holidays.
Just days before Christmas, Gerri and Dean were invited to Shirley Barnes’ second-grade classroom at Pacific West Christian Academy. There they received 23 brightly wrapped packages from students there who had purchased necessities for the Moons from Bed, Bath & Beyond.
“I had made a list at the store because people said they wanted to know what we needed,” Gerri said. “And (the students) picked up almost everything on the list. It was wonderful to be with them and have them help us open our presents and to hear the children’s laughter.”
Ann Anderson, president of the Parent Teacher Fellowship at Pacific West, said each class at the school adopts a family at Christmas. Students do extra chores around the house to earn money to buy the adopted family gifts for the holidays. Karen Moon, one of Gerri and Dean’s daughter-in-laws, is an assistant principal at Pacific West, so Anderson said the class felt it was important to help a family so closely connected to the school.
On the day of Christmas Eve, the Moons went to see the movie “We Are Marshall,” which is about a college football team dying in a tragic plane crash and the college town recovering from the disaster.
“It was hard at first to see all the flames when the plane crashed – it brought back some awful memories,” Dean said. “But in the movie, they rebuild and that’s what I have to do. I left the movie with a positive attitude and I think about it a lot. We’ll pull through this.”
Most of the Moon’s Christmas decorations burned in the fire, so they didn’t even have a tree to mark the holiday. They gave family members a Bible and some spending money for Christmas. They spent Christmas Day in their granddaughter’s two-bedroom apartment, where 15 members of the family gathered to celebrate Christmas and the blessing of having each other.
Dean and Gerri spent New Year’s Eve in the trailer currently acting as their home – Dean said they were in bed asleep shortly after darkness fell. Dean’s resolution for 2007 is to get back to his regular exercise routine, which helps keep his cholesterol down. He stopped the routine after the fire because of the countless things he had to deal with.
His other goal for 2007 is, of course, to work with the city to get all the permits to start rebuilding the Moon homestead.
“I’m going to build Gerri a house just the way she wants it,” Dean said. “The last one wasn’t exactly right, but the new one will be.”
