October 23, 1999.  A car rally and a movie night. (#239)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

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Inside the church office, the lights had been turned off, except for a small desk lamp on the front desk.  Mike Mueller sat in a desk chair that had been moved to the front of the desk.  He wore all black with sunglasses.  Next to him were two small bowls, one full of red M&Ms candies and the other full of blue ones.  Behind the M&Ms was a stack of envelopes, each stamped with the outline of a running rabbit.  Five others were in the room.

“Good evening,” Mike began.  “I am Morpheus.  One of you is The One.  I’ve spent my whole life looking for you.  What is the Matrix?  It is everywhere around you.  But you have to see the way things really are for yourself.  There is no turning back.  Follow the white rabbit.  Now you must choose the red pill or the blue pill.”  Mike motioned to the bowls of M&Ms as he said this.  “Which pill do you choose?”

Great, I thought.  If I chose wrong, my team might be eliminated right off the bat.  When I heard that the college and career group at church was doing a car rally based on the movie The Matrix, I hoped that it would be no big deal that I had not seen it.  But had I seen the movie, I would probably know which pill to choose now.  I tried to see the movie in the theater, back in the spring when it was first out, but when my friends and I got there, the only showing left that night was already sold out.

Mike called each of the six of us, the drivers for the participating teams, into another room one at a time, asking, “Do you want the red pill?  Or the blue pill?”  He had been speaking more slowly than usual, probably because he was in character as some guy named Morpheus from the movie.  I still had no idea which pill was correct, but the first thing that popped into my mind related to either of these colors was the California Blue Waves, the baseball team that I absolutely detested.  Blue was not going to be my choice.  “Red,” I said.  Mike handed me one red M&M and an envelope marked with a red dot, with instructions to eat the M&M and keep the envelope sealed for now.

After all of us had chosen our pills and received our envelopes, Mike explained, “Now  find your teams.  Open the envelope when you get to the car; it will tell you what to do.  Go!”

I ran back out of the building, where my team waited for me.  We formed teams while we were waiting for the event to start, and I had Lacey Kilpatrick, Jen Aldrich, and Jen’s boyfriend Kevin Reed on my team.  I got excited earlier when Lacey asked me if my team was full yet; a fun competition sounded like a great night, but hanging out with Lacey at said fun competition sounded even better to me.  I was a little apprehensive, though, because my one previous experience with a car rally, four years ago, had gone badly.  None of us on my team then were able to decipher the first clue, so we drove around for an hour and a half, accomplishing nothing.  It did not help that the clue had a typo.

When we got back to my car, I opened the envelope.  Inside were about a dozen small squares; a message had been typed on a piece of paper, which had then been cut into pieces.

“Have you ever had,” Lacey said, reading from one of the papers.  “This one says ‘a dream that felt,’ maybe those two go right next to each other?”

“Pines that grow lemons,” I read.  “What does that mean?”

“This one says ‘go to the grove of,’” Jen pointed out.  “Maybe these two are next to each other?  Go to the grove of pines?  That makes sense.”

“But how do pines grow lemons?” Lacey asked.

“This one says ‘Blake Lo,’” I said, pointing at another piece of paper.  “Blake Lowry lives at Pine Grove Apartments, which is on Lemon Court!”  With this breakthrough, we were quickly able to put all the papers together in the right way and read the whole message:

Have you ever had a dream that felt real?  Can you wake up?  Blake Lowry can help you wake up.  Go to the grove of pines that grow lemons.  Be ready to make a splash!

I pulled out of the church parking lot and drove south on Andrews Road, turning right on Eighth Street past Maple Drive, then zigzagging through a neighborhood of student-oriented apartment buildings until I reached Lemon Court.  Blake stood outside his apartment near the swimming pool, next to a chair with a pile of bath towels on it.  Three other teams arrived around the same time.  “Welcome to the real world,” Blake said mysteriously.

“The clue said ‘make a splash,’” I said.  “Is there something in the pool?”

“Look!” Jen exclaimed, pointing at gallon-sized plastic bags in the deep end of the pool, each weighed down by a rock inside, and also containing a folded piece of paper.  “Someone’s gonna have to dive into the pool.”

It was late October.  It was starting to get cold at night this time of year.  As I was thinking about how much I did not want to dive into a pool and be wet all night, Kevin began taking off his shoes and emptying his pockets.  “I got this,” he said.  He dove into the deep end before any of us could react; I watched his distorted underwater body for several seconds, slowly moving toward the bags with our next instructions in them, then slowly surfacing until his head, wet but less distorted now, broke above the surface of the water.  He took a deep breath, tossed the clue to me, and shouted, “Let’s go!”  The three of us cheered as he got out of the pool and dried himself off with one of the towels on the chair.

“Thanks for taking one for the team, Kevin,” I said.

I opened the clue.  At the top was the same rabbit stamp from the first clue, then below this was a picture of a gravestone, with “R.I.P.” written on it, and the Grim Reaper standing next to it.  Beside this was a large five-pointed star.  At the bottom was typed, “ESCAPE THE AGENT BY DODGING THE BULLETS.  EVERY OTHER UNUSED LETTER.”

“Every other unused letter,” I said, quietly enough that Lacey and Jen could hear me, but not loud enough for any other teams to hear.  I tried reading every other letter of the message on the page, but that did not spell anything coherent.  “It’s not every other letter on this clue,” I said out loud.  “We have to find something else.  Something with unused letters, apparently. And the gravestone picture must be a clue to where.”

As we jogged to the car, Lacey asked, “Is there a cemetery in Jeromeville?”

“Yes,” I said.  “On Eighth, past Power Line Road.  I guess that’s where we’re going next.”  I drove back to Eighth Street and headed east, across Maple Drive, across Andrews Road, and eventually into the grid of lettered and numbered streets in the oldest part of Jeromeville.

As I slowed down to stop at a red light at G Street, Jen said, “I’m glad we’re in your car.  You know your way around Jeromeville so well.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“What do you think the star in the clue means?” Lacey asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered.  “There’s something we’re missing here.”

“Maybe a gravestone with a star on it?  Isn’t that a Jewish thing?”

“If it was, it would be a six-pointed Star of David.  Hmm… star… grave star… Grim Reaper star…” I contemplated.  Then, at the same time, Kevin and I said, “Death star.”

“Shit!” I screamed.  “We’re going the wrong way!  Sorry, didn’t mean to swear at a church activity.”  After the light turned green, I pulled over as soon it was safe.  “The Death Star building on campus.  That’s probably where we’re supposed to go.  Not the cemetery.”

“Oh my gosh, I bet you’re right!” Lacey exclaimed.

“Does the whole car agree?” I asked.  “Abandon our trip to the cemetery and go to the Death Star instead?”  Kevin and Jen answered in the affirmative, so I zigzagged my way on the grid streets toward campus, avoiding areas that would be heavy with pedestrian traffic on a Saturday night.  I parked on A Street across from the Social Sciences Building, affectionately known as the Death Star because its concrete and metal canyons reminded people of the Death Star from Star Wars.  I jogged around the perimeter of the building, and the others followed me.  We saw Randy Smith, Marlene Fallon, 3 Silver, and Morgan King running toward the parking garage on the north end of campus; they must have completed the task already.

At the far end of the Death Star building, a girl named Heather, whom I had seen around church but did not know well, stood under a streetlight, wearing all black with sunglasses.  “Hello, Mr. Anderson,” she said to me in a deadpan voice; I figured this must be a quote from the movie.  She handed me a folded piece of paper and a pencil; I noticed that she had two more papers in her hand.

“It’s a word search,” I said.  “There’s a list of words to find at the bottom.”

“This shouldn’t be too hard,” Lacey added.

After a few minutes, in which we saw one more team arrive, we had all of the words circled.  “Now we read every other unused letter,” I said, referencing the previous clue.  I wrote down all of the unused letters in the puzzle at the bottom of the page, then I rewrote them, only including every other letter.  YOURTRAININGISATDCCXKST, it said.

“Your training is at… where?” Jen asked, reading the letters.  “Did you skip a letter there at the end and write the wrong thing?”

I thought about it for a few seconds, then shouted, “Got it!  I’ll explain in the car.”

We jogged to the car just as we saw Jen Powell and her team arrive.  If Heather had printed exactly one word search for each team, then the other Jen’s team was in last place, which would put us in fourth place out of six.  Not great; I had cost us precious minutes by heading toward the cemetery instead of going straight from Blake’s apartment to the Death Star.

“Where are we going?” Lacey asked.

“D-C-C-X.  Roman numerals for seven hundred ten.  And K-S-T is K Street.”

“Oh!” Kevin exclaimed.

“You’re good at this!” Lacey said as I pulled up to a stop sign.

“Thank you,” I replied, looking over at her, smiling.

We arrived at 710 K Street and parked a little ways past the house.  It was a nondescript one-story house in an older neighborhood with a relatively large front yard.  Randy’s team, the ones we saw ahead of us at the Death Star, was still here, searching for something in the yard. The house was dark, as if no one was home.  A sheet of paper was taped to the door; this one had the same rabbit stamp as the other clues, along with a picture of Woody, the cowboy sheriff character from the movie Toy Story.  Great, another reference to a movie I had not seen.

“Huh?” Lacey asked, whispering so the other team would not hear us.

“This is definitely the right place, but what are we supposed to do?” I asked.  “Any ideas?  I never saw Toy Story.”

“I did, but I’m not sure what it has to do with The Matrix, or the clue,” Kevin explained.

“Yeah,” I said.  “All we have to go on is this picture of Woody.  That’s his name, right?”

“Woody, yes,” Jen said.

“And what are they looking for over there?  Or are they just looking–”  I paused and whispered intensely, “Follow me!” I had gotten an idea mid-sentence.  I pretended to look around the yard for clues, as the others here were doing, but once we got to the sidewalk, I headed back to the car and motioned for the rest of the team to get in.  I drove off, hoping that the other team would not be able to follow us.

“Where are we going?” Jen asked.

“Woody!  Woody’s Pizza!” I exclaimed.

“Yes!” Lacey agreed excitedly.  “And we left before Randy’s team!”

Woody’s Pizza was on G Street downtown, in the middle of the crowded area I was trying to avoid.  The streets were filled with people visiting various restaurants and bars nearby.  I drove the entire length of the block without finding a place to park.  “Maybe someone can get out and find the next clue while I drive around the block looking for a parking place?” I suggested.

“That’ll work,” Jen said.  “Kevin and I will get out.  If we’re done before you two find a place to park, we’ll stand on the sidewalk and wave at you when you come back around.”

“Sounds perfect,” I replied.

After Jen and Kevin stepped out of the car, I drove down to the end of the block and stopped at the four-way stop at Second Street.  “Is that Darius?” Lacey asked, pointing out the window at a guy sitting on a bench.  He held what looked like a cell phone, something not many people had back in those days.

“I think so,” I replied.  “He must be working this event, doing whatever this clue is.”

We drove around the block, coming back around to Woody’s by way of Third Street.  Jen and Kevin were standing on the corner waving; we got as close to them as we could and let them back into the car.

“‘505 Angelina Street.  That’s your exit,’” Kevin said.  “That was our clue.”

I worked my way to First Street and turned on Cornell Boulevard, headed under the railroad tracks toward south Jeromeville.  “I’ve never seen a pay phone ring before!” Jen exclaimed.

“What?” I asked.

“That was how we got the clue,” Kevin explained.  “We were looking outside, and the pay phone rang.  I answered, and a voice said ‘505 Angelina Street, that’s your exit,’ and hung up.”

“Pay phones have phone numbers on them, and I’ve heard you can call a pay phone, but I’ve never done it myself.  Lacey saw Darius Curtis sitting on a bench with a cell phone, so he’s probably calling the pay phone whenever he sees someone from our group approach.”  I turned onto Highway 100 eastbound toward Capital City.

“Where are you taking us?” Jen asked, suddenly noticing that we were on the freeway. “Capital City?”

“No,” I said.  “505 Angelina Street.  A family from church lives there, I forget their names, but Liz Williams is renting a room from them. She was my year, she went on a year-long mission trip to an unreached people group in rural Russia after she graduated, and she moved back this summer.  I went to her house for a presentation on her mission trip, and I’ve been there on a bike ride too.”  I took the Bruce Boulevard exit and turned back onto Cornell Boulevard, having avoided two and a half miles of much lower speed limits, then turned left on Angelina Street, in a neighborhood that was just built last year, at the easternmost extreme of Jeromeville.

The four of us ran up to the porch.  I knocked, and Liz answered the door.  “Hello,” she said, wearing all black.  “My name is Trinity.  This is your final destination.”  She handed me a folded piece of paper.

“Thanks!” I replied.  We ran back to the car, and as I started it, I gave the paper to Lacey and asked, “What does it say?”

Lacey read, “‘2121 Buckeye Lane.  Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.’”

I started the car and drove north across the freeway, then west on Coventry Boulevard until I got to Buckeye Lane.  I had been to this house many times before.  Several people from church lived there, including Adam White, the youth pastor; Mike Mueller, who had played Morpheus tonight; and Colin Bowman, who had hosted the Bible study I was in last year in that same house. Colin was a driver in the car rally tonight; I had seen him at the church earlier.

Adam answered when I knocked.  “Everyone is in the garage,” he said, pointing to a door off the kitchen.  “I think you guys are first.”

“Really?” I said excitedly.  “We weren’t first for most of the night.”

“I haven’t seen any other teams get here.”

The four of us walked through the door to the garage.  “Congratulations,” Mike said, still in costume as Morpheus.  “You won.”  Blake, Darius, and Heather, now finished handing out clues, were also in the garage.

“Nice!”  I said, visibly excited.  I high-fived everyone else in my group.

“Great job, Greg!” Lacey exclaimed.

“How did you get here so fast?” Darius asked.  “Your group was third to get my clue, and you got here first, and it’s not even close.  No one else is here yet.”

“Greg knew right where to go when he got your clue,” Lacey suggested.  “Maybe other people didn’t know where Angelina Street was?”

“That could be,” I said.

About five minutes later, Colin arrived, with Brianna Johns, Chelsea Robbins, and Tim Walton.  “How did you beat us?” Colin exclaimed. “We were ahead of you the whole night!”

“I told you, it’s because Tim stopped to ask for directions,” Chelsea said.

“Well, how else were we supposed to find Angelina Street?” Tim asked.  “And it’s not my fault none of the first five people we asked knew where it was!”

“It’s a good thing we found that guy at Kafe Misha using the Internet, so he could look it up for us on Mapquest,” Brianna said.  “Otherwise it might have taken us even longer to find.”

“So after all the teams get here, we’re going to watch The Matrix,” Mike explained.  “Adam brought the projector from church, and we hooked it up to my brand-new DVD player.”  A white sheet hung over the closed garage door to act as a screen.  The projector sat on a table about ten feet from the sheet, with couches and chairs set up on either side.  I walked over to the table and looked at the DVD player connected to the projector, the first DVD player I had ever seen.  I wondered if these new DVDs would soon replace VHS tapes as the primary medium for home movies, as music CDs had supplanted cassette tapes.

The other four teams trickled in over the next half hour, as did Liz. Apparently Angelina Street was the sticking point for all of those teams as well.  Two teams bought street maps of Jeromeville to find Angelina Street, and one of those maps did not have Angelina Street on it yet because it was a new neighborhood.  My apparent superpower of knowing my way around scored a victory for my team.  Jen Powell’s team finished last; I heard her say that they took the blue pill at the beginning, so when they assembled their cut-up paper, it told them to go back and take the red pill.

I sat on one of the couches when I first got here, and as the room filled up and couch and chair space ran out, it became evident that we would need to seat more than three people to a couch.  My left arm rested on an arm of the couch, with Lacey sitting to my right, and when more people began squeezing onto the couch, she scooted up close to me, so my right arm felt uncomfortably squished. I raised my arm and extended it along the back of the couch.  “Is that okay?” I asked Lacey.

“Yeah,” she replied, smiling.  I looked at her and smiled back.

Mike turned the lights out and started the movie.  The opening sequence showed lines of random green letters and numbers on a computer screen, reminiscent of the word search we had completed earlier.  As the movie played, I recognized other elements of the movie that had been present during the car rally.  Trinity and Morpheus showed up early in the movie, with Trinity disappearing in a phone booth. When Neo, the main character played by Keanu Reeves, first appeared, he was told to follow the white rabbit, just as Mike told us at the beginning.  A few minutes after that, Lacey stirred a little and leaned closer against me, resting her head against my chest.  I turned my head to look at her; she was smiling, and I smiled back.

In the movie, Morpheus showed Neo that everything he knew about his life was fake, a virtual reality world called the Matrix resembling human society at its peak in 1999, planted there by artificially intelligent machines.  He explained that humans and machines had gone to war hundreds of years earlier, destroying the world.  Machines had enslaved the human race to use their bodies as energy sources, living batteries.  Humans were unaware of this, because in their minds, in the Matrix, they were going about lives that were normal by 1999 standards. Someone long ago found a way to escape, starting a group that was now on a mission to free others.  It was prophesied that Neo would destroy the Matrix and bring freedom.  Wow.  Deep.

I tilted my head to the right a little so it just barely touched Lacey’s head, my dark hair touching her strawberry-blonde hair.  She smiled as she felt me move.

This movie messed with my head.  How did one truly know what is real, and what is not?  Neo’s experience of being freed from the Matrix to see the world as it really was called to mind the experience of coming to Jesus.  Jesus Christ freed us from sin and brought a new understanding of the meaning of life and spiritual reality.  The world said a lot of things, but the Word of God and God’s love were real.  I was twenty-three, I had just begun my career as a teacher, and a lot of things were changing.  Many of my oldest friends here in Jeromeville had moved away, but other new friends had taken their place.  Would they stay in my life forever?  I did not know.  But right now, at least, I was part of this church community, and I had people who cared for me and welcomed me into their lives.  That was real.  And, far more exciting from my perspective, an adorably cute girl was almost cuddling with me right now.  I could feel her against my side.  I was a little apprehensive about the age difference, considering that she had just turned nineteen this month, but that was not necessarily insurmountable.  Was this real, or were things not what they seemed?  Either way, maybe it was time to take the red pill and see where this rabbit hole would lead.

I bought my own DVD player a few years later, and The Matrix was one of the first DVDs I bought.

Readers: Now only 11 episodes left! (This number is subject to change, because while I have a broad outline of the rest of the story, some of my ideas may get edited out, and I may find a need to add another episode or two.)

Have you ever seen The Matrix? Have you ever done a car rally? Tell me about it in the comments.

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[Foo Fighters – Everlong]

October 20-22, 1999.  What were these students thinking? (#238)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

Only 13 episodes left! Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any. If you are new to this story, click here to start from episode 1.

The bell rang to begin period 3.  It was Wednesday morning, and this was the geometry class that had been assembled by changing twenty-three students’ schedules a week into the school year.  The room assignments had been made previously, and Room E, the converted storage room where I taught from periods 2 through 4, only had room for twenty-three desks.  The school intended to use this room only for freshman classes, for which the state at the time provided extra money to keep the class sizes small.  Since this schedule change had been made in the middle of the second week of the school year, the administration limited enrollment in my period 3 geometry to twenty-three students, even though there was no state money for small geometry classes.  I was told that rooms would be reassigned halfway through the year, and that this class would get larger and move to a larger room.  Despite all that headache at the start of the year, things had settled down now.

I had written on the board the page I wanted the class to turn to.  As soon as the bell rang, I looked up for empty desks and compared this to the seating chart to see who was absent, and I marked the absent students on the weekly attendance bubble sheet. Someone from the office would come pick up the bubble sheet about halfway through the period; this would then be scanned into the student information system.  Keeping a seating chart made the process of taking attendance go so much faster. I also used the seating chart to keep students apart if they tended to distract each other when sitting in close proximity.   “Rafael is absent?” I called out.  I did not hear a response, so I filled in the bubble for Rafael. I saw one other empty desk and announced, “Kaylee is absent?”

“I’m right here,” a soft voice said to the left of where I was looking.  I turned my head; Kaylee Santos was standing right next to my desk, just out of my field of vision when I had called her name.  She was a small, thin girl, and so far she had gotten As and Bs in everything in my class.  “I need to ask you something,” Kaylee continued, nervously.

“What is it?”

“Can I have tomorrow’s assignment?” she asked.  “I’m not gonna be here.  I’m doing something with my family.”  She spoke slowly and hesitantly; whatever she was doing tomorrow with her family was clearly not something she wanted to talk about.  Probably a funeral.  This must have been a difficult time for her, losing a loved one.  I would make sure to be extra nice to her in class today.

“Yes,” I said.  “Of course.  I’ll give it to you before you leave.  Remind me at the end of class if I forget.”

“Thanks,” she said, giving me a small smile and going back to her seat.

I liked this class.  I knew that it would get more difficult in January when they moved the class to a larger room and gave me more students.  And there were some students who were failing badly, mostly because they did not do their work and never asked for help or participated.  But it was a relatively well-behaved class, and in general, this class of only twenty-three students stayed quieter than my other two geometry classes of thirty-one and thirty, respectively, in the larger room.

I gave the students time to start their homework at the end of the period.  I saw Kaylee out of the corner of my eye as I walked back to my desk, remembering that she had asked for tomorrow’s assignment because she had a family funeral to go to.  I looked through my notes and found the assignment in question.  I wrote the page number and problem numbers on a scrap of paper and handed it to Kaylee as she sat at her desk working.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.


Later that day, I had geometry in the normal-sized Room C-6 for periods 6 and 7.  Because Jorgensen High School was overcrowded, most teachers taught in different rooms throughout the day so that every room would be used every period.  I did not have a class period 5, and both of my rooms were used by other teachers, so most days I went to the lunch room and got work done there during that period.

I took attendance at the beginning of period 6, scanning the room for empty desks and marking the absent students on the attendance sheet while I gave students a problem to work on.  I had overhead projector slides for today’s lesson that I had written with a wet-erase overhead marker during my morning geometry class in the other classroom.  I did this every day, writing the slides during that class and saving them to use them for the other two classes.  I put up the slide for a problem from last night’s homework that I wanted to go over with the class, with everything covered up except for the first step; I would reveal the worked-out problem one step at a time.  “What do we do now?” I asked.  I shuffled the cards on which I had written the students’ names, and pulled a card.  “Pablo?” I called.  I looked over at Pablo’s desk.

The boy in Pablo’s seat was not Pablo.  I had never seen this kid before.  He had messy hair and bad acne.  I looked at him directly and said, “Who are you?”  The kid in Pablo’s desk stared off into space, so I repeated my question.  Others around him turned, trying to get his attention, and a few people across the room laughed.

“Huh?”

“Who are you?  You’re not in this class.”

“Yeah I am.”

“He’s a new student,” someone said from the other side of the room.

I walked over to check his schedule to make sure he was in the right room.  His schedule listed his name as Christopher; I was not sure whether or not he went by Chris, since he did not say anything when I asked his name.  “So you just walked in and picked a seat?  You didn’t even tell me who you were?”  Christopher shrugged as I pointed to the only empty desk in the room, on the opposite side of the room.  “That seat over there is empty.  Someone else sits where you are now.”

Christopher carried his stuff to his proper seat and sat down.  I walked to the door, where I had hung the attendance bubble sheet and filled in the bubble indicating that Pablo was absent.  Later in the period, when I had a break, I went to the file cabinet and found copies of all the papers I handed out on the first day of school: the class rules, a paper for parents to fill out with their phone numbers, and questions for the students to answer about themselves so I can get to know them.  I handed these to Christopher with instructions to fill them out and turn them in as soon as possible.

It was also my responsibility to issue him a textbook.  I had exactly two extra textbooks; I grabbed one, wrote down the number on it, and took it to Christopher’s desk.  “Here’s your textbook,” I said.

Christopher looked at me, confused, then said, “I have a book.”  He reached into his backpack and pulled out a geometry textbook.  I did not give him this book, and I had never seen this book before; it was not the textbook that we used at Jorgensen.

“What is that book?” I asked.  “Where did you get that?”

“From my old school,” he explained, like it was the most obvious thing ever.

I flipped through the pages, trying to make sense of what happened, and I saw stamped on the first page: SAN DIEGO UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT, SAN DIEGO, CALIF.  “You brought this book with you from San Diego?”

“Yeah.”

“They didn’t ask for it back?”

“No.”

“This book belongs to your old school.  You need to give it back.  These books cost a lot of money.”

“They don’t care.”

“Yes, they do!  You need to send it back.  Either that, or they’ll send you a bill.  They won’t send your transcripts to us until you return your book, or pay for it.”

“Huh?”

“We’re gonna ask your old school for your grades.  They’ll notice that you haven’t returned your books, and they’ll make you pay for them.”

“No, they won’t.”

“Whatever,” I said, exasperated.  “It’s not my problem.  But don’t be surprised when you get a bill.  And this is the book we use at Jorgensen.”  I put the book on his desk.

“What page are we on?” he asked.  I pointed to the board, where I had written the page number, and I went back to teaching.  Was this really a thing?  Did students who moved far away routinely steal textbooks from their old school and see nothing wrong with it?  I shook my head.


Thursday morning, I found myself again taking attendance in period 3.  As I always did, I looked around the classroom for empty seats, so that I could quickly mark students absent.  My mind tended to jump all over the place as a teacher, with so many things I needed to keep track of, so when I first saw Kaylee’s empty desk, it did not register that we had spoken about this the day before.  I just said, “Kaylee is absent?”  Then I paused as my memory of yesterday came back, when Kaylee hesitantly asked me what she would miss because she would be at a funeral with her family.  I added, “That’s right, I remember.  She told me she wasn’t going to be here.”

Kaylee’s friend Alicia heard me and said, “She went to go see the Backstreet Boys.”

I stopped in my tracks and looked at Alicia.  I thought, really?  That was why she was skipping school today?  I realized then that she never actually said that she was going to a funeral.  I had just inferred that from the way she was talking.  But, of all the fun things she was skipping school to do, it had to be the Backstreet Boys?  I hated the Backstreet Boys.  I hated boy bands in general, and all of the overly flashy pop music that had become so huge in the last couple years.  I was more into what had been called alternative rock, although that word was losing a lot of its meaning.  The name had been coined at some point in the 1980s to indicate rock music that had a different sound from the bombastic glam rock and heavy metal that had dominated the era.  In the early 1990s, bands like R.E.M. and Nirvana that had been classified as alternative rock became mainstream, phasing out older glam rock bands like Guns N’ Roses and Motley Crüe and becoming the dominant force in rock music.  This begged the question: what exactly was alternative rock the alternative to now?

The dominance of so-called alternative rock was subsiding these days, being replaced with a new generation of pop stars, including boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and this scantily-clad 17-year-old kid named Britney Spears.  Boy bands were nothing new.  My generation had the New Kids on the Block, for example.  But to me, they all sounded equally bland and unoriginal.  And the term “boy band” itself was a misnomer, as most boy bands just sang and danced. They did not play their own instruments or write their own songs.  Britney Spears was even more detestable to me.  She had a terrible voice.  Her entire image was artificial and curated in order to be popular and sexy, and she was still legally a child, despite all the sexually suggestive lyrics and rumors of plastic surgery.  This was offensive to my Christian values.  Of course, my generation had Madonna performing sexually suggestive music, but Madonna was shocking and controversial in the 1980s, whereas this kind of thing was normal and celebrated coming from Britney Spears in 1999.  Madonna also was not a minor; she was well into her twenties by the time she became popular.  And, of course, I was also exactly the type of pedant who disapproved of the fact that Britney Spears’ parents did not even know how to spell Brittany correctly.

I continued running my class the way I had planned to.  It was the front office’s decision whether or not to excuse Kaylee’s absence.  I was not sure of the protocol, whether or not I should report to the office what I found out about the reason for her absence.  I was not going to push for Kaylee to get in trouble, though.  She was a good student, she had never caused problems in my class before, and as long as she continued attending school most of the time and getting her makeup work done, I would not make a fuss over her missing one day for an experience like this.  A Backstreet Boys concert was not something that happened every day.  I had done something similar just a few weeks ago, after all, when I had met my family in Bay City for the final Titans baseball game in the old stadium on a school day.

And there was a good chance that Kaylee had not lied to me at all.  She never told me she was going to a funeral; she just said that she had something to do with her family.  Maybe her whole family was going to the concert.  Maybe her parents were Backstreet Boys fans too, or more likely, maybe her parents supported her interests and passions.  Kaylee was only fifteen years old, not old enough to drive.  A big concert tour like the Backstreet Boys would only be playing in big cities, so the show was probably in a large sports arena or stadium in Bay City, Oaksville, San Tomas, or Capital City, all of which were a significant distance from the school.

As I walked toward the overhead projector to get class started, a lot of students were noisily talking about things other than math.  My afternoon classes were often like this, my Basic Math A classes were often like this, but period 3 geometry was usually the quiet class.  Not today, apparently.  I heard girls on the other side of the room arguing.  Alicia, the one who told me where Kaylee actually was today, and a girl named Jessica in the desk next to her were animatedly in a heated discussion.  “Three, two, one,” I counted down, standing in front of the white board, next to the overhead projector, waiting for the class to get quiet.  Alicia and Jessica realized what was happening and stopped talking, but Jessica quickly raised her hand.

“Yes, Jessica?” I said.

“Is Alicia’s shirt maroon or burgundy?”

Really? I thought.  What were these students thinking?  We had work to do, the class was noisy and off task, students were skipping class to go see boy bands, and this was what they were arguing about this whole time?  And why would they expect me to know this?  Exasperated, I replied, “I’m a guy.  It’s red.”


Kaylee was back on Friday.  She only missed one day of school.  She apparently bought a lot of merchandise at the concert, because she was wearing it all to school the next day.  She walked into my classroom wearing a Backstreet Boys Into The Millennium Tour t-shirt.  Around her neck she wore a Backstreet Boys lanyard, with her ticket stub in a plastic sleeve attached to it, along with the house key that she normally wore on a lanyard.

As she walked past me, I tried my best to hold back laughter as I said, “Welcome back, Kaylee.  How was the concert?”

Kaylee looked up at me suspiciously, not making eye contact.  “It was good,” she said, quietly.  “How did you know?”

Really? I thought.  You’re dressed like that, and you have to ask how I know?  “This,” I said, gesturing toward her brand new shirt.  “And I heard Alicia say that’s where you were yesterday.”

“Oh,” Kaylee replied, walking to her seat.  I dropped the issue and went back to what I was doing.

I was not particularly upset with Kaylee.  Her bland taste in music was unsurprising for a girl of her age, and it really was none of my business, not affecting my life in any meaningful way.  And, while officially the school frowned upon students skipping classes to go to concerts, even with permission from parents, I did not think of this as a particularly serious offense.  Kaylee had the natural consequence of having work to make up, but if she was capable and willing to do so, I did not see an inherent problem with her enjoying memorable life experiences every once in a while.  After all, I had done the same thing when I went to the Titans game last month.

Something similar happened about six months later.  A boy named Rich from my period 6 class was absent on the day of the first Titans game in the new stadium, and he came to school the next day wearing brand new Titans merchandise.  I asked him how he liked the new stadium, and he answered nervously, knowing that he had been caught.  I reminded him that we had a substitute on the day of the last game in the old stadium, and he smiled knowingly at me.

I never did find out what happened with Christopher and the textbook he brought with him from his old school in San Diego.  That one just blew my mind that he would have not even thought to return his book, and that he brought it with him when he moved five hundred miles away, and that with all that disregard for school property, he would remember to bring it to school here.  I did not stress over it much; it was not my problem, and not my job to enforce anything.

 I have told people many times, in hindsight, that although it sounded odd to hear a teacher say this, I have always wished that I had spent a little less time studying and more time experiencing life with friends.  The night I played sardines in the Death Star building, the night I slept on the beach at Moonlight Cove, watching those silly boys from church make a snow toilet at Winter Camp, those memories made a much more lasting emotional impact on me than any memory involving finding the determinant of a matrix or proving that an algebraic group was abelian.  So, good for Kaylee for taking the time to go see the concert, and for being responsible enough to make sure she knew what she was missing in class.  And as much as I was still not a fan of boy bands, a few songs from that era have grown on me a little over the years, purely for the nostalgia.

Readers: Now only 12 episodes left! (This number is subject to change, because while I have a broad outline of the rest of the story, some of my ideas may get edited out, and I may find a need to add another episode or two.)

What is a song that you used to hate that now you like, or at least has grown on you? And why? Tell me about it in the comments.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

[Backstreet Boys – I Want It That Way]

Mid-October, 1999.  Finishing a long project. (#237)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

Only 14 episodes left! Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any. If you are new to this story, click here to start from episode 1.

For the last couple weeks, I had spent every spare moment putting the finishing touches on my Dog Crap and Vince computer game.  This would be one of the largest projects I had ever completed, and the end was in sight.  I just needed to get a few more of my friends to record voices for a few more characters, so I had asked a bunch of people recently to lend their voice talents to my project.

The Edge, the youth group at church, met on Tuesdays this year, a change from previous years when it had met Wednesdays.  Last Tuesday, while volunteering at The Edge, I asked fellow volunteer Jamie Dodson if she was available to record her voice, since she was one of the few youth group leaders who had not already done this for me.  She said she would come today, Saturday, around noon, so I was not surprised when I heard a knock at the door around that time.  I was surprised, however, to see Emma Paul-Matsuda with her.

It should not have been too surprising.  Emma and Jamie were childhood best friends who grew up together in Ashwood and came to the University of Jeromeville together as freshmen last year.  The two of them were almost always together at church, and at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship. They roomed together as freshmen, and this year, they lived together in the same apartment off campus.  Jamie was taller than average for a girl, thin with brown hair and bright blue eyes, whereas Emma was several inches shorter, of average build and mixed European and Asian heritage.

“Hey, Greg,” Jamie said.  “Is it ok that I brought Emma?”

“Sure,” I replied.  “I’ll find a role for Emma in the game too.”

“I was just gonna watch,” Emma explained, “but I can if you want me to!”

“It’ll probably only be a few lines, but I’ll find something for you,” I explained.  “Part of the fun of making this game has been getting all my friends involved in this experience.”

“That’s really cool,” Jamie said.  “So where is your game design studio, or whatever you call it?”

“Game design studio?  You’re vastly overestimating my budget and general level of seriousness,” I chuckled, as I motioned for Jamie and Emma to follow me to the desk in my bedroom.  “I’ve made this whole game with the same computer I used last year to write papers and check email.”

“So how does this game work, anyway?” Emma asked.  “Like, what do you have to do in the game?   Jamie just told me yesterday that you were making a video game. I didn’t know that was something you did.”

“It’s definitely not anywhere near the quality that you’ll see from professional game publishers,” I explained.  “So hopefully you’re not disappointed.”

“Not at all!”

As I turned on the computer and opened what I had so far of the game, I explained, “I grew up with the kind of old computers that you had to know a little bit about coding to get them to do anything.  I took three programming classes as an undergrad; one was required for the math degree, and the other two counted in place of an upper-division math class.  The rest I just sort of taught myself. I had a lot of time this summer to fiddle with it.  This game is based on characters from a series of stories on my website, called Dog Crap and Vince.  Have I shown you this before?”

“No!” Emma exclaimed.  “That sounds like an interesting creative hobby.”

“I’ve heard you talk about it, but I haven’t seen it,” Jamie added.

“I’ll send you the link.  But this game is basically an interactive story.  Click on ‘New Game,’ watch the intro, and you’ll see a story about Vince discovering that his Ice Monkeys jersey has been stolen.  But a few of the characters still don’t have voices, so some of the voices you won’t hear.  I’ll fill you in on any important story points you miss because of that.”

I got up to let one of the girls sit in my chair.  Jamie took control of the game as Emma asked, “Ice Monkeys jersey?  Are the Ice Monkeys, like, a team or something?”

“Yeah.  My brother came up with the name.  He’s given me so many ideas, and I’ve used so many of our inside jokes in this game that I gave him a co-writing and co-creating credit.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Jamie said.  “Where does he live?”

“Plumdale.  With Mom and Dad.  He’s a senior in high school this year.”

“Where’s Plumdale?” Emma asked.

“Near Gabilan and Santa Lucia,” I explained.

“Oh, okay.”

I showed Jamie how to control the game; she started walking around, picking up items and examining things around her.  She got stuck at the part where the annoying neighbor kid made her say the password in order to get past, the same place where most people had gotten stuck when I showed the game to them.  After a few minutes, I showed her how to get past him by throwing a water balloon at him.  Ideally, I would have wanted players to figure this out on their own, but the point of this visit was to show my work in progress and record voices, not to sit there and watch Jamie play her way through the entire game.

“That’s so funny,” Emma said, watching the whole thing standing behind Jamie.  “You have to throw a water balloon at the little kid.”

“So now that you have an idea of how this works, are you ready to record your voice?” I asked.

“Yes!  Which character am I?” Jamie asked.

I took the mouse and loaded a game file that I had saved right at the point where Jamie’s character first appears.  “Later in the game, Dog Crap and Vince and their friends are hanging out at Up-N-Down Burger,” I explained.

“Up-N-Down Burger?” Jamie laughed.  “It’s supposed to be like In-N-Out Burger?”

“Yes.  My brother came up with that one years ago.  If you talk to the girl behind the counter, that’s you, Vince tries to flirt with her, and she’s having absolutely none of that.  Your normal voice is fine for this character; you don’t have to do any silly voices.”

“Okay.”

I opened the file where I had written the script and found the lines for the Up-N-Down Burger scene.  “Let’s see.  If the player tries to walk behind the counter, you need to say, ‘Sorry.  Employees only.’”  I clicked Record as Jamie repeated her line into the microphone.  I continued, “Next, if the player tries to talk to you, Vince says, ‘Excuse me, I really like your buns,’ and you say–”

“‘I really like your buns?’ Jamie repeated, laughing.  She added, sarcastically, “That’s real smooth.”

“So you reply, ‘Eww!  You little creep!’”

Jamie repeated her line as the computer recorded it, and I repeated this process for all of Jamie’s character’s lines.  After I finished recording all of her lines, I reopened the game to the Up-N-Down Burger scene and pointed to one of Dog Crap and Vince’s friends in the background.  “That girl, her name is Christine, I hadn’t given her any actual lines, but I was thinking, Emma, you can play Christine.  I’ll make it so that if the player talks to you, you just say hi and start talking about school or something.”

“That sounds good!” Emma replied.

I typed Christine’s lines, so that Emma would have a script to read, then turned on the microphone and recorded her as I had done with Jamie.  When I finished, I said, “I guess that’s all.  Thank you both so much for your help.”

“You’re welcome!” Emma replied.

“Thank you for including us,” Jamie said.  “Can you let us know when the game is finished?”

“Sure!  And I can give you a copy of the game when it’s done.”

“Will it run on my computer?”

“It should work on Windows 95 and higher.  I haven’t tested it on anything earlier.”

“I have a Mac,” Emma lamented.  “It probably won’t run on that.”

“I don’t think it will,” I said.  “Sorry.”

“It’ll work on my computer,” Jamie said.  “Emma and I can play it together on my computer.”

“Great!”

“We should get home.  We both have midterms to study for.”

“Good luck!” I said.  “I’ll see you at church tomorrow?”

“Yeah!”


By the middle of the following week, I only had one voice left to record, and it was a fairly significant character: Mike, the school bully who actually stole Vince’s jersey.  He only had a few lines, since he only appeared in the game twice, in the introduction and at the end.  I was saving this role for someone who had been part of many of my creative projects over the years, since long before I moved to Jeromeville for school.

“Hey, Cody,” I said, opening the door after I heard him knock.  “Welcome to my house.”

“Hey, Greg,” Cody replied.  “Nice house.  How was your day at work?  What grade do you teach again?  High school, right?”

“Yeah.  Basic Math A, which is mostly freshmen, and geometry, which is mostly sophomores, but both classes have some older students who are behind in math.”

“Nice.”

My family had known the Kanekos since before either Cody or I were born.  Cody was a year older than my brother Mark, and the two of them had played baseball and basketball together growing up, sometimes as teammates and sometimes against each other.  Cody was now a freshman here at UJ, and this was the first time I had seen him in person since he moved here last month at the start of the school year.

“Actually, it’s funny you should mention work,” I said.  “Because that has to do with why I’m wearing this hat today.”  I gestured toward the Bay City Titans baseball cap that my parents had gotten free a few months ago, the one that I wore to the church picnic the day that Darius Curtis did not recognize me.  I took it off, and as Cody saw my hair sticking out in all directions, much more so than typical hat hair, he laughed.  I explained, “At school this week, we’re doing dress-up spirit days, and today was Crazy Hair Day. I ended one of my classes in the morning a few minutes early and told them to give me crazy hair.  I had a big pile of paper clips, rubber bands, and pencils for them to use.  Someone got a picture of me like that for the yearbook.”

“That’s awesome!” Cody said.  “You sound like a fun teacher.”

“I hope so,” I replied.

I went through the same process that I had for Jamie and Emma a few days ago, and for everyone else who had come over to record voices, showing Cody the introduction to the game and how to play.  But for Cody, I did not have to explain what an Ice Monkeys jersey was.  The name Ice Monkeys came from the Moport tournament that my brother Mark and I and his friends played every summer when I went home, and Cody had participated in every single Moport tournament.  I showed him every scene that Mark had recorded voices for, and every scene that I could remember that was connected to one of our childhood inside jokes.  I got to the part where Dog Crap and Vince had to sneak into the crazy neighbor lady’s house, and Cody laughed hard.  “I remember her,” he said, having seen her in other Dog Crap and Vince projects I had done when I was younger.

“So watch how you have to get past her,” I said.  I walked Dog Crap and Vince back home and called her house, and she asked if this was a prank phone call.  While she was talking, I walked Dog Crap and Vince back to her house; they could search it now that she was distracted on the phone.  “What she said about it’s not a prank phone call because there’s no heavy breathing?  Do you get that reference?” I asked.

“Oh!  It sounds familiar, but I don’t remember,” Cody replied.  “What’s that from?”

“Remember that game Maniac Mansion?  I had it on the Commodore 64?”

“Oh, yeah!”

“You had to sneak past the old lady in the mansion by calling her, and that’s what she said in the game.”

“That game was hilarious!  I remember playing it with you and Mark at your house.”

“It really was.  Brilliant game,” I said.  “So anyway, let’s get to recording.  You’re going to be the guy from the intro who they think stole the jersey.  So, like a tough guy voice.  In the end, it turns out he was part of it, but there were also aliens involved.”

“Okay,” Cody replied, laughing at the absurdity of the storyline of this game.

I showed him his lines in the script, and started recording as he read them off one by one, in his best tough guy voice.  Cody was relatively short and thin in real life, making it somewhat ironic that he was playing a character with the opposite physique, but therein lay the beauty of voice acting.

“That’s it,” I said after Cody finished speaking his last line.  “I’ll show you the finished product when it’s done.  It should be done soon, because I’ve been testing everything for a while now, and all that’s missing is the voices.”

“Awesome,” Cody replied.

“You have a lot of studying to do tonight?”

“Not really a lot, but I should get home and get to work.”

“Sounds good,” I said.  “Tell your mom and dad I said hi.”

“I will!”


Over the next few days, I spent a lot of time playtesting Dog Crap and Vince, picking up every item, examining every item, reading every sign, and talking to every non-player character multiple times.  I played the game all the way through a few times, sometimes trying to go through the story in a different order than what was intended, or skipping certain tasks.  I found a few more glitches and fixed them.  Late one afternoon, the week after Cody came over, I was finally ready to show off my game.  I walked out into the living room, where Jed, Brody, and Robby all sat, and announced, “Guess what?  My game is–” I was interrupted by the phone ringing.  I picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

After the telltale pause of a telemarketing call connecting, a voice asked, “Hello.  I’m calling from American Express.  We would like to offer you our credit card, with low interest rates, and–”

I was not in the mood for this right now, so I decided to be blunt and honest.  “Sorry.  I believe credit cards are a threat to our national security,” I blurted out.

The telemarketer on the other end of the call paused, then said, “Wow.  You sound like you’re pretty smart.  You could go on a game show and win a lot of money, or something.  I’ll just let you enjoy your day.”

“Thank you,” I said, hanging up as I heard the call disconnect.  I turned back to my housemates and continued from earlier, “So I’m finished with my game–”  I looked up and noticed that all three of them were staring at me, wide-eyed and in shock.

“That was bad-ass!” Jed exclaimed, breaking down into laughter afterward.

“I’m going to use that next time I get a telemarketing call,” Brody said.  “What did he say to that?”  I told them the telemarketer’s response, about going on a game show, and all three of them laughed.

“I’ve never heard that one before,” Robby said.  “‘Credit cards are a threat to our national security.’”

I shrugged.  “It’s true.  Anyway, who wants to try out the Dog Crap and Vince game?  It’s done.”

“Ooo!  Ooo!  Me!” Brody said.

“Can we all play it together, on my computer, so everyone can watch?” Jed asked.  Jed had his computer right here in the living room.

“Go for it,” Brody replied.  I watched as my three housemates tried to navigate the game. Brody already knew about throwing the water balloon at the kid, and eventually when Dog Crap and Vince found the strange old lady’s phone number, the three of them working together figured out to call her and search her house while she was on the phone, distracted.  I smiled, proud of my housemates for figuring out one of my puzzles.

After about an hour, Robby had already walked to the kitchen to make food, and the other two were ready to take a break.  “Can I save my game?” Jed asked.

“Yes!” I replied, showing him where to click to save the game.

“This looks really good so far,” Brody said.

“Yeah,” Jed added.  “No wonder you’ve been working so hard on it the last few months.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I bought a bunch of blank CDs and copied the game, once for everyone who helped with the game and had a computer that could run it, plus ten extra copies to sell.  I put a sticker on the CD case of the Dog Crap and Vince game saying that the price was ten dollars.  However, I was only selling them myself, not in a store or anything, and I gave away many more copies than I actually sold.

But, in hindsight, that was all right.  I was never going to make tons of money from this game.  The most valuable part of the experience was not money, nor was it coding, since I never really used computer coding skills much in life.  Two things were more important than that.  I persevered and completed a major project, something that was often a struggle for me.  This video game was finally emerging from the massive pit of unfinished projects that had taken my creative energy for the last decade or so, and that gave me a great sense of accomplishment.  Additionally, with all the voice acting, I got to share this project with many of my friends.  I made a second Dog Crap and Vince game the following year, and most of my friends reprised their roles, with some new ones participating as well.

One interesting side effect of sharing this project with friends came several years later, when I got an email from a name I did not recognize.  I had a character biographies section on the Dog Crap and Vince website, and in the bios, I listed everyone who had portrayed the characters, so Emma’s name was listed on Christine’s bio.  Some guy who went to Jeromeville and knew Emma, but not me, was searching the Internet for old friends he had lost touch with, trying to track them down, and when he saw Emma’s name on Christine’s character bio, he told me to tell her that he said hi.  I wrote back and explained to him exactly why Emma’s name was there, and I apologized, because at that point I had not talked to Emma in a few years and did not know how to get in touch with her.

Some of the people who performed in the Dog Crap and Vince games stayed in my life, some of them did not, but all of them left a mark on my life by being part of this project.  The creative artistic value and the camaraderie, the memories of making this game and sharing the experience with friends, were much more important and memorable than any money I might have made from this.

Readers: Speaking of persevering through a long project, there are now only 13 episodes of DLTDGB left! (This number is subject to change, because while I have a broad outline of the rest of the story, some of my ideas may get edited out, and I may find a need to add another episode or two.)

Tell me in the comments about a long project that you persevered through.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

[Toad the Wet Sprocket – Throw It All Away]

October 6, 1999. This year’s new Bible study. (#236)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 1 Comment

Only 15 episodes left! Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any. If you are new to this story, click here to start from episode 1.

It wasn’t fair, I thought.  It only took about three minutes to drive to Darren and Katrina’s house on 15th Street, but that thought was running through my mind the whole way there, as it had been off and on for the last several days, ever since Clint Ryland told me at church on Sunday that Darren and Katrina would be hosting Bible study this year.

Darren Ng and Katrina Twigg were both a year behind me at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  I used to see them around large group meetings all the time, and I saw Darren at the Man of Steel Tournaments and sometimes at the X-Files watch parties at the De Anza house.  A few years ago, the same summer I went to Oregon, a group of students from JCF went on a short-term mission trip to China; Darren and Katrina came back from that trip boyfriend and girlfriend.  The following year, I saw a lot less of them around JCF, and I learned why when I ran into them at the grocery store one day: Katrina was pregnant.

I had overheard mutual friends say that they had a son now, Ethan, who was born in December, almost a year ago.  I also overheard that Darren and Katrina had gotten married, and that they both had put their educational plans on hold, with neither of them having graduated yet.  It all seemed unfair to me.  I had been hearing messages for years about how God designed us to not be sexually involved with people we were not married to.  Some of the books that were trendy among Christian young adults these days took it one step further, making the point that dating was not Biblical, that spending time alone with the opposite sex led to temptation, and that the best way was to get to know the opposite sex platonically and then jump straight to planning marriage, all without dating.  I was not that extreme.  I had borrowed the most popular book in this genre, I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris, from Taylor Santiago, and I could not finish it.  It felt a bit extreme, and it seemed written for people who had found Christ after having had experience making bad choices in previous relationships. It was unhelpful to someone like me who did not know how to get in a relationship to begin with.  But I still held to the ideals of waiting for marriage and getting to know someone as friends first, and it seemed unfair that this never worked out for me, while Darren and Katrina had their happy family after going about everything in the wrong order. For that matter, one of the Bible verses I heard quoted most often on this subject, “do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires,” was attributed to Solomon, and he was not exactly known for following God’s plan for sexuality.

Of course, I knew that I was being petty and judgmental.  I also knew that it was none of my business what Darren and Katrina were and were not doing with their private lives.  I knew that their lives were probably not perfect.  And I knew in my heart that no girl owed me a relationship, and that I should be rejoicing in the fact that God loved me and put boundaries around his plan for sexuality, to guard my heart and keep me healthy.  But it all still seemed unfair.  And I was actually looking forward to seeing Darren and Katrina again, and meeting baby Ethan for the first time.

I had never been inside the Ngs’ house, but I knew exactly where it was, and the floor plan was familiar once I got inside.  The house was half of a duplex with the same floor plan as mine, only mirrored, and the other half of the house was the JCF Staff House, where I had been many times.  The McAllens, who ran JCF, rented the Staff House with Cheryl, another full-time JCF staff member.  Normally, other part-time JCF staff also rented rooms at the Staff House, but this year they were not renting their spare room because the McAllens had a baby on the way.

JCF had been such a big part of my life for the last four years, but it was now primarily in the past.  JCF was specifically a group for students, and while I had never explicitly asked whether or not I could still be part of the group now that I was not a student anymore, I did not remember anyone sticking around the group after finishing school.  Alumni did visit JCF occasionally, though, and I had not ruled out occasionally attending as a visitor.

Despite that, now that I was no longer a student, it no longer felt right to attempt to be part of a JCF Bible study.  Fortunately, I still had my church, Jeromeville Covenant, and there were a few others there in the same situation as me, no longer in school and were now without a small group.  The church had a college and career group, and a young adults group, but the young adults group was really a de facto young married couples group, so Clint Ryland and Tabitha Sasaki, both from my year, had approached the church leadership about starting a small group for those of us in between. The Ngs had stepped up to host it at their house.

I knocked at the door, and Darren answered.  “Hey, Greg,” he said.  “Come on in.”  I walked to the living room, where the dining room chairs had been brought to the living room to make a circle around the couch and recliner that were already there.  I sat in the recliner.  Clint and Tabitha sat on the couch with an Asian girl whom I vaguely remembered seeing around but had never talked to.  A few minutes later, Ajeet Tripathi arrived, with a short blonde girl whom I had not met before.  I waved in Ajeet’s general direction.

“Hey, Greg,” Ajeet said.  “How’s teaching?”

“The usual.  Some kids are doing fine, some aren’t.  And I’ve been doing the scoreboard for home football games.  That’s been fun; it counts as all the extracurricular activity supervision I have to do for the year, and I get to sit out of the wind.”

“Nice!  Have you met Shannon?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

“Hi,” Shannon said, walking over to the recliner and shaking my hand.  “I’m Shannon.”

“Greg,” I replied, shaking back.  “Nice to meet you.”

A few minutes later, no one else had shown up, so Clint and Tabitha got everyone’s attention to get the group started.  “We were thinking we’d start with a brief introduction.  Most of us know each other, but we don’t all necessarily, and some of us might have new things going on in life.”

“I’ll start,” Clint said.  “I’m Clint, and I’m getting a Ph.D. in linguistics.  This is my second year.  I went to Jeromeville as an undergrad too.”

Tabitha went next, and the introductions continued around the circle from there.  “I’m Tabitha,” she said.  “I graduated from Jeromeville in 1998, I took last year off, and now I’m doing the student teaching program at Cap State.  I’d like to teach upper elementary school, like fourth or fifth grade, but I might not get my choice.  And most of you know Eddie Baker, he’s on part-time staff with JCF, he’s my boyfriend.”

“I’m Cassandra,” the girl on the couch said.  “I just graduated with a degree in biology.  I’m going to take this year off, maybe next year too, then apply to medical school.”

“I’m Ajeet,” Ajeet began.  “I just finished my degree in statistics.  I’m looking at jobs for sports statistics.  I love baseball.  My dream would be to work for the Bay City Titans, but that’s a long shot.”

“Go Titans!” I exclaimed.  “I was at the last game at Bay Vista Park, last week.”

“No way.  I’m so jealous.”

“Yeah.  That was the first time I’ve ever had a substitute.”

Shannon was next.  I listened closely since I did not know her at all, although I had gathered from the way she and Ajeet were acting that they were a couple.  “I’m Shannon,” she said.  “I’m still in school at UJ.  This is my fourth year, but I don’t think I’m graduating this year.”  I noticed a hint of a Southern accent as she continued, “I’m a math major, and Ajeet told me someone else who was gonna be here tonight was a math major.  Who is that?”

“That’s me!” I said.  “I’m Greg, I graduated in 1998 with my B.S. and 1999 with my teacher certificate, and now I’m teaching math at Jorgensen High School, next to Tyler Air Force Base.”

“I know where that is!” Shannon exclaimed excitedly.  “That’s where my parents live.”

“Oh, yeah?  Did you go to Jorgensen?”

“No.  I went to high school in Alabama.  My dad is in the Air Force, and he got transferred to Tyler.  We moved there right after high school.  I went two years at Fairview City College, then transferred to Jeromeville last year.”

“I see.  That’s cool.”

Darren and Katrina finished the introductions.  Darren had just started working as an emergency medical technician, and Katrina was staying home with Ethan but hoped to go back to school eventually.  “This little guy is ours,” Katrina announced, picking Ethan up from the floor and putting him in her lap.

“He’s cute,” Cassandra said.

Tabitha put her guitar on her lap and led us in a few worship songs.  Afterward, Clint said, “So this week we aren’t really doing a study.  We just wanted to get some ideas on what people want to study for next week.  Like, do we want to do a book study?  Or study a topic?”

“I’ve always kind of wanted to do a book study on Revelation,” Ajeet suggested.  “But I don’t know if we’re ready for that.”

“I’d love to do that too,” Clint replied, “but I think we’d need more time to prepare.  Maybe sometime later this group can tackle Revelation.”

“James was always one of my favorite books,” Katrina said.

“James is an option,” Clint announced. “Any other suggestions?”

A few other suggestions got thrown around, but in the end we decided to go with Katrina’s suggestion to study the Epistle of James.  “We’ll start the actual study next week,” Clint said.  “Any prayer requests?”

We went around and shared prayer requests.  Darren asked for prayer for his new job.  Cassandra needed to find a job; she had an interview coming up.  I said, “Pray for me as a teacher.  It’s a rough job, and a lot of kids aren’t very respectful and don’t do their work.

“That’s why I could never be a teacher,” Darren said.  “I’d be like, ‘Shut up!’”  He made a motion as if slapping someone.  “Not really, but I don’t want to have to deal with a bunch of kids talking back like that. I have a few more years before this one starts talking back,” he said, gesturing toward Ethan.

“I’d get in trouble for sure if I slapped them.”

We went around in a circle, each of us praying for the person to our left.  When it came to Shannon’s turn, she said, “God, I pray for Greg.  I pray that you will give him patience to deal with disrespectful kids.  I pray that those students will have their eyes opened and realize that they have a wonderful teacher who cares about them.  I pray that Greg will turn to you when things get difficult, and that he will be a light to these students.”

“I pray for Darren,” I said a few seconds after Shannon finished. “I thank you for giving him this job, so he can provide for his family. I pray that you will be with him on those days when it feels difficult, or when there is a lot of pressure from the nature of the job. I pray that he will be a light to his coworkers, that they will see Jesus in him through the way he lives.  And I pray for wisdom to bring up Ethan in the ways of the Lord.  I pray for Darren and Katrina as parents, that their lives will show Jesus to Ethan as he grows up.”

After we finished prayer requests, the eight of us sat around making small talk as people trickled out.  I did not stay too long, because I had to get up early in the morning.  When I got home, I heard voices in the living room.  I walked toward the voices; Brody was on the couch with Holly, his friend who he insisted was just a friend and nothing more, watching something on television.  They did not appear to be acting like anything more than just friends.

“Hey, Greg,” Brody said.  Then, as if interrupting himself, he added, “Oh!  Go show Holly your game!”

“My game?” I asked.  “The Dog Crap and Vince game?”

“Yeah!  I was telling her earlier about this video game you’re making, based on your silly comic thing, and how brilliant it is.”

“Thanks,” I said, glad that someone was enjoying it.  “Come on.”  I walked back to my room and motioned for Brody and Holly to follow me.

As my computer started up, Brody told me, “Show her the part where you have to get past the little kid who asks for the password.  That was my favorite part of what you showed me so far.”

“What kind of game is this?” Holly asked.

“It’s like an interactive story game,” I explained.  “I don’t suppose you remember a game from the late ’80s called Maniac Mansion?”

“No.”

“That was some of my inspiration for this game.  You click on an action and an item, and the characters perform the action, and that’s how the story unfolds.  Vince’s Ice Monkeys team jersey is missing, and you have to find it, getting clues from talking to people and noticing things around you.”

“Interesting!  This sounds fun!  And these are characters that you do a comic about?”

“More like an illustrated story.  I made up these characters senior year of high school.”

“Wow,” Holly said.  I let her sit in my chair as she started clicking around.  During the opening scene, one of the other characters’ mouths started moving, but no words came out.  Instead, the words appeared on the screen.

“I haven’t finished recording the voices yet,” I explained hurriedly, not wanting to interrupt her ability to hear the audible voices.  After the opening scene finished, I continued, “I’ve been having all my friends record voices for me.  But I haven’t done all of them yet.  That’s pretty much all I have left to do on this game.”

“How do you pick up items?” she asked, clicking around and looking through the house on the screen.

“Click ‘Take’ down here, then click the item.”  I showed her how the controls for the game worked, then let her continue playing.

When Holly made Dog Crap and Vince step outside, Brody said, “Which way is the kid who wants the password?”

“Right,” I said.  Holly clicked on the button to make the characters walk right, where an annoying high-pitched little boy blocked Dog Crap and Vince. 

“What’s the password?” he said.

“Who did his voice?” Brody asked.  “One of the kids from church?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Alex Hensley.”

Holly kept trying to step past the little kid, or give him things in her inventory. Nothing made him move.  Finally, Brody gave her a hint.  “It involves something in your inventory right now, but you have to do something else to it first.”

Holly slowly scrolled through the items she had found in the house, carefully thinking.  After some time, he clicked on the item called “deflated balloon” and asked, “Can I fill it with water and throw a water balloon at him?”

I looked at Brody, and he chuckled.  “Try it,” I said.  Holly walked back inside the house, placed the balloon on the edge of the kitchen faucet, and filled it with water.  She walked back outside and used the item in front of the annoying kid.

“Here’s your password!” Dog Crap said on the screen.  I had provided the voices of both Dog Crap and Vince, with Dog Crap in a lower, more gravelly voice than my normal voice, and Vince sounding like a bad impression of Kermit the Frog.  The kid on the screen began crying and running away.

“I did it!” Holly exclaimed.  “That’s so cool!  How did you learn to do all this?”

“I fiddled around with programming on a Commodore 64 as a kid, but most of the time it was too slow and too limited for games I wanted to make.  I took three coding classes at UJ, and the rest I just kind of taught myself over the last several months.”

“Wow.  What’s that Commodore thing you mentioned?”

“An old computer from the 80s.”

“I haven’t heard of that one,” Holly said.  I thought Brody had said once that Holly was twenty years old, not that much younger than me, but it still made me feel old that she had never heard of a Commodore 64.

“Can you show her the voice I recorded?” Brody asked.  “He made me be this weird, deranged guy with a trench coat.”

“Sounds like the perfect part for you!” Holly replied.

“Shush, you.”

“It’s a ways further into the game, but I have the game saved at several different points for testing purposes,” I explained.  “Let me get there.”  I clicked on Open Game and found the file I was looking for.  I walked Dog Crap and Vince to the downtown main street, where Brody’s character was waiting to talk to them.

“You do that creepy voice so well,” Holly told Brody as she listened to his character.

“You want to record a voice for me?” I asked.

“What?” Holly replied.  “Me?”

“Sure.  I still have some characters left to record.”

“I can’t do funny voices!”

“It doesn’t have to be funny.  I’ll find a character with a normal voice for you.”  I picked up my notes and looked through the list of characters.  “How about this?  Vince tries to hit on this random cute girl in the mall, using the same pickup line that Anakin used on Queen Amidala in Star Wars Episode I.  The girl says, ‘What?’ and ‘Get away from me,’ and she slaps him. I just need to record you saying those two things.”

“Sure!  So, what, I just say those things right here, and you record me?”

“Yeah,” I said.  I pulled the microphone to the front of the desk, closer to Holly, and opened the file with the script and the sound recording program.  I pressed Record and pointed at the two lines from the script.  Holly spoke the word “What?”  Next, she tried to say “Get away from me!” but about halfway through the phrase, she stumbled and started laughing.

“Don’t worry about that,” I said.  “I’ll edit it later.  I’ll use this for bloopers.”

“Your game even comes with a blooper reel?  That’s amazing.”

“Try it again,” I instructed.  Holly spoke the line correctly this time, and I stopped recording.

“I can’t wait to see the finished product!  When do you think your game will be done?”

“A week or two, I’m hoping.  Like I said, I’ve been working on this since July, and all I really have left is a few more voices to record.”

“Keep me posted!” she exclaimed.  “Let me know when it’s done!”

“I will!  I need to get ready for bed, I work in the morning, but thank you so much for helping me with this project,” I told Holly.  “Your name will be in the credits.”

“Great!  I’m gonna be famous!”

“Using a flexible definition of ‘famous,’ sure.”

“Let’s go back out to the living room,” Brody said.  “Good night, Greg.”

“Good night,” I said.

“Good night!” Holly exclaimed.  “Thanks again!”


A few minutes later, I turned the light out and climbed into bed, still thinking about the day.  My life was littered with so many unfinished creative projects that it felt surreal that this one was nearing completion.  It also gave me an excuse to make plans with friends, asking them to help record voices, and it gave me something to do with the youth group kids, whom I was supposed to be spending time with anyway.  Making plans with people was not my strong point.

About a year later, Brody met the woman who would become his first wife, and he stopped hanging out with Holly so much, although Holly was at Brody’s wedding.  I lost touch with her after that.  The Dog Crap and Vince game that I was working on back then, as well as the sequel that I made about a year later, have numerous such voices of people I have long since lost touch with.  I recently looked at the credits of this game, and one guy who had one line in the game, I do not even remember ever knowing anyone by that name.  To this day, I have no idea who that was.

This new Bible study at Darren and Katrina’s house seemed promising, as a way to have a community in Jeromeville now that I had graduated.  And I was not angry at Darren and Katrina for getting pregnant before they were married.  They were doing the right thing, getting married now and being involved parents.  I was somewhat angry at the world in general because of this, but life was hard, and relationships were frustrating.  Everyone went through that.  All I could do was stay true to what I believed, and not give up hope.

Readers: Now only 14 episodes left! (This number is subject to change, because while I have a broad outline of the rest of the story, some of my ideas may get edited out, and I may find a need to add another episode or two.)

Have you ever felt like you were doing the right thing, but things never worked out for you? Tell me about it in the comments.

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[Blink-182 – Dammit]

September 30, 1999.  A stadium passing into memory. (#235)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 3 Comments

Only 16 episodes left! Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any. If you are new to this story, click here to start from episode 1.

It was a Thursday morning, and I was driving west on Highway 100, as usual. My muscle memory led me to drift the car into the right lane at the exit where I would usually turn to head south toward Jorgensen High School, like I had on every other weekday morning when I headed this direction, but I remembered just in time that I was not going to work today. I wondered who my substitute was today; this was the first time I had ever had to call for a substitute. I hoped that I had left clear enough directions.

I had perfectly clear directions for myself today; I knew exactly where I was going. Highway 100 west across the bridge to downtown Bay City, then south on Highway 11 to Bay Vista Park on the southern edge of the city.  I had called Mom last night and arranged a place to meet outside the stadium, since Mom had all four tickets.  Mom suggested meeting somewhere in the parking lot.  I knew from experience that different sections of the parking lot were named with letters, so I whimsically suggested, “Let’s meet near the ‘Q’ sign in the parking lot.  Because Q is a funny letter.”

From the 1950s through the 1970s, baseball expanded beyond its roots in the Northeast and Midwest, following a general population shift in the United States as more people moved south and west.  Many teams moved, and new teams were added to the league, so that in a span of just twenty years, the West Coast went from having no major pro baseball teams to six.  The Bay City Titans and the California Blue Waves were the first of these six, moving west in the same year, preserving the rivalry they had when they were located near each other on the East Coast.  A new team, or a team playing in a new city, required a new stadium, and many of the stadia built in this time period were large, uninspiring concrete structures, oddly shaped to accommodate both baseball and football.  Bay Vista Park was built in 1960 as a baseball park, then remodeled and expanded around a decade later when the Bay City Captains football team moved out of their even older stadium and into Bay Vista Park.  The two teams had shared this stadium ever since, until today, the day of the final Titans baseball game at Bay Vista Park.

A massive sea of parking lots surrounded the stadium, with entrances along a road that made a ring around three-fourths of the stadium.  Dirt lots for overflow parking continued across the road.  The sign said that parking was $20 today; of course, they jacked up the price for a game that was sure to draw a maximum capacity crowd.  The new stadium, downtown near where the bridge entered the city, would supposedly be much more accessible by public transportation.  A commuter train running under the city had a station just over a mile from the new stadium, where one could transfer to a different local light rail that stopped just in front of the stadium.  This would not help me, coming from seventy miles outside the city.  There would be a parking lot near the new stadium, but smaller and much more expensive, so whenever I made it to a game at the new stadium, I was planning to drive halfway and take that train the rest of the way.

I saw the Q sign in the parking lot and turned into the nearest entrance.  I gave the parking attendant twenty dollars and turned toward the sign.  The parking lot was already filling up, so wherever I found to park, I might have to walk for a while until I got to the Q sign.  As I passed the sign, I saw Mom, Dad, and Mark standing nearby, waving at me.  They pointed about twenty feet away at a miraculously empty parking spot, the only one as far as I could see in a sea of cars.  I pulled into that spot, got out of the car, and walked to my family.

“You found a spot near the Q sign!” Mom exclaimed incredulously.

“I know!” I replied.  “Let’s go in!”

As we walked toward the entrance, Mom asked, “So how did everything go with the substitute?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said, wondering exactly how I would be expected to know this.  “I didn’t go into work today.  But I was able to call for a substitute.  I’ll find out tomorrow, I guess.”

“Oh, yeah.”

Gesturing toward my brother, a high school senior this year, I said, “Mark didn’t go to school today either, I see?”

“Right,” Mom replied.

After standing in a long line to have our ticket stubs torn, we ascended a long escalator to the upper level of the imposing concrete bowl looming before us.  From the upper level concourse, I could see the vast parking lot below; on the other side, tunnels leading to the seats interrupted the wall at various intervals.  On each level of the stadium, the seats closer to the front were made of hard orange plastic, and the seats higher up were hard red plastic.  I had always wondered about this color scheme; maybe it was because the Titans, who had orange trim on their jerseys, shared the stadium with the Captains, who wore red.  I did not know, though, whether the red seats predated the Captains’ use of this stadium, and I never did find out.

Mom and Dad had bought a package of four seats each to seventeen games; this was the only way to be guaranteed tickets to the final game.  Our seats were in the closer orange section of the upper level, looking down on third base and left field.  This was the fifth and, of course, last of those seventeen games that I had attended, tied for the most I had ever been to in one season at the time.  Mom and Dad went to some games with other couples they knew, for some games Mark brought a friend for the fourth seat, and Mom and Dad gave away some tickets for games that they could not go to.  It took almost two hours to get to the stadium from Mom and Dad’s house in Plumdale, a little longer than it took me from Jeromeville, so going to a Titans game was a big trip for us.

As a math person who knows a bit about probability, it always surprised me how easily I could find someone I knew among a crowd of sixty thousand people like today.  Before we even got to our seats, I spotted Taylor Santiago, my friend since freshman year whom I attended some Titans games with last year, walking toward us.  “Taylor!” I called out, waving.

Taylor looked up when he heard his name.  He looked around, then saw me.  “Hey! Greg!”

“You remember my parents?” I said, gesturing toward the others.  “And my brother?”

“Yeah!  Good to see you again.”

“Hi, Taylor,” Mom said.

“It’s gonna be packed today,” Taylor warned us. “Be careful.”

“I know,” I replied.

“I need to get back to my seat, but it was good seeing you!  I should be in Jeromeville for the weekend sometime in October, so I’ll probably see you at church.”

“Yeah!  Have fun!”

As we walked to our seats, Mom asked, “What did he mean, he’s going to be in Jeromeville?  Does he not live in Jeromeville anymore?”

“He graduated.  He moved back in with his parents in El Arcangel.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Mom explained.  “I forgot, your friends from your freshman dorm are done with school by now.”

By the time I sat down, rolling my eyes at Mom’s confusion about the fact that I was not in school anymore, I was dripping sweat.  “I didn’t expect it to be this hot,” I said.  Ocean currents in the Pacific bring cold water down from Alaska, so in this part of the United States the coast is often significantly cooler than inland areas like Jeromeville during summer and early fall.  Bay City, in particular the neighborhood around the stadium, was known for being cool and windy.  However, it was also not uncommon for late September and early October to be the warmest time of year in Bay City, and even with that, today was an unseasonably warm day.  I had not planned for this; I was wearing long pants and a sweatshirt when I got out of the car, and although I had taken the sweatshirt off, I still could feel sweat dripping out of multiple places on my body.

A while before the game started, a number of former players took the field, welcoming fans and sharing briefly about their experiences playing at Bay Vista Park.  I recognized most of their names, some from watching games as a kid, and some from earlier than that whom I had read about.  When I was young, the team would sell an Information Guide every year, a book with player biographies and statistics as well as team history and records. I greatly enjoyed reading those books cover to cover, learning as many interesting facts as I could about the team.

 “I hope we get to see Will Clark,” Mom said.  Will Clark currently played for Baltimore, but he was a Titan for eight seasons in my late childhood and teens, and he was a fan favorite in those days.  The Titans made the postseason early in Clark’s career, and when we watched news broadcasts of the team celebrating in the locker room, Mom laughed hard at Clark’s antics.  When the Titans made the postseason again two years later, Mom made sure to record the news broadcasts, and somewhere in the bowels of a cabinet back at my parents’ house, we still had a VHS tape of a drunk, celebratory Will Clark shouting into the camera.

“He probably has a game today,” Mark said.

“They might show him on the video screen,” Dad explained.  “They said former Titans who are still playing recorded video messages for this game.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Mom replied.

Two of the former players from the pre-game ceremony did the ceremonial first pitch.  The game started well; the Blue Waves did not score in their half of the inning, and the first player up for the Titans hit a home run.  The crowd cheered loudly.  The Blue Waves took a 2-1 lead in their half of the second inning, but the Titans had tied the game with an RBI single in their half of the third inning.  Barry Bonds, the Titans’ star home run hitter, came up to bat right after that with a runner on base, but got out.  This was his second time at bat, and so far he had not lived up to his power-hitting expectations.   Mom got up to use the bathroom after the last out of the third inning.

About thirty seconds after Mom left, a voice coming from the big video screen said, “Hi, Bay City.”  I looked up as the crowd began cheering wildly; Will Clark was on the screen, wearing his Baltimore jersey.  He said something about fond memories of playing at Bay Vista Park, and of the fans therein, but I could not hear him well over the sound of cheering.  By the time Mom got back to her seat, about ten minutes later, Clark was long gone, the game had restarted, and the Blue Waves had scored again.

“I missed Will, didn’t I,” Mom said, in an exaggerated disappointed tone.

“Yes,” I replied.

“I heard the cheers while I was walking to the bathroom, and I kept thinking, oh I hope that wasn’t Will that they were cheering for.”

The rest of the afternoon was a fun time of reminiscing, as other former players and people once associated with the team appeared on the video screen between innings to give pre-recorded messages to the fans.  But the game itself kept getting worse, as the Blue Waves went on to win, by a score of 9 to 4.  As the game ended, an announcer reminded us to stay in our seats for the post-game presentation.

Several minutes after the end of the game, streamers exploded from hundreds of locations attached to the stadium.  I jumped up and grabbed one, a strand of plastic several feet long covered in green foil.  More people shared memories of the park, and a helicopter dropped directly onto the field.  Some members of the stadium maintenance crew removed home plate and loaded it onto the helicopter, where it would be taken to the new baseball-only stadium nearing completion across town.

“Well?” Dad asked after the ceremony ended.  “You ready?”

“Yes,” I said.

As I got up and walked toward the tunnel leading to the concourse, a man I did not know stopped me and asked, “I didn’t get one of those streamers.  Do you mind if I cut off a piece of yours?”

“Sure,” I replied.  He pulled out a pocket knife, something that would never be allowed inside a stadium these days but was perfectly normal in 1999, and cut off about a foot of my streamer.

“Thank you so much!” he said.

“No problem,” I replied.

I spent over an hour of the drive home stuck in traffic.  It took a long time to get out of the parking lot, and it took even longer than usual to get out of the city on a weekday evening.  By the time I got to Briones, just twenty miles past downtown on the other side of the bridge, I had to pee again, even though I had just used the bathroom before leaving the stadium.  I knew there was an In-N-Out Burger in Briones, so I stopped there, and after I finished using the bathroom, I walked to the counter and ordered a burger and fries.  I had been to this one once before, so I could not add one to my list of In-N-Out Burger locations I had been to, which had been stuck at seventeen locations ever since my road trip to Brian Burr’s New Year party nine months ago.  I made a note in my mind to go on more road trips.

I sat in the restaurant and ate, watching people go by, but I did not see anyone particularly noteworthy.  My mind kept drifting to Liz Williams, who lived near me in the freshman dorm, because she grew up here in Briones.  After she graduated, she spent several months on a mission trip to Buryatia, in eastern Russia near the border with Mongolia.  She took Russian language classes at the University of Jeromeville, because she was part Russian on her mother’s side, and she wanted to take a couple years off before starting medical school, so she asked Pastor Dan about mission trips, specifically if there were any unreached people who spoke Russian.  I saw her in church last week; she had just moved back to Jeromeville, renting a room from a family at church, where she would spend this year working on medical school applications.

As I passed the exit that I would have used to go to Jorgensen High School, I sighed, not enthused about the prospect of going back to work the next day.  At least tomorrow was Friday, so I would have a break for the weekend after one more day.


When I arrived at work Friday morning, I found the notes from the substitute in my box.  I unfolded the paper and read it:

Students did not understand any of the math, and neither did I, so I just had them work on other homework. Many of them were off task, especially periods 2, 4, and 7.

I was furious as I continued reading the note, in which the substitute listed names of students who were particularly noisy, using the seating charts I had left as a reference.  All that work, I spent over an hour typing up detailed notes for the substitute, telling her exactly what to tell the students, what answers to look for in the students’ work, even working out every problem in detail in case the substitute was not a math person.  All for nothing.  Apparently the substitute was even less of a math person than I expected her to be. Basic Math A just had to put negative numbers on a number line, and geometry just had to think logically, to put statements together to form a conclusion, in preparation for learning how to write proofs.  All fish live in water.  Goldy is a fish.  Therefore, Goldy lives in water.  Did people really not understand how to think like that?  Now I was a day behind, and I had to completely change my plans for the next few weeks.  More work for me.

As my period 2 Basic Math A class walked into the classroom, a loud-mouthed skater stoner named TJ said, “Mr. Dennison!  You should have a sub more often!  Yesterday was fun!”  Several others agreed, and I made a note to let the next substitute know that these students seemed to have the attitude that normal school rules did not apply with a substitute.

“Where were you?”  asked Niki, the girl who saw me at the football game a couple weeks ago.

“Not here,” I said, still feeling angry and agitated.

I talked to some of the other teachers in the lunch room about my failed substitute experience.  “I just give them busy work with a sub,” Jerry DeBoer, the mathematics department chair, advised.  “Most subs can’t do a math lesson.”

“But these were easy lessons,” I protested.  “Are most subs really that bad at math?”

“Honestly, yes,” Derek Raymond, the teacher I had met during summer school, said.

With geometry being a college preparatory course, my geometry classes did not include quite as many students of the type who just tried to get away with things, like TJ.  But many of them still complained loudly as they walked in.

Jenn, the one who carried the sign for the guy she knew at the football game last week, whined, “Mr. Dennison!  I’m so confused!  I didn’t understand any of what we did yesterday!”

“I know!” Sara, Jenn’s inseparable friend, said.  “And the sub was mean!”

Several other people started shouting at me with their negative opinions of yesterday.  I tried filling the bubbles on the attendance sheet, but I could not concentrate with everyone talking over each other.  “Hey!” I shouted.  Everyone looked up at me, so I continued loudly, “You know how to begin class!  Sit down and get your books out, and check your answers!”  Apparently people really did not know how to think logically, which of course explains why so many people make such reckless decisions with their lives.

I learned the hard way on that day that, sadly, that unless I personally knew that a substitute had experience with mathematics, I could not assume that a substitute would be capable of doing any actual subject matter with the students.  Mathematics illiteracy in the population at large was apparently much more profound than I had ever imagined, whch made sense since I spent most of my life in a bubble of honor students and university students.  This made me feel like my entire career was worthless in the long run.

The last game at Bay Vista Park was not the final game of the season; the Titans had a three-game series that weekend in Denver to close the season. The Titans would not be playing in the postseason. I was not sure when I would get to see a baseball game again, since I kept hearing from people that tickets for the brand new stadium would be very difficult to come by next year.  Taylor had told me a while back that he was going to try to get group tickets for a game next year.  As a group, we would get our group name announced on the scoreboard, and he said he was going to give our group name as “The Brent Wang Fellowship,” his semi-whimsical Christian dating discussion group.  I told him to count me in for that.

I went to the Brent Wang Fellowship group game, in April 2000, about a week after the new stadium opened.  It turned out that the game was the same day as the Spring Picnic at UJ, so I had to miss the Spring Picnic for the first time since I discovered that the event existed.  We got back to Jeromeville early enough that the Battle of the Bands was still going on, so I rode my bike to campus and watched about half an hour of it, just to say that I did still go to the Spring Picnic, technically.

Fans of the same sports team have an instant bond with shared memories.  Now Bay Vista Park, with its massive seating section that stood mostly empty for weekday games, and its notoriously cold wind, was passing into memory for us Titans fans.  The Captains football team continued to use the stadium for another fourteen seasons, but it was torn down completely in 2015.   As I write this from middle age, baseball itself faces an uncertain future, with labor disputes threatening to cancel next year’s season.  This sort of thing has happened before, but baseball will survive, both in my own memory and to make new memories for new generations.

The streamer that I caught that day is now hanging on the wall in the game room at my house, next to a sign from that same game and my childhood Will Clark poster.

Readers: Now only 15 episodes left! (This number is subject to change, because while I have a broad outline of the rest of the story, some of my ideas may get edited out, and I may find a need to add another episode or two.) Will Clark and Barry Bonds are real persons, but neither was involved in the production of this story.

In case anyone born after 2000 is confused: “streamers” are long strips of paper or plastic used as decorations at parties or other celebratory events. To a middle-aged Gen-X’er like me, that word does not mean people who broadcast live videos of themselves playing video games, because that technology did not exist back in my day.

Have you ever been to the first or last day of some significant building or location? Tell me about it in the comments.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

[Sarah McLachlan – I Will Remember You]

September 27, 1999.  I wondered how many other writers had named a story after a favorite restaurant. (#234)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

Only 17 episodes left! Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any. If you are new to this story, click here to start from episode 1.

About a month ago, my mind was wandering on a weekend.  I was thinking a lot about all my failures with women.  Megan McCauley, Haley Channing, Carrie Valentine, Sadie Rowland, Sasha Travis, Brianna Johns.  I also was friends with a lot of beautiful, friendly women like Courtney Kohl who had absolutely no interest in me and always seemed to have boyfriends, and any such woman who broke up with her boyfriend always seemed to find another man immediately, sometimes before I even knew about the breakup.  In a fit of frustration, I wrote a rough draft of a story about a guy who had my kind of luck with women.  Then the school year started, and I got really busy, and put the rough draft aside.

Tonight, I managed to leave work by four o’clock with no grading to take home.  No one interesting was online on Yahoo Chat, so with nothing to do tonight, I got that story back out and finished it.

“Dos Amigos”
By Gregory J. Dennison, August 20 – September 27, 1999

“Hi, Mark,” a voice said.  Mark turned around to see who it belonged to.

“Hey, Rich,” he replied to the owner of the voice.  “How’s it goin’?”

“Fine,” he said.  “Wasn’t that a good sermon this morning?”

Mark thought.  “Yeah, it was.  Hey, is anyone going out to lunch today?”

“I hadn’t heard yet.  Let me know if you can get people together.”

“Okay.”  Mark looked around the patio in front of the church, turned to someone else, and greeted him.  “Hey, Jeremy,” he said.

“Hey, Mark,” Jeremy said, turning around.  “How’s life?”

“Pretty good.  Do you know if anyone is going to lunch today?”

“I don’t think so.  My roommates and I all have to study.”  Jeremy paused.  “Sorry.”

“Oh well,” Mark said

Mark next turned to a group of girls.  He stood there and waited until one of them noticed him.  It was Sarah.  She waved at him, and he waved back.

“Hi,” Sarah said, quietly.  Sarah was a relatively quiet girl, but not so much as to come across as unfriendly.  “How are you?” she asked.

“Not bad,” Mark replied.  “Hungry, though.  Do you know if anyone is going to lunch?”

“I don’t know.  I was just going to go home and take a nap.”

“I want to go to lunch too,” Sarah’s roommate, Katie, said as she turned around.  Mark thought that Sarah and Katie were simultaneously very similar and very different, if that were possible.  Both of them were very sweet, compassionate, nurturing people, the kind of people you want to have as friends.  Yet the contrasts were noticeable as well.  Sarah, for example, was not very popular with the opposite gender; guys saw her as a friend but as not much else.  Mark could not remember her ever having a steady boyfriend; the closest thing was a rumor he had heard that she had gone out with his friend Dave and things had gone horribly wrong.  Katie, on the other hand, had had three relationships, of varying lengths and degrees of seriousness, in the time he had known her.  Strictly going by appearance, she fit the stereotype of the cute blonde.

“Hey, dude?” someone said to Mark.  Mark turned around and saw Rich.  “I think I’m just going to go home.  Sorry about that.”

“Oh, well.  Maybe next week.  Have a good afternoon.”

“You too,” Rich said.  Rich walked toward his car.

Mark turned to Katie and smiled.  She smiled back.  “Looks like it’s just you and I who want to go to lunch,” Mark said.

“Do you still want to go?”

This was not the response Mark expected.  He expected one of the usual excuses, like “I have to go study,” or “I have to take a nap.”  But the absence of an outright rejection caught him a little off guard.  “Sure,” he said. “Did you have somewhere in mind?”

“Not really.”

“How about Dos Amigos?  Our usual?”

“Sounds good.  Do you want to walk over?”

“Sure.”


Most people considered Dos Amigos to be a Mexican restaurant.  In reality, though, the food was more Southwestern Tex-Mex than real Mexican.  Dos Amigos, being just three blocks from First Covenant Church, was always a popular destination for churchgoers to meet for lunch on Sunday afternoons.  The restaurant was located in a strip mall, with both indoor and outdoor seating.  A few people sat outdoors in the spring sunshine, but the majority of the customers that Sunday morning were eating indoors.  Mark preferred eating indoors, since that way he did not have to walk as far to refill his drink or get more salsa for his chips.

Katie reached the front of the line after a wait of about five minutes, and Mark ordered shortly after she did.  He ordered his usual, a Southwest Burrito with chicken and a Cherry Coke.

Mark walked over to the bowls of salsa.  He spooned some onto his plate.  “Do you want any?” he asked Katie.  Katie nodded, and Mark spooned some onto her plate as well.

“Where do you want to sit?” Mark asked Katie.

Katie looked around.  “I think I want to sit outside,” she said.

Mark followed Katie outside as she chose a table.  He sat down across from her.  “So how are classes going?” Mark asked.

“Not bad.  I have a paper due Friday.”

“Let me guess.  You haven’t started yet.”

Katie laughed.  “You know me too well, Mark.”

A waitress came to their table carrying their food a few minutes later.  As Mark bit into his burrito, Katie asked, “How are your classes?”

“Not bad.  I have a midterm on Thursday, and I’m trying to figure out my classes for fall.”

“What are you going to take?”

“I’m not really sure yet.  I need to make sure I take everything I need so that I can graduate at the end of next year.”  Mark dipped a chip into the salsa, ate it, and continued.  “Are you graduating next year too?”

“I’m not sure yet.  It’ll depend on what classes I can get into.”

“That’s cool.”  Mark’s conversation with Katie continued through lunch.  He thought about how Katie was probably the closest female friend he had at the moment.  After they finished their meal, Mark took his leftover salsa and dumped it on Katie’s plate.  He took his fork and began to spread it around.  Katie grabbed a cup of spicy green salsa that the people next to them had left behind when they finished; she poured this on top of Mark’s salsa and mixed the two together with her fork.  Mark looked up at Katie and the two of them started laughing, simultaneously.

“Do you need a ride home?” Mark offered.

“Yeah, I do.  Can I get a ride with you?”

“Of course,” Mark replied.  He and Katie got up from their seat and walked back down the street, headed for the church parking lot where Mark’s car waited.


Mark felt a little nervous as he turned from the sidewalk and began walking through the apartment complex.  It was not that he felt unwelcome; he just felt funny going to visit people just to say hi.  He thought this was probably because no one ever visited him just to say hi, so he had never known any rules or etiquette for impromptu visits.  Mark approached the apartment he was looking for and knocked on the door.  Katie answered.  “Hi, Mark!” she said, smiling.  She gave Mark a hug.  “What’s up?” she asked.

“Nothing.  I was just out for a walk and thought I’d stop by.”  That was not entirely false; he had just omitted the fact that his sole purpose for taking a walk was to visit Katie.

“Come on in,” Katie offered.  He stepped into the living room of her apartment.  Katie shared the largest of the apartment’s three bedrooms with Sarah, and two other girls each occupied their own bedrooms.  No one other than Mark seemed to be visiting this household, an unusual occurrence considering that Katie’s apartment was usually one of the popular hangouts for people from First Covenant’s college group.

“You rearranged the living room,” Mark observed.

“No, that would just be the effect of the hallucinogenic plant next to you,” Katie replied.  She laughed that cute little laugh of hers, and Mark laughed in return.

“That sounds like something I would say,” Mark replied, still laughing.  He really liked a girl with a sense of humor, especially one with his sense of humor.

Katie sat down on the recently rearranged sofa and gestured for Mark to do the same.  Mark looked into Katie’s watery blue eyes, thinking of what to say.  After about five seconds, Mark uttered, “Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh,” Katie replied.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Mark paused, and then laughed.  Katie laughed back.  Sarah, who had walked into the kitchen to get a drink of water, observed them and wondered what was so funny.  Well, at least they both get it, the look on Sarah’s face seemed to say.  Sarah indicated to Katie that she was going to bed, and Katie and then Mark wished her a good night.

Katie picked up a piece of paper, an advertisement for personalized mailing labels that Mark had found in his mailbox as well, and started tearing it as Mark talked about his upcoming midterm.  When he finished, Katie said, “Have you ever noticed just how fun it can be to randomly tear up a piece of paper?”

Mark laughed.  “Yeah, I have.”

Katie picked up the newspaper that was sitting on the coffee table.  As she turned a page, Mark picked up the mailing label advertisement that Katie had torn a few minutes ago.  He tore it, very carefully and neatly, almost across its entire length.

“What movies are playing this week?” Katie asked.  Mark made a second tear in the advertisement, starting on the opposite side of the page from, and running parallel to, the first one.  Just before he reached the other end of the paper, he began a third one, starting from the same side as the first and running parallel to the other two.

“Have you seen this?” Katie asked, gesturing to an advertisement for a movie.

“No, I haven’t,” Mark said.  He remembered thinking that it was a definite date movie.  He tore a fourth parallel line in the paper.  The tears alternated starting from the right to the left, and each ended about half an inch from the opposite side of the page, so that the entire page was still connected.  “Do you want to see it?” he asked as he continued tearing.

“Sure.  When?”

“What are you doing tomorrow evening?”

“Nothing.  That would work.”

“Sounds good,” Mark said.  He held up the advertisement, now just eight loosely connected strips.  It dangled down from his hand.  He looked at Katie and smiled.  “I’ll pick you up at six, then?”  Katie looked down at the advertisement, then back up at Mark.  She broke into laughter.  Mark laughed as well.

Mark started feeling tired as he and Katie kept talking, but he felt like he was in a surreal world where time passes differently.  Eventually, after a lull in the conversation, Mark yawned and looked at his watch.  2:02 in the morning.  “Wow,” he said.  “It’s late.”

“Yeah,” Katie replied.

“I should probably go to bed.”

“Good idea.”

“Tomorrow at six, right?”

“Right.”


Mark and Katie walked together to the middle of the theater.  They got there just in time; the lights dimmed and the previews started just as they sat down.  The first preview was for an action movie that looked really bad; the second was a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio that looked even worse.  Mark turned to Katie and said, “Looks like I won’t be seeing many movies in the next few months.”  Katie chuckled.

The movie started.  Mark removed his hand from the arm rest in case Katie wanted to use it.  As the movie started, Mark remembered the first time he saw this movie advertised.  That movie looks interesting, Mark had thought, but a definite date movie.  So I probably won’t see it… But here I am, he thought now.

Thirty minutes into the movie, Katie had not made use of the arm rest, so Mark placed his hand back there.  He looked at Katie as if to make sure that this was okay, and she smiled.  Shortly after this, Mark felt something brush up against his arm.  He looked down to see that Katie was holding his hand.  Mark looked at Katie, and she smiled.  He tightened his grip for just half a second, to acknowledge her hand’s presence, and felt Katie, his closest female friend at the moment, do the same.  Mark smiled through the rest of the movie.

As the movie ended, Mark became unsure of what to do, whether he should leave the theater arm in arm with Katie or just let go.  He loosened his grip a little to see what would happen.  He let Katie get up first, and she pulled his hand up with hers as she got up.  Mark and Katie walked back to the lobby, holding hands.

“So what did you think?” Katie asked.

“I liked it.  I didn’t think I was going to at first, but I liked it.”

“Good.  I’m glad.”  Katie looked in the other direction.  “I have to go to the bathroom.  Will you wait for me?”

“Of course.”  Mark watched Katie enter the women’s room, her shoulder length blond hair gently swaying against her neck and upper back.  Mark wondered exactly what would happen next.


Mark walked across the Quad, glad to be finished with his midterm.  He scanned the Quad for familiar faces and spotted Katie and Sarah.  He walked toward them.  Katie spotted him first and waved.

“Hi, Mark,” Katie said when he was within earshot.  “How was your midterm?”

“Easier than I thought,” he replied.

“Good!  Do you have any more classes today?”

“No, I don’t.  Do you?”

“Just one more, at four o’clock.  I have another hour.”

“I have class at three,” Sarah interrupted.  “I should probably go.  See you at home tonight, Katie.  See you later, Mark.”

“Bye, Sarah.”  Mark watched as Sarah walked toward her class.  Another familiar face walked by.  Spotting the two of them, he approached and waved.  Mark waved back.  Katie turned around to see whom Mark was acknowledging.

“Hi, Jeremy,” she said.

“Hey, you two,” Jeremy said.  “What are you up to?”

“I just had a midterm,” Mark explained.  “It was easy.”

“Cool.”

“I have class in an hour,” Katie said.

“I’m actually late for class now, so I should probably go.  Have a good day, guys.”

“Bye, Jeremy,” Katie said as Jeremy walked across the Quad.

“You’re working on your paper tonight, right?” Mark said.

“Yeah.  It’s going to be really quiet at our house tonight.  All four of us have big things due tomorrow.  We’re going to have a study night.”

Mark pulled a handful of grass from the lawn.  “Sounds cool.  I probably shouldn’t come over, since I don’t have anything to study, and I don’t want to distract you.” he said.  He sprinkled the grass in Katie’s hair, knowing she would not mind.

“Yeah.  That’s probably a good idea.”  Katie picked up a clump of grass comparable in size to Mark’s and sprinkled it in Mark’s hair.  Mark picked up two dead leaves he saw behind him and put them on Katie’s head.  Katie took the leaves and placed them behind her ears as if they were pencils.  The two of them both laughed.

Mark checked his watch.  “I should go catch the bus now.  I hope you do well on your paper.”  As Mark stood up, Katie stood up with him and hugged him good-bye.

“Bye, Mark,” Katie said.  “Have a good day.”

“You too.”  Mark smiled.  “Are we still on for lunch tomorrow?”

“Sure.”


Mark looked down at his greasy piece of pizza from the student union.  They made really good pizza, except that it was a bit greasy sometimes.  Katie had ordered a salad.  “How did your paper go?” Mark asked.

“I think I did okay.  I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it.”

“I know.”  The two of them laughed.

“Something funny happened this morning,” Katie said.  “I saw Jeremy on his way to class… You heard about last night, didn’t you?”

An image ran through Mark’s head.  It was a scene from the first Star Wars movie, the one where Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker that he senses a disturbance in the Force.  “No,” Mark answered.

“Jeremy and I are dating now.”

Mark shifted his eyes a few degrees to the right of Katie’s face.  He continued looking at this random spot for a full five seconds before refocusing on Katie.  “Oh,” he said.

“Yeah.  He was over last night while we were studying, and we were talking, and found out we were both interested in each other.”

Mark took a bite of his pizza as both he and Katie seemed to forget whatever she was going to tell him about seeing Jeremy on his way to class.  Then Mark took another bite.  “What classes do you have this afternoon?” he asked.

“Just English.  At two.”

“I’m done with class for today.”

Mark and Katie continued with their lunches.  Mark’s bites of pizza continued to be punctuated by long stares into space.  Eventually he finished his pizza.  Sarah walked past and, noticing them, came over to say hi.

Mark looked at his watch.  “I need to go,” he said.

“Bye, Mark,” Katie said, giving him the customary hug.

“Bye,” Sarah added.

As Mark walked away, Mark could hear Katie talking to Sarah.  Katie said, “Mark was acting a little strange today.  I wonder if anything was wrong?”

As the printer finished printing, I looked at the title page and wondered how many other writers had named a story after a favorite restaurant.  The title carried a double meaning, though.  “Dos Amigos” was Spanish for “two friends,” as Mark and Katie clearly were at the end of the story.  Just two friends.  Other than Mark clearly being me, each character did not necessarily represent one person in my life, and while parts of the story had actually happened to me, I had never been rejected by someone who had acted so blatantly like she liked me.

Not yet, at least.

Readers: Now only 16 episodes left! (This number is subject to change, because while I have a broad outline of the rest of the story, some of my ideas may get edited out, and I may find a need to add another episode or two.)

What’s the most unexpected way you’ve ever been rejected? Tell me about it in the comments.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

[Pearl Jam – Nothingman]

September 17-24, 1999.  A new job to do at school, and new friends in other states. (#233)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 3 Comments

Only 18 episodes left! Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any. If you are new to this story, click here to start from episode 1.

I looked at the clock on the wall; it was time to go.  It was late afternoon on a Friday, but instead of going home to start my weekend, I was still sitting in the classroom.  After my last class in room C-6, I walked back to room E where my file cabinet was, to use the afternoon productively. I worked on grading the papers I had collected today, finishing next week’s lesson plans, and starting lesson plans for the week after next.  But now, it was time for what made me stay at school so late tonight, and on a Friday at that, in the first place.

I walked across campus, around building E, across one courtyard, along building C, and across another courtyard to the staff parking lot, where I left my school things in the car.  I had brought a sweatshirt with me this morning and left it in the car, since I figured it would eventually get cold outside tonight. I grabbed the sweatshirt, tied it around my waist, closed the door, and locked the car.  I then walked back across campus the way I had just come, but I continued past building E, past a cluster of portable classrooms which had been nonconsecutively named building S since science classes were held there, and to the entrance of the football field. My fellow math teacher Martha Cervantes and a parent volunteer sat at a table collecting admission.

“Five dollars,” the parent volunteer said. 

I was about to reach in my pocket for my school ID card when Martha told the parent volunteer, “He’s a teacher here.  District employees get in free.”

“Okay,” the parent said.  “Go ahead, then.”  Maybe the parent thought that, since I was only twenty-three, I did not look old enough to be a teacher.  Also, though, I was new to Jorgensen this year, so I could not expect to be recognized by parents, except for maybe the ten percent or so of parents whose children had me as a teacher, and even then, half of those parents did not show up to Back-to-School Night.

As part of my job, I was required to work at four afterschool activities per year.  I had signed up to work four of the five home football games.  I knew that I wanted to be at the football games anyway, so that seemed a natural choice for my supervision duty, but this week’s game, the first home game of the year, was not one of the ones that I had signed up to work.  I was just here tonight for fun.

I bought a hot dog and popcorn, since I had not eaten anything for dinner, and found an empty seat near midfield, about halfway up the bleachers.  This was the junior varsity game, the younger players; the crowd would probably fill up later when the varsity game started.  Although high school football on Friday night was a normal part of American culture, playing on Friday was still a bit unfamiliar to me.  The school I attended back home, Plumdale High School in Santa Lucia County, did not have lights on their football field, so they played all their home games on Saturday afternoons.

Tonight the Jorgensen Vikings were playing against the Lions of St. John High School, a Catholic school in La Yegua.  The varsity game got all of the attention, of course, but a few players each on both the JV and varsity teams had me as a teacher.  I did not make an effort to get to the stadium early, so it was already about halfway through the first quarter of the JV game when I arrived.  There was no score yet, but St. John was on Jorgensen’s 18-yard line.  The Vikings defense held the Lions to a field goal attempt, which was successful.

Niki, a freshman from my Basic Math A class, walked past me with one other girl and three guys, none of whom I recognized.  I waved at her, and she waved back, saying “Hi, Mr. Dennison!”  She and her friends climbed the bleachers and sat in an empty spot two rows behind me.

I heard talking and giggling behind me in the direction where Niki and her friends were sitting.  One of the guys said, intentionally loud enough for me to overhear, “What, Niki?  Did you just say that Mr. Dennison was cute?”

I instinctively turned around in the direction of the voice when I heard my name, before my brain had processed the rest of the sentence.  Niki was burying her face in her hands, embarrassed, and her friends were laughing.  I turned back around to face the football field, realizing that I probably should not have looked back, but I giggled a little at the whole exchange.

Typically, especially during evenings like this one after warm summer days, cool breezes bring cold ocean air off the coast of Bay City through the gap where the Capital River crosses the coastal hills and into the Valley.  Sometimes the breeze makes it all the way inland to the foothills east of Capital City, sometimes only as far as Jeromeville, but almost always the breeze gets to Fairview and Tyler Air Force Base, where I was tonight.  By halftime, the breeze had steadily picked up, and I put on my sweatshirt.  Although St. John had scored first, the game was close throughout, and Jorgensen ended up winning, 21-17.

Shortly before the end of the JV game, I saw another two students whom I recognized, Jenn Zeller and Sara Shaw, carrying a sign on poster board.  The crowd had started to fill in by then, so they did not see me at first.  After the JV game finished and the varsity team took the field to do their warmups, I noticed Jenn and Sara holding up their sign and cheering wildly.  I had to get up to use the bathroom, and I had to walk past Jenn and Sara to get there.  “Hi, Mr. Dennison!” Jenn said.

“What does your sign say?” I asked.

Sara turned around to show me the sign.  “ANDERSON IS HOT #54” I read silently, as Jenn said, “Anderson is hot.”

“Yeah,” Sara added, giggling.  “Because Anderson is hot.”

“Okay,” I replied.  “Enjoy the game tonight.”  Jenn and Sara giggled as I walked off.  I did not know anyone named Anderson, so I looked toward the field, trying to find the player wearing number 54, but I could not tell from my vantage point in the bleachers what he looked like, let alone whether or not he was hot.

Jorgensen scored on their first possession, but they fumbled the ball the next time around, giving St. John good field position.  At halftime, the score was tied 14-14.  I barely remembered the second half of the game, because by then the wind had picked up enough that I was shivering, even in my sweatshirt.  I needed something with a hood, or a hat.  Maybe next time I would bring that heavy jacket I wore to Urbana a few winters ago.  Jorgensen won, 24-21, but I did not feel very excited about the win, since I was miserable sitting in the cold wind.  On the way home, I turned on the car heater, feeling the warm air counteract the effects of the wind that had bombarded me as I sang along to the radio.  “Hey now, you’re an all star, get your game on, go play,” I sang. A perfect upbeat song to go along with a win for the Jorgensen Vikings.


The song “All Star” had stuck in my head when I turned the car, and its radio, off, and I whistled the part of the song that had whistling as I walked to my front door. I stopped whistling as soon as I stepped inside.  Brody was the only one home that night.  When I got home, he was watching a movie with his friend Holly, whom he kept insisting he was not dating and not interested in.  I said hi to them and went back to my room, sitting at my computer as I waited for it to connect to the dial-up Internet.  This would not tie up the phone line for anyone; Brody had his own phone line, and neither Jed nor Robby Tran, the new housemate this year, was home tonight.

I had recently discovered a new way to talk to random strangers on the Internet.  I had lost access to the school network, and Internet Relay Chat with it, when I finished my student teaching program.  I had seen recently that Yahoo, which had started as an Internet directory but had expanded into other services, offered chat rooms now, and in the last few weeks I had started fiddling with Yahoo Chat.  I looked through the list of available rooms.  So far, I had mostly just lurked, and occasionally chatted, in general interest rooms not geared to specific communities, but tonight I decided to try something different.

I clicked on the room called “Christian Chat.”  So many of the strangers I had been meeting on the Internet lately were either unfriendly or just so different from me.  I would try to find girls to talk to, and they would either want to talk about weird sex stuff or drugs and partying.  Of course, I had no way of knowing whether or not these people were actually the age or sex they claimed to be, but this was little consolation.  I was just hoping that the people in a room called Christian Chat might be different.

I was partially correct.  As I watched the messages scroll by, someone asked what denomination everyone was, which led to a discussion about the differences between the branches of Christianity.  The discussion was mostly productive and peaceful, but a few people used the opportunity to call those of other denominations inappropriate names.  A Pentecostal said something about how “babtists” were not really saved since they did not believe in speaking in tongues.  Although at the time I considered myself neither Baptist nor Pentecostal, I replied, all in lower case because it was faster to type that way, “maybe baptists would take your position more seriously if you spelled baptists right.”  The Baptist in the conversation typed “LOL,” and the Pentecostal called me a “babtist heathen.”  Someone else began trolling the room, posting praises to Satan.

One girl named PrincessTamar typed, “Anyone want to message me? 18/f/or”

I replied to this eighteen year old Oregonian with a private message: “hi! what’s up?”  She replied a few seconds later asking how old I was and where I was from, and I told her; I had this information public on my profile, but I did not want to make a pedantic statement about paying attention.  I would save that for Monday when students were not reading the directions.  I also asked where in Oregon she was from, since I had lived in Oregon for eight weeks. She was from a suburb of Portland, about an hour and a half drive from where I had been.  She continued replying:

PrincessTamar: So what are you doing tonight?
jediofmath76: i just got home. i was at a football game
PrincessTamar: Who was playing? I don’t follow football.
jediofmath76: it was a high school game. i work at a school.  and the funniest thing happened
PrincessTamar: Are you a teacher?
jediofmath76: yes
PrincessTamar: What was the funny thing?
jediofmath76: i saw a girl from my class and she said hi.  i heard her whispering with her friends, and one of them said really loud, “did you just say your teacher was cute?”  she was hiding her face after he said that
PrincessTamar: Aww, that must have been embarrassing for her :( You teach math? I’m guessing because of your name. Is it weird teaching high school when you’re so young?
jediofmath76: yes math. it’s not really weird but i feel like some of the kids and even some of the adults don’t respect me
PrincessTamar: I can see that, that’s too bad.
jediofmath76: tamar? is that your name?
PrincessTamar: My real name is Elizabeth but everyone calls me Tamar. I picked that name years ago because I’m a child of Jesus, and some people believe Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child named Tamar.  And Jesus is the king of kings, so as his child I’m a princess. And I think that’s so beautiful. What’s your name?
jediofmath76: greg
PrincessTamar: Nice to meet you, Greg!  I need to go to bed soon but i added you so i’ll talk to you later!
jediofmath76: ok!

Tamar said that she added me, my first friend on Yahoo Chat, but I was not too sure I wanted to keep this friendship going.  What she said about Jesus having children with Mary Magdalene certainly seemed to contradict the Bible, and I had never heard anything about this either from the Catholicism of my youth or from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship or Jeromeville Covenant Church the last few years.

A few minutes later, a girl named solidrock123 posted all in lower case, “ughhh i can’t sleep. how is everyone?”  I checked her profile; she was 20 years old, from Minnesota, and she had a Bible verse in her profile.  I tried the same thing I had done with Tamar and sent her a private message asking why she could not sleep.  She replied about a minute later.

solidrock123: i dunno, just getting bogged down with work to do for my classes
jediofmath76: i know that feeling. what are you studying?
solidrock123: english.  the school year just started, 2 more years until i graduate. what’s your name?
jediofmath76: greg
solidrock123: hi greg!  i’m katherine
jediofmath76: nice to meet you
solidrock123: you too!  are you in school?
jediofmath76: i graduated in 1998, then did student teaching last year. i’m a teacher now
solidrock123: oh wow! teaching math?
jediofmath76: yes
solidrock123: i was never good at math, but good for you! what are your plans for the weekend?
jediofmath76: just church sunday
solidrock123: what kind of church do you go to?
jediofmath76: evangelical covenant
solidrock123: i don’t know that one. i go to a small baptist church

I made a mental note that Katherine knew how to spell Baptist, unlike that Pentecostal troll from earlier.  I continued typing.

jediofmath76: did you grow up in a christian family?
solidrock123: yes.  i’m away at school now, my church back home is about 2 hours from here, but i love visiting my home church when i go see my family.  my dad passed away when i was 16, and that was so hard for all of us, but our church was so supportive when that happened
jediofmath76: i’m so sorry.  that would be so hard.  do you have siblings?
solidrock123: yes.  i’m the 2nd of 4, two sisters and a brother
jediofmath76: bigger family than me.  i just have one younger brother
solidrock123: did you grow up in a christian home?
jediofmath76: kind of. mom’s family is catholic, she went to church every week but didn’t force me or my brother to.  when i came to jeromeville for school, my closest friends in the dorm were christians, i started hanging out with them and going to jcf, that’s our chapter of intervarsity, i learned there what it really meant to know and follow jesus
solidrock123: wow that’s a great testimony!  i go to chi alpha here but my school has intervarsity too
jediofmath76: we have chi alpha at jeromeville, everyone thinks it’s a fraternity but it’s not
solidrock123: haha! we have that same problem, i think it’s an issue with all chi alpha chapters

Chi Alpha was the college ministry of the Assemblies of God church, although from what I knew of the group, students from different denominations attended sometimes too. It was named for the initials of a New Testament Greek phrase meaning “Christ’s ambassadors.”  I knew a few people from Jeromeville’s chapter of Chi Alpha, from when multiple Christian student groups jointly held inter-denominational worship nights.  I continued typing to Katherine.

jediofmath76: makes sense
solidrock123: i’m going to try to go to bed again, it’s getting late here, but it was good talking to you!  have a great weekend and message me any time!
jediofmath76: i will! bye!




The following Monday morning, I was awake early, so I got to work a little early, before first period started, even though I was a late start teacher.  Ken Luck, an English teacher who was also an assistant football coach, saw me and asked, “Hey, Greg?  Can I ask you something?”  I barely knew Ken; we just had not crossed paths much, considering that we taught different subjects.  I was confused about why he might need to talk to me.

“Yes?” I asked.

“I saw you at the game on Friday.  And I also saw that you had signed up to work some games later in the season.”

“Yes,” I replied.  “I like watching football, I was probably going to go to some games anyway, so I figured I could get my extra duties out of the way at games, since I’d be staying at school late on those nights anyway.”

“Perfect.  Would you be interested in sitting in the booth and running the scoreboard?  The person who used to do it last year isn’t here anymore, and we’ve been looking for someone new.”

I did not know where I expected this conversation to go, but this certainly was not it.  The idea of getting to sit in an enclosed space out of the wind where I would still have a full view of the field sounded wonderful to me.  “Sure!” I said.  “I’ve never really run a scoreboard before, at least not for football.”

“It’s really easy.  Just get to the next JV game about fifteen minutes early, and I’ll show you everything you need to know.  I’ll show you what signals to watch for from the referee so you know when to start and stop the clock, things like that.  I’ll stay up there for most of the JV game, and by then you’ll know what you’re doing.  And if you work every game, that’ll be enough extra activities to count for all of your required after-school supervision for the year.”

“Sure.  Sounds good!”

Jorgensen had another home game the following Friday night.  I went straight to the booth where the announcers and scorekeepers were, where Ken was waiting to show me the details of how to work the scoreboard.  He was right; it was pretty simple to learn.  I ran the scoreboard for every home football game from that day until I left Jorgensen High, and it was the perfect arrangement for me.  I got to watch football games, something I wanted to do anyway, from the comfort of the little booth where the announcer sat, sheltered from the strong evening winds.  And this counted for all of the afterschool activities I would have to supervise as part of my job.

Yahoo Chat was a big part of my life for another several years, providing my introduction to many Internet friends.  Some of them I would go on to meet in person, and a few of them I am still in touch with today.  I spoke to Tamar a few more times, but she had a few other ideas about Christianity that were a little out there, beyond just that of Jesus having children.  She started getting online less often a few months later.  In contrast, I did stay in touch with Katherine, and while we do not talk often today, we are still friends on Facebook and I occasionally hear about how she is doing.  She currently holds the record for the longest I have continually been in contact with someone I met on the Internet.  She was never a romantic interest for me, but in 2001, she became the first Internet friend whom I ever crossed state lines to meet, when I took a five day trip to Minnesota.  She has a husband and daughter now, and we met two more times in person over the years when she happened to be on the West Coast.  Yahoo Chat is long gone, but making long-distance friends on the Internet has stayed a part of my life.

Readers: Now only 17 episodes left! (This number is subject to change, because while I have a broad outline of the rest of the story, some of my ideas may get edited out, and I may find a need to add another episode or two.)

Tell me in the comments an interesting story about an Internet friend or long-distance friend of yours.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

[Smash Mouth – All Star]

September 5, 1999.  A pleasant Sunday afternoon, and a less pleasant Sunday night. (#232)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

I walked outside after church and took a deep breath as I felt the pleasantly warm late summer sun.  It was warm, but not blisteringly hot. It still felt like summer, but there had recently been hints that the season was starting to change.  School had started for me and for children.  The University of Jeromeville was on a three-quarter schedule, so university classes would not start for a few more weeks, but a few students who had been gone for the summer were back in church this morning, and others would trickle in over the next few weeks.

Lacey Kilpatrick, who had been in town all summer taking a couple of classes for summer session, walked out of the building just after me.  I smiled and waved at her.

“Hey, Greg!” Lacey said.  “How are you?  Have you started teaching yet?”

“Yes!  I’ve been with the students for a week now.”

“How is it so far?”

“It’s going to be a rough adjustment,” I said.  “Like this week, I had a student who wanted to be a TA for my class, and a few days later he stole my hall pass and never came back.”

“What?  What happened to him?”

“I told the vice principal what happened, she said they would change his schedule and not let him TA for me, but my stolen hall pass is still out there, so I don’t know.”  I shrugged my shoulders.

“That’s crazy,” Lacey said.  “Are you off tomorrow?  This is a holiday weekend, right?”

“Yes!  I need a three-day weekend right away after the crazy week I had.”

“Do you have any plans?”

“I’m probably going to go for a long bike ride this afternoon.  And I’m going swing dancing at the U-Bar tonight.”

“That sounds like so much fun!  I haven’t been swing dancing in a long time!  I can’t go tonight, though.  I’m going to go see my parents.”

“Oh, that’ll be fun.”

“Yeah.  I’ll be back tomorrow night.  Enjoy your day off!”

“I will!” I said.


When I got home, I changed into a different pair of shorts, a pair that was already dirty, and an old t-shirt.  I zigzagged to Andrews Road, turned right, then turned left on 8th Street, which I followed east all the way to Power Line Road.  I turned right and crossed over the freeway, on the overpass with the trees on it, then continued east on Willard Avenue on the other side.  Tucked away about a mile east of the overpass was a tiny neighborhood park which connected to a bike path, running parallel to Willard along a dry creek bed.  This was the same dry creek bed that had been dammed to form the long skinny lake running through the Arboretum on campus a few miles to the west.  Because of those dams, this creek only got water from rain and storm drains, and as was normal for this time of year, it had not rained in Jeromeville in about four months.  I continued east on the bike path, about as far from my house as one could be while still being in the Jeromeville city limits.

This trail connected to a larger park in a new neighborhood that had been built just a few years ago.  The trail curved to the left around a very old wooden building that looked like a plain shed, but was two stories tall.  An informational plaque said that this was a tank house, basically a small water tower, from decades ago when this land had been a working farm.  Near the tank house was an area that was left in its natural state, covered with tall grasses and small bushes, with towering oak trees along the bank of the creek.  I rode past the edge of this nature area as far as the eastern edge of the park, then I turned and headed north, alongside a grassy athletic field toward a playground.  A girl who looked no older than twenty was playing with two young children, a boy and a girl.

I slowed down and did a double take.  I knew that girl.  But I was confused as to why she was here, or whose children these were.  I rode my bike slowly toward her and hesitantly called out, “Hannah?”

Hannah turned around.  “Greg!” she called out enthusiastically.  “What’s up?”

“I’m on a bike ride.  What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been working this summer as a nanny,” she explained.  “These are the kids I’m watching.  This is Ashley, she’s five, and this is Austin, he’s three.”

“Hi, Ashley and Austin,” I said, waving at the kids.  Ashley waved back as she slid down the slide, and Austin was too busy digging in the sand to notice me.

Hannah continued, “The family goes to our church, that’s how I found out about the job, but they usually go to first service.  That’s why I haven’t seen you there in a while.”

“That makes sense.  Did you say you’re going to be doing high school group at church this year?”

“Yeah.  The girls I had last year in my discipleship group in junior high are moving on to high school this year, and I wanted to stay with them.”

“That makes sense.”

Ashley climbed up the ladder to the top of the slide.  Before she slid down, she looked at us and started chanting, “Hannah has a boyfriend!  Hannah has a boyfriend!” I chuckled.

“No, Ashley, it’s not like that,” Hannah replied.  Turning to me, she asked, “So how’s teaching going?  When does school start?”

“A week ago,” I said.  “It’s been kind of chaotic so far.  Three of my classes are basically in a converted storage room.”

“No way!  I thought that only happened in stories about schools needing more money.”

“It’s really happening at Jorgensen,” I said.  “They only use that room for small classes, there are only twenty-three desks in there, but it still feels kind of insulting when most of the school doesn’t know where my room is.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” I said. As I was telling Hannah about Jamal stealing my hall pass, Ashley interrupted us, holding some kind of flower she had plucked from a nearby bush.  She handed it to me, smiling, and said, “Give Hannah the flower, because you love her.”

I chuckled and looked at Hannah.  “Ashley,” Hannah said firmly.  “Greg is not my boyfriend.  And don’t pick flowers at the park.”  I thought about giving the flower to Hannah, just as a nice gesture, but I figured from her reaction to Ashley that she would not want that.  Ashley ran off and got out a coloring book and crayons from a tote bag that Hannah had brought.  “I don’t know what’s gotten into her,” Hannah said, rolling her eyes.

“So how’s high school group going at church?” I asked.

“Good!  Do you remember Shawna Foreman?”

“Yeah!”

“She gave her testimony this week.  It was beautiful.  Sometimes you think those kids who grew up in the church are going to have boring testimonies, like ‘I grew up in the church, I’ve been following Jesus as long as I can remember.’  But Shawna’s story wasn’t like that.”

“I know a little bit of her story.  I’m glad she was willing to share.  It’s hard getting high school kids to be vulnerable sometimes.”

“Definitely!” Hannah agreed.

Ashley tore a blank page out of the back of the coloring book and put it in Hannah’s lap.  Ashley had drawn on it stick figures vaguely resembling Hannah and me sitting on the bench.  She added dozens of hearts all around us and the word “LOVE” in typical kindergarten block letters at the top of the page.  I snickered.  Hannah looked sternly at Ashley and said, “That’s not okay.  I told you, Greg is not my boyfriend.”

“Then why are you sitting on the bench with him?” Ashley asked.

“Because he’s my friend.  We’re just talking.”

“I should probably get going,” I said, not wanting to get in the way of whatever Hannah might say to Ashley about her supposedly inappropriate, but hilarious, behavior.

“Well it was good seeing you!  What are you doing the rest of today?  Do you have any grading or lesson planning to do?”

“I’m off tomorrow, so I’m saving it for then.  Going swing dancing tonight.”

“Oh, yeah!  Well, have fun tonight!”

“I will!” I said.  “Thanks!”


About a year and a half ago, swing dancing became a huge nationwide fad.  People flocked to bars, dressing in the kind of clothing their great-grandparents might have worn, dancing to music from that era and music from modern bands playing music in that style.  It took me a while to get into it, but once I gave it a try, I had fun.

I took a break from swing dancing for several months last year after a bad night.  New episodes of The X-Files were also about to start at the time, so I started going to the X-Files watch parties at the De Anza house, as I had done the previous year, only showing up to swing dancing occasionally when The X-Files was a rerun.

The University Bar and Grill, on the corner of Fifth and Andrews across the street from campus, held swing dancing once a week on Sundays.  I had been going more often again since May, when The X-Files went back into reruns for the summer and the watch parties went on hiatus.  I taught summer school for most of June and July, though, and I was teaching full time now, so for the majority of my swing dancing nights this summer, I had to leave early in order to get enough sleep and get up in time for work.  But tomorrow was Labor Day, a federal holiday in the United States, so schools were closed and I could stay all the way until midnight.  And maybe someone would go out for a late night snack afterward, as had happened a few times last year.

I arrived about halfway through the beginner lesson.  The first half of the beginner lesson was always the East Coast Swing basic step, which I knew well.  The second half rotated between a few different topics on different weeks, but I had been here often enough that I knew most, if not all, of those as well.  Usually I came for at least part of the beginner lesson, hoping that I would meet a friendly beginner and dance with her later.  Tonight, for the second half, Matthew was teaching the basic step of the Charleston, another one I knew already.  I started to giggle, thinking of what Candace, my roommate’s girlfriend, had said about Matthew a couple weeks ago, when we were playing The Game of Life with Noah and Cambria.

“Hi,” the girl standing across from me said.  “What’s so funny?”

“Don’t ask,” I replied.  “Something just reminded me of an inside joke with my friends.”

“Interesting.  I’m Lindsay.”

“I’m Greg,” I said.

“Nice to meet you!”  she replied.  I led her through the basic step of the Charleson, as Matthew and his dance partner had just demonstrated.

When Matthew called for us to rotate a couple minutes later, I told Lindsay, “It was nice meeting you!  Save me a dance later?”

“Oh!  Sure!  Nice meeting you too!”

We rotated partners.  “Hi, I’m Greg,” I said to the next girl to be paired with me.

“I’m Esther,” she said.  I noted in my mind that she had a classic Biblical name.  “This is my first time.  I’m not very good.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I replied.  “Just have fun with it.  Are you enjoying it so far?”

“Yes!”

I led Esther through the turn that Matthew was demonstrating, one I had done many times.  For a first-timer, she was picking things up quickly.  “You got it,” I said.

Esther smiled wide and said, “Thanks!”  When it came time to rotate partners again, I did my customary thing and asked Esther to save me a dance later.  The next partner to rotate through after Esther was not a good dancer, and she kind of smelled, so I did not ask her to save me a dance.

Once the lesson ended and the actual dancing started, I stepped off the dance floor to make room for people who were actually dancing.  I looked around for someone I felt comfortable asking to dance, and came to an unsettling realization: very few of those people were here this week.  Bethany Bradshaw was not here; she was taking summer classes and could not stay out late on Sunday nights anymore.  Some of her friends that she usually came with I knew well enough to say hi to and ask to dance, but none of them were here tonight either.  Lacey had been here a few times before, but she was back home with her family tonight.  Courtney, Cambria, and Erica, who had finally talked me into going swing dancing the first time I came to the U-Bar, rarely danced anymore.  No one else that I knew from church was here.  Jed and Candace were here, but they spent all of their time dancing with each other.  I was just going to have to get brave and ask someone on my own.

It was too late to ask someone to dance to the first song, so I waited for the second song of the night to start.  Esther had just stepped off of the dance floor, so I walked over to her and held out my hand, asking, “Would you like to dance?”

“No thanks,” she replied.  “Maybe later?  I need a break.  That first song was kind of fast.”

“Okay,” I replied.  I walked over to the bar and ordered my usual Roy Rogers and took another break for the rest of this song.

Jed and Candace walked toward me a few minutes later. “Hey, Greg,” Jed said.  “How’s it going?”

“Not bad,” I replied, “but most of the people I know who I dance with aren’t here tonight.”

“Don’t let that stop you!  Ask someone new!” Candace suggested.

“I tried, but she said she wanted a break.  I’ll try again later.”

“Good! Go for it!”

A new song came on, and Jed and Candace went out to the dance floor to dance.  I sipped my Roy Rogers for a while and decided to try again a few songs later.  Esther and Lindsay were both already dancing, so I walked up to a girl I had seen there a couple times before and asked, “Would you like to dance?”

“No thanks,” she replied.

I started walking around the edge of the dance floor, looking for someone else to ask to dance, when I came face to face with the uncoordinated smelly girl from the beginner lesson.  I did not want to sit out another song, so with a bit of desperation, I asked her, “Would you like to dance?”

“Sure,” she said.  I led her to the dance floor and began doing the basic East Coast swing step.  I knew this song, because Jed had the CD; it was called “The Best You Can,” by a modern swing band called Indigo Swing.  I was doing the best I could to lead this girl, but each beat felt like a chore, getting her to smoothly follow my lead. She kept moving in other directions, unresponsive to my leading, and I did not want to hurt to her.  The song ended, and I turned her into a dip.  I stumbled a little trying not to drop her as she released her body into my arms a bit more forcefully than I was used to.

“Thank you,” I said, pulling her back upright.

“Thanks!” she replied.

I found an empty seat on the side of the room and sat there for a few more songs, observing.  The swing dance crowd at the U-Bar these days included a clique of very good dancers who dressed in accurate clothing from the swing dance era and typically only danced with each other.  In the past, I had tried asking girls in that group to dance, and most of the time they said no.  One of them danced with me once, but I could tell that she was kind of bored with me. I knew the basic step to East Coast Swing and the basic step to Charleston, and I could reasonably fake my way through the basic step of Lindy Hop, but surely that was boring compared to all the fancy moves I had seen her do on the dance floor with more experienced and skilled partners.  One of the guys from that clique had complimented my driver cap once, but then pointed out that my pleated pants were not historically accurate.  So I did not try to associate with that group anymore.  They were fun to watch on the dance floor, definitely, but watching them dance was not as much fun as meeting new people and dancing myself.

About an hour into the night, I went back to Esther and asked her to dance again.  She said no, again, and walked back over to the people she was sitting with.  I saw Lindsay not dancing, so I walked up to her and asked her to dance.

“No thank you,” she replied.  “I’m going to sit this one out.”

“Okay,” I said, going back to where I had been sitting.  Before I even got back to my seat, I saw out of the corner of my eye another guy asking Lindsay to dance; she smiled and walked out to the dance floor with him.

Another half hour passed.  Candace danced with me once during that time; she was my roommate’s girlfriend, yes, but we all knew each other well enough that it was not weird that I was dancing with my roommate’s girlfriend.  Another half hour passed, during which I did no dancing.  I could easily just get up and go home.  Jed came here with Candace, so he had his own ride home.  I was not having fun here; I could be in bed getting sleep, or I could stay up late chatting with any Internet friends that happened to be online, since I did not have to work in the morning.  But did I really want to give up on a fun opportunity to be social?

Yes, I finally decided.  Yes, I did.  At this point, it was time to give up.  Swing dancing was not fun anymore.  I was tired of the cliques, tired of the rejection, tired of feeling like I had to dress up like someone’s great-grandpa back in the days just to feel like I belonged.  I waited for Jed and Candace to finish the song, then I walked over to them and said, “Hey, I’m heading home early tonight.  I’m really tired.”

“Okay,” Jed replied.  “Sleep well.”

“Good night!” Candace added.

I waved and walked out to the parking lot.  I started the car and began driving home.

And I never set foot inside the U-Bar again.


As I mentioned before, I did return to swing dancing eventually, in 2007.  Swing dancing at the U-Bar was long defunct by then, but some of the people who had run that swing dance later started a weekly dance across the Drawbridge in Capital City.  Unlike that night in 1999 when everyone was unfriendly and rejecting me, I was actually able to make friends through dancing in 2007.  My social life for most of my thirties revolved around people I met through swing dancing and friends of people I met through swing dancing.  In my forties, many of those people moved away, and most of the ones who stayed in the area stopped dancing at some point.  I stopped dancing for the third, and probably final, time in 2019, at age forty-three, for a variety of reasons.

Also in 2019, I read in the local news that the U-Bar, which had been around for almost fifty years at the time, was going out of business.  I thought about going back to see it one last time, but that thought lasted about three seconds before I remembered that both of my stints as a regular swing dancer at the U-Bar ended badly.  My memories of swing dancing are somewhat more positive now, after the good experiences I had in my thirties and the friends I made then.  But not all of my hobbies and activities are meant to stay with me for my entire life, and that was okay.  Like the guy said in that song that the uncoordinated girl and I had danced to, sometimes you do the best you can.

Readers: What is something you used to do for fun, but don’t anymore? Why did you quit? Tell me about it in the comments.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

[Indigo Swing – The Best You Can]

Early September, 1999.  Another rough beginning. (#231)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 10 Comments

I arrived on Wednesday morning, still feeling somewhat optimistic.  It was September 1, day number three of working as a full-time teacher.  School started at 7:45 in the morning, but I did not have to be there legally until 8:12, and I did not have to teach until 8:42.  Jorgensen High School, being overcrowded, ran a schedule with two different start times, so that some students took their classes periods 1 through 6, and others periods 2 through 7.  Teachers also were designated either early start teachers, with period 7 off, or late start teachers, with period 1 off, in addition to our prep periods at some other point during the day.

I was a late start teacher, the only one among the ten math teachers.  I was okay with that; it meant that I did not have to wake up as early, which was especially useful since I was driving for a little over half an hour to get there all the way from Jeromeville.  When I saw my schedule last week during the meetings to begin the school year, I saw that I was in room E for periods 2 and 3.  I asked Jerry DeBoer, the math department chair, if this was a typo.  My understanding was that the buildings on campus were named with letters, and the rooms within the buildings were named with the building letter and a number. I had taught summer school in room C-1, for example. “Which room in building E is this?” I asked.

“It’s just ‘Room E,’” Jerry explained.  “A few years ago, they remodeled the storage space in building E and added this room between E-3 and E-4.  It’s a smaller room, but we only have small classes in there, like your Basic Math A and Algebra 1 for freshmen..”

“Okay,” I said.  As soon as I got to Room E on that day last week, I could tell exactly what happened.  Building E had three classrooms on each side, E-1 through E-3 on one side and E-4 through E-6 on the other, with doors facing the outside.  The building was designed to have storage space in a long, skinny room between the classrooms, with doors connecting to all six rooms.  Around the corner from E-3 was an unmarked door where Jerry told me I could find my classroom.  Room E apparently had been carved out of this storage space, with a thin partition wall in the back and a door leading to the remnant of the storage space.  So basically, I would be teaching in a converted closet.

I could not go to room E right away when I arrived on that day, though, because, with the school being overcrowded, I did not have the luxury of a quiet classroom to myself in which to do my work.  Every room was used every period as much as possible, which meant that most teachers had classes in different rooms and no reserved place to work during prep periods.  Martha Cervantes taught Basic Math A in room E period 1.  She then had prep period 2, and taught other classes in room C-3 periods 3 through 6.  I taught in room E periods 2 through 4, then had lunch and prep, then I moved to room C-6 for periods 6 and 7.  I carried two textbooks under one arm, with my notes and gradebook inside a plastic file box that I carried with my other hand, and parked myself in the teacher lunch room, where I sat in a chair working on lesson plans for next week.  I saw other teachers carrying file boxes and tote bags, and I decided to buy a file box for this purpose a few days ago.  One teacher took the whole situation of sharing rooms to a dramatic extreme, carrying her things around in a full-size shopping cart.  Taped to it was a cardboard sign in the style of those made by homeless people; it said “WILL WORK 4 CLASSROOM.”  I probably would not be able to get away with such theatrics as a brand new teacher.

Yesterday, as period 2 was starting, a large student unknown to me walked through the entrance of room E and shouted across the room in my direction, “You need a TA?” Yes, I thought, I did need a teacher’s assistant, a student to run errands for me and things like that, so I signed his schedule change form.  His name was Jamal Brown, a senior.  Jamal arrived to class two minutes late today; I marked him tardy on the bubble sheet and placed the paper on the clip next to the door, where an office TA would come by and bring it to the office to be scanned.

My first assignment in all of my classes was to have students answer a few questions about themselves so that I could get to know them.  I got this idea from Kate Matthews, one of my master teachers from student teaching at Nueces High last year, who in turn got it from the teacher’s edition of one of the textbooks that school used.  I collected these from students yesterday and read through them after school, and now I handed them to Jamal along with my gradebook.  “Record these for me, please,” I said.  “Give them ten points if they are done.”

“Yeah,” Jamal grunted.

I walked back to the front of the class.  “Today you’ll be getting your textbook,” I explained to the students.  “Take a few minutes to look through your book.  If you notice any writing in it, any torn pages, anything like that, write it on this paper I’m going to give you.  That way, when you turn your book in at the end of the year, you won’t get fined for anything that someone else did to your book before you had it.  Also write your name on the line in the inside cover, but don’t write anything anywhere else in the book.”  I walked around and handed a book and a form to each student, then I continued walking up and down the rows to make sure that they knew what to do.  “Thomas,” I said to a student who was doing nothing, “if you leave this form blank, you’re saying that your book is in perfect condition, and any writing or rips we find in it at the end of the year, you’ll have to pay for.  Is that what you want?”

“Fine,” he sighed loudly, halfheartedly flipping through his book.

“Hey!” I heard a shout from across the room.  Jamal was standing up.  “I gotta use the bathroom!”

“Take the TA pass,” I said, handing him a reusable hall pass I had made.  After he left, I noticed that he had not entered any of the papers I had given him in the gradebook; apparently he had just been sitting there the whole time.  He never came back to class, and he never returned my hall pass, so now he had free rein to wander the school whenever he wanted.

I spent the rest of the period attempting to teach my Basic Math A students what negative numbers were.  Today they were relatively quiet while I was talking, but half of them sat there doing nothing when I gave them the opportunity to try problems on their own.  I was happy when the bell rang and my 3rd period Algebra 1 class entered the room.

The state had given extra funding to schools for small class sizes specifically for ninth grade.  Basic Math A classes were typically almost all ninth grade students, so these classes were kept small this year.  Algebra 1 was more complicated, since a number of older students also took Algebra 1, typically ones who took Basic Math A as freshmen and did well.  Rather than make all Algebra 1 classes small, the school made separate classes called “Algebra 1-9th” with only ninth graders in them and a limit of twenty students, while regular Algebra 1 classes were for non-freshmen only, with class sizes well over thirty like every other class at the school.  One with common sense would understand that Algebra 1 students who were not freshmen needed extra support and would benefit more from the smaller class sizes than freshmen who were testing on grade level.  But it seemed often that schools were run by people who cared only about money and themselves, not common sense.

“Mr. Dennison?” a student named Peter asked as he walked in.  “Can I give you a high five?”

“Sure,” I said.  I raised my right hand with my palm open, but since Peter was maybe five foot two at most, I did not extend it fully upward.  Peter jumped up and slapped my palm with his.  I smiled as I walked to my desk and filled out the attendance bubble sheet, getting a little irritated again when I remembered that Jamal had stolen my hall pass, but I tried my best to put it out of my mind as I gave these students their textbooks and told them to look for pre-existing damage.  After that, I began the first lesson, reviewing what variables were, and how to turn phrases like “three less than a number” into variable expressions.  Just yesterday I had finished making cards with all the students’ names on them, so I could call on students randomly instead of calling on the same three or four students who raised their hand every time.  “Julia?” I called after pulling her card.

“Three minus x,” Julia answered.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Julia replied, confused.  “‘Less than’ means subtract.”

“But how many are you taking away?”

“Three.  Because it says three less.”

“Yes.  You start with the number and take away three.”

Julia thought for a second, then said, “So it’s ‘x minus three?’”

“Exactly.”  I walked the students through a few more examples and gave them time to get to work.  Most of them used their time productively, and none of them were major distractions.  This class looked like it would be the bright spot in my schedule.

As I was walking around, checking to see that students were doing the work correctly, a girl named Tasha pulled a piece of paper out from under her textbook.  “Here, Mr. Dennison,” she said.  “I drew you a cat.”

I looked at Tasha’s drawing and smiled.  It was better than I could do.  I hoped that she had taken the time to take notes, and that she had not spent the entirety of my math lecture on this cat drawing.  “I’ll put this on the wall behind my desk,” I replied.  I walked back to my desk and taped the cat to the wall, the first of hundreds of pieces of silly student artwork I would save over the course of my career.

At lunch I went to the office to tell someone about Jamal’s disappearance.  Sharon McCall, one of the vice principals, said that she would let campus security know that my hall pass was stolen.  In the whole time I worked at Jorgensen, I never did ask Sharon if she was related to the McCalls that I had known growing up.  That was the kind of thing my mother would have done right away, but I did not want to make things weird.

“I’ll also speak to the counselors and get Jamal into a different class,.” she said.  “He hasn’t shown that he is responsible enough to be a TA.”

“Thank you.”

“In the future, you might want to only let students you know and trust be your TAs.”

“Good point.”

For periods 6 and 7, I was in a full-sized classroom.  Mike Novak taught in that room for the other five periods, with prep period 6, and during our time to set up last week, he made it clear through his attitude that it was his classroom, not mine.  It was big enough for two teacher desks, but the posters in the room were his, because he had been in that room for a long time and that was just the way things were, in his view.  All the teacher posters I had went up in room E instead.

A wide range of students were in the geometry class.  Geometry was normally taken during sophomore year, but I had quite a few juniors and two seniors who were behind in math, as well as four freshmen who were ahead in math.  One of the freshmen, Milo, I had met during summer school; most of my summer school students were there because they had failed math the previous year, but Milo was there to get ahead.  I went through the same routine as in the other classes, passing out textbooks and asking students to check the condition of the textbooks and write down any pre-existing damage that they found.  Those two periods passed relatively uneventfully that day, except that the room was hot.  I had discovered the hard way while teaching summer school that most of the buildings at Jorgensen High, including buildings C and E, had no air conditioning.  I made it quite clear that students were not to touch the fan; summer school was still fresh in my mind, when two students got into a fistfight in the middle of class while arguing over which way to point the fan.


About a week after Jamal stole my hall pass, I felt like I was settling into a routine.  Given how much chaos I dealt with during that first week, I should not have been surprised one bit when my routine was massively upended again, through no fault of my own.

I arrived at school and checked my mailbox.  Nothing there except the bubble sheets for attendance.  As I headed toward the lunch room to get some work done, I heard Sharon say, “Mr. Dennison?  May I talk to you for a minute?”

I stepped into Sharon’s office and asked, “Yes?”

“So we’ve been running the numbers, and some of our classes, including geometry, are way too overcrowded.”

“Okay,” I said, hoping that this might mean that my sixth period class might have fewer than the current thirty-three students moving forward

The solution Sharon was about to propose was much more drastic.  She explained, “We’ve been looking at scheduling options, and the best way we can find to solve this problem is to hire another math teacher part time.  Susie Andrews used to teach here until a few years ago, when she decided to stay home with her kids full time, and she’s agreed to come back part time to teach two classes.  But the least impactful way to fit this into everyone’s schedule is to give her your third period Basic Math A class.”  My face fell.  This was by far my favorite class, and apparently I would not be teaching them for the rest of the year.  I nodded as Mrs. McCall continued, “We’re going to open a new geometry class 3rd period.  We’ll keep you in room E, since you’re already there for periods 2 and 4, and since there are only twenty-three desks in that room, we’ll cap the class at twenty-three.  And you’ll only have two preps now, geometry and Basic Math A.”  I had heard the term “two preps” during my student teaching, and I was confused what that meant at first; I figured out at some point last year that it meant that I would only have to prepare lesson plans for two different classes, as opposed to the three I was preparing now.  That would definitely be an advantage, less work on my part.

“I really like the students in my third period class now,” I said, a little disappointed.  “But I also like the idea of only having two preps. When would this go into effect?”

“Tomorrow.  I’ll come into your period 3 at the beginning of class and tell the students what is going on, and we’ll meet with the students who will be getting schedule changes to go into your new third period geometry.”

“Okay,” I said.  “I’ll see you third period, then?”

“Yes.  Thank you for being flexible.”

“No problem.”  I felt like it was a problem, though, because I would be losing a wonderful class, and I would have to start over, establishing routines for a new class.

The next day, Mrs. McCall arrived in room E just seconds after the bell rang to end period 2.  I stood near the doorway as students trickled in.  Peter was one of the first to arrive; he gave me a high five and exclaimed, “Hi, Mr. Dennison!  Who’s that?  Isn’t she the vice principal or something?”

“Yes,” I explained.  “Mrs. McCall.  She has an important announcement for the class.”

“Is someone in trouble?”

“No.”

“Hi, Mr. Dennison!” Julia said, smiling, as she walked in.

“Hi,” I replied.

After the bell rang, Mrs. McCall announced that she had something important to say.  I filled out the attendance bubble sheet as she explained, “We are making some schedule changes in order to make our classes less crowded.  But in order to make everything work out, your class is moving to room C-5, and you’ll be taught by Mrs. Andrews.”

“What?” Peter called out.  “Mr. Dennison isn’t gonna be our teacher anymore?”

“That’s correct.  We need him to teach geometry this period, since we have so many students enrolled in geometry.  Mr. Dennison is already teaching two other geometry classes, and you are his only Algebra 1 class.  So today will be your last day with Mr. Dennison.  Tomorrow, for this period, go to room C-5 with Mrs. Andrews.”

“We’ll miss you, Mr. Dennison!” Julia said.

“Mr. Dennison?  Can we have a party, since this is our last day with you?” Peter asked.

“Unfortunately, no,” I explained.  “I don’t want you to get behind for Mrs. Andrews.  It’s going to be hard enough for her, having to add this class at the last minute.”

I went through my regular lesson plan that day, but it was a bittersweet day.  All of the students were well-behaved and on task.  When the bell was about to ring, and I gave them permission to pack up, I told them, “I’ll miss all of you.  Come say hi when you see me around campus.”

“We will!” Peter exclaimed.

I got to room C-6 for the afternoon geometry classes a few minutes before Mike’s period 5 class ended.  He was sitting at his desk looking over something that did not look school related while his students were halfheartedly working independently at their desks.  I had heard less than stellar things about his teaching, and what I had seen by walking into his room at the end of 5th period every day seemed to reinforce that opinion.

Mike walked over to me when I sat down at my desk.  “Your students stole markers from on top of the file cabinet,” he said.

“What?” I asked, still processing what I had just heard.

“I had a set of overhead markers on top of that cabinet, and when I got here this morning, the red one was missing. Students like to steal the red markers because it’s a gang color.”

“I’m pretty sure no one went back there during my classes,” I replied.

“Just keep an eye out.  Make sure no one goes near my desk.”

“I will,” I said, mildly annoyed.  I wanted to remind him that he spent the last several minutes of his last class not paying attention to what his own students were doing, but it probably was not worth arguing at this point.


Last year, when I told my colleagues from student teaching at Nueces High that I had been hired at Jorgensen High, everyone familiar with the schools in the area kept telling me that Jorgensen was a great school.  A couple weeks in, though, there were only two ways to explain what I had experienced, and I was not sure which was true.  Either things at Nueces were much worse than they appeared to me if Jorgensen seemed good by comparison, or Jorgensen had a reputation from the past but had gone downhill quickly.

Sharing a classroom with Mike Novak never got any easier.  It was the same old story for the entire time I was at Jorgensen; any time anything went missing from his classroom, he would blame my students, but he spent much of his classes barely paying attention to his own students.  My colleagues from student teaching at Nueces High and the student teaching program at the University of Jeromeville both led me to believe that sharing classrooms like this was the norm these days in this state, but fortunately, after I left Jorgensen, I never had to share classrooms again.

I never did find my hall pass.  But, while walking around campus, I often saw the students from the Algebra 1 class that Susie Andrews took over, and they did say hi to me when I saw them.  A few of them, including Peter and Julia, had me for geometry the following year.  And, by a bizarre coincidence, I ran into Peter in my thirties at Target where I live now, over fifty miles from Jorgensen High.  Apparently he lives in this area now too.  He recognized me, but I did not recognize him, since he had a late growth spurt and had grown about a foot since I had last seen him at age sixteen.

My student teaching experience last year was a harsh introduction to what high school students were like, outside of my bubble of honors classes. My first week teaching summer school, when the fight broke out, was a harsh introduction to what summer school was like. And those first couple weeks at Jorgensen in the fall were an equally harsh introduction to the level of disorganization plaguing many public schools in this state.  Some years and some schools have definitely been worse than others, and Jorgensen was definitely one of the more chaotic of the schools where I have worked, but as a teacher, I have come to find that I will never escape unexpected last minute changes.  That is also true of life in general.  I did not have to like it, but I did have to accept it.

Readers: Have you ever been surprised at how disorganized something was? Tell me about it in the comments.

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[The Offspring – The Kids Aren’t Alright]

August 21, 1999.  Game night at F-3. (#230)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 17 Comments

I have always enjoyed playing games.  What kind of games I tend to play, however, has changed over the years, and also somewhat has depended on the others in my life.  The traditional family board games and card games I played with my family as a child mostly gave way to video games on the Commodore 64, then on the Nintendo and Super Nintendo.  My freshman year at the University of Jeromeville, I learned Risk from Pete Green.  A few years later, Pete taught Catan to me, and Noah Snyder, and Cambria Hawley who started dating Noah later that year, and some of our other friends, and this had dominated most of my game playing since then.

The last time I saw Noah, he mentioned that Cambria and her roommates wanted to have a game night, and that he had a new Catan expansion to show us.  He told me I could invite other people, so when I got home I mentioned it to Jed and Brody, and Jed mentioned it to his girlfriend, Candace.  So, that Saturday night, Jed, Candace, and I took my car to the Sagebrush Apartments, about half a mile to the north on Maple Drive, and knocked on the door of apartment F-3.  Brody drove separately because he had other plans later and would be leaving earlier than the rest of us; he arrived a few minutes after us.

Cambria let us in, and I looked around the room.  Her roommates Courtney and Erica were home, and Mike Knepper, Courtney’s boyfriend, was here too.  Mike was my age and finished his degree last year; I had known him since freshman year, before Courtney even came to Jeromeville.  I did not see Sasha or Kirsten, the other two roommates, and I never did find out where they were that night.  Courtney turned her arm a certain way, and the light caught her hand in a way that I noticed a diamond ring on her finger.  Apparently Mike was Courtney’s fiancé now.

“Hey, Greg!” Courtney said, giving me a friendly side hug.  Mike greeted me as well.

“Dumb question,” I asked, pointing to her finger.  “Is that new?”

“Yes!” she replied excitedly.  “Mike proposed last night!”

“Congratulations!”

“Thank you!” Mike and Courtney said together.

“When is the wedding?  Do you know yet?”

“We’re thinking about a year from now,” Courtney explained.  “That way, I’ll be done with school.  And Mike has been interviewing for jobs closer to Bay City, there’s a lot more for computer programmers there, so we’ll move down that way after I graduate.”

“I see.  That’s exciting.”

“So I got this a couple weeks ago,” Noah said.  The Catan base game was actually titled The Settlers of Catan back in those days, and Noah gestured toward a similarly-shaped and decorated box called The Seafarers of Catan.  “You add pieces to the board so there are other islands around the main island.  And you build shipping routes to expand to the new island.  But it only plays with up to four people, so we’ll probably have to split into two groups and play two different games.”

Noah, Mike, Cambria, and I decided to play Catan at the kitchen table, while Jed, Candace, Courtney, Erica, and Brody started a game of Uno in the living room around the coffee table.  After Noah explained the new Seafarers rules, we began the game the same way as a regular game of Catan.  The new islands included two gold mine tiles, which were like the Catan version of a wild card, producing any resource of the player’s choice when the gold mine number was rolled.  There were two gold mines, with the more productive one on a more isolated island harder to get to.  I placed my first settlement on a port, touching wood and sheep, since those were the resources required to build a shipping lane to the productive gold mine.  Mike went next, placing his settlement exactly in the spot I wanted for my second settlement.  “You stole my spot,” I said.

“That’s part of the game,” he replied.

“Oh, I know.”  By the time my turn came around, I found a spot to place my second settlement, but it left me unable to produce ore, and the numbers I had on all of the resources other than sheep were mediocre at best.  My hope lay in getting to that gold mine quickly, so I would be able to collect whatever resource I needed from it, and in getting enough sheep that I could trade them at the port.

“My plan isn’t working,” I said after five turns around the board; only one of my five dice rolls had gotten me any resources, and the others rarely seemed to roll the numbers for my resources.

“Things could change,” Noah offered reassuringly.  And things did change.  My numbers for wood and sheep started getting rolled, giving me enough resources to start building shipping routes, and to build a road leading inland.

“So have you started school yet?” Mike asked me.  “You’re teaching full time now, right?  Not just an internship under another teacher?”

“Right.  Tuesday is the first day I have to go in, and then kids start Monday the 30th.”

“Nice!  Are you excited?”

“Excited, but also a little nervous.  I’m not going in completely blindly, though; I taught summer school there last year, so I know some of the students and teachers.”

“That’s good.”

When I was ready to build my settlement on the gold mine, which earned me an extra point for being the first one to get to that island, I pumped my fist in the air excitedly.  “Yes!” I exclaimed.  My excitement dimmed quickly as I started planning my next move, realizing that the other players’ settlements had trapped me along the coast.  “Now I have nowhere to go,” I said sheepishly after assessing the situation.

On the other side of the board from my gold mine lay a larger island off the main island, where Noah already had two settlements.  The gold mine with the less productive number than the one I had was on this island.  Mike had just built a shipping lane to that island, and now he placed his first settlement.  “Hey, this is my island,” Noah said.

“Not anymore,” Mike playfully retorted.

Just before my turn, Cambria rolled a 7 on the dice, which enabled her to move the robber piece and steal a card.  I had collected resources on both Mike and Noah’s turns.  Cambria placed the robber on my gold mine and stole a card from me, saying, “Sorry, Greg, but I know you have the resource I need.”

I glared at her, but with no malicious intent since I knew that it was just a game.  In the other room, I heard Brody scream in frustration as someone made him draw four; apparently I was not the only one having a rough time tonight. I rolled a 9 on my turn and glared at Cambria again, since this was the number that would have made my gold mine produce, but the gold mine was being robbed so I got nothing.  I had no way of moving the robber right now unless someone rolled a 7, and by the time the next 7 was rolled, Noah was close to winning, which he did two turns later.  Too little too late.

“Well, that didn’t work,” I said.  “Going for the gold mine first.”

“Yeah,” Noah observed.  “You ended up boxing yourself in, and it takes a lot of resources to spread out on the islands.”

“And it didn’t help that my numbers didn’t perform well.  And my gold mine got robbed.”

“Yeah.  It’s probably not the best strategy to go there first.  That’s why they put the gold mine with the good number so far from everything else, because otherwise the game would be too easy once someone got there.”

“Good point.  Don’t go for the gold mine right away.  There’s probably a life lesson in that somewhere.”

“That’s true too.”  Noah stood up and looked in the direction of the others playing Uno around the coffee table; by now, they seemed to be tired of Uno and were just talking. Noah said, “We’re done if you want to play something else.”

“I have to get going,” Brody explained, “but you guys have fun the rest of the night.”

“Mike and I were talking about going for a walk,” Courtney added.  “So if there are only six of you left, you might be able to find a game that everyone can play.”

“Good idea,” Noah said, pointing to the stack of games he had brought alongside a few that Cambria and her housemates owned.  “Any suggestions?”

Candace got up from the Uno table and looked through the games that were available.  “You have The Game of Life?” she asked.  “I haven’t played that since I was a kid.”

“Yeah,” Noah explained.  “I saw it on sale recently, and I figured, someday I’m going to have kids, so I may as well build up a collection of kid-friendly games when I see them on sale.”

“Makes sense,” I said.  “Good idea.”

“Can we play that?” Candace asked.

“Sure!” Noah said.  He took the box for The Game of Life down from the shelf and began setting it up.

I had this game when I was young.  Players moved around the board driving cars, passing through spaces representing things that happened at various stages of life.  The player’s choices would have an effect on the game’s outcomes; for example, not going to college moved players along by a slightly shorter route, giving players chances to make money earlier, but going to college gave players a better chance of earning a higher salary.  Players also had opportunities to buy insurance, which would cut down on certain expenses that they may incur later in the game.  A great deal of chance was also involved, with the exact events determined by spinning a spinner.  As the player progressed through life, various milestones such as marriage and births of children happened in the game, and family members would join the players’ cars.

“What are these?” I asked, pointing to a stack of cardboard tiles with the game’s logo on them.  The game I had as a kid did not have these.

“Life tiles,” Noah explained.  “It’s a new rule that was added recently, I guess.  I don’t remember these when I was growing up.”

“Same.”

As we began the game, I noticed a number of other changes to the game compared to the one I had as a kid.  A player choosing to go to college at the start of the game began the game in debt, a much more realistic scenario for 1999 compared to the older edition that I had grown up with.  I chose to go to college anyway, and I ended up as a teacher.  “That’s appropriate,” Cambria said when I got my career in the game.

I was the first to reach the “Get Married” space.  I took a female pink peg out of the box and added it to my car.  “What’s your wife’s name?” Jed asked.  I paused, flustered, and did not say anything, not wanting to admit that I found anyone attractive at the moment.  Jed continued, “I think the rest of us should be able to decide your wife’s name.”

“That’s a good house rule,” Noah said.  “And since it’s my game, I have final say over house rules.”

“Sasha,” Jed announced.  I blushed as everyone but Candace laughed.  I knew that Jed, Cambria, and Erica knew about my history with Sasha, and I figured Noah did as well since he had run with that crowd for so long.

When Cambria got married on her next turn, we could not think of an obvious name for her spouse.  Of course, we were not going to say Noah; that would be too obvious. The only other prominent man in her life that I could think of was Bennett Lee, with whom Cambria led a Bible study last year.  “How about Bennett?” I suggested.

“Bennett?  My Bible study co-leader last year?”

“Yeah.”

“Bennett and I definitely are not getting married.”

“So it’s perfect.”  I pointed at the blue spouse peg in Cambria’s car and said, “This is Bennett.”

“Wait! If Bennett and I get married, my full name will be ‘Cambria Lee Lee.’”

“That makes it even better!” I said as the rest of us laughed.

Candace was next to reach the marriage space, and while she and Jed were arguing over who her spouse should be, I again jumped in with a winning suggestion.  “Matthew,” I said.

“As in Matthew Gallagher?  The swing dancing instructor?” Jed asked, laughing.  I nodded, and Jed replied, “Wow.  Yes.  Candace and Matthew.”

“Eww,” Candace said.  “He’s such a sleaze.”

“Oh, come on,” Jed told her.  “You can make it work.  He’s only, what, five, six years older than you?”

“Yeah,” Candace replied, “but I’m, five, six years older than the kind of girl he goes after.”

“Whoa,” Noah shouted as the rest of us laughed loudly at this comeback.  All of us except Noah had been swing dancing at the U-Bar and knew Matthew, and all of us knew, at least from apparent outward appearances, that Candace was right.

As the game continued, I started getting frustrated as I kept hitting many of the bad luck squares.  Poor Sasha and I only had one child, whereas Cambria and Bennett had six children and could not even fit them in their car piece.  In the rules I grew up with, the birth of a new child meant collecting money, gifts from friends, but in this game, players drew a Life tile for every birth.  I was still not sure what these Life tiles were for, the rules said not to look at them until the end, but the fact that Cambria was racking up a huge stack of them while I managed to land on a lot of bad luck spaces was disconcerting to my competitive nature.  What made it even worse was that once the draw pile of Life tiles ran out, the rules said that players steal one from another player instead of drawing one, and Cambria had been getting many more opportunities to steal than others had to steal from her.

At the end of the game, players could choose to retire either to Millionaire Estates, where the player with the most money got four additional Life tiles but could still have tiles stolen, or to Countryside Acres, where players could not be stolen from but had no chance of getting the four tiles.  Cambria chose Millionaire Estates.  “Speaking of Millionaire,” she said, “have you guys been watching that new show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”

“We watched it a couple times,” Candace replied, indicating herself and Jed.  “It was more high-pressure than I was expecting from a game show.”

“Greg, I think you’d like it,” Cambria suggested.

“I saw commercials for it,” I said.  “It looks interesting.”

“They’re showing it every night next week again.  They’ll probably bring it back eventually, because so far it’s been super popular.”

“I’ll have to check it out.”

“Greg, you’d probably be good at that show,” Noah said.  “You’re good at trivia.  You know a lot of random facts.”

“Are they doing contestant tryouts or anything?”

“I don’t remember if they’ve said anything, but like Cambria said, the show is really popular, so they’ll probably bring it back and make an announcement about being a contestant,” Noah explained.  “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

“Thanks!  I don’t know, though.  I’d probably freak out and get horrible stage fright if I knew I was going to be on national TV.”

“It doesn’t hurt to try out,” Cambria offered encouragingly.  “You never know what’ll happen unless you try.”

“I guess,” I replied.  I took my turn in The Game of Life, which brought me to retirement.  I chose Countryside Acres; I was not going to win this game.

After everyone finished the game, with Erica and I being the only ones choosing Countryside Acres, we counted our money.  Cambria had the most, but the game was much closer than we expected, with Jed a close second.  “Next, we turn over the Life tiles and add the money on them to your score,” Noah explained.  I turned over the few Life tiles I had remaining and read the printing on them.  “Paint a masterpiece, $150,000.  Climb Mount Everest, $50,000.  I see what they’re doing here.”

“I won the Nobel Prize!” Jed exclaimed.  “$250,000!”

“The older versions of the game were all about making money,” I continued.  “And the message that success in life is all about money isn’t trendy anymore like it was in past decades.  I mean, I agree that life isn’t all about making money, but all this feel-good mumbo-jumbo takes away from the spirit of the game I enjoyed as a kid.  And it leaves too much to chance.”

“Win Dance Contest,” Erica read out loud, laughing a little.  “$50,000.”

“Hey!  I’m supposed to win the dance contest!” Jed replied.

“Greg, look at it this way.  It’s called The Game of Life,” Candace explained.  “And life leaves a lot to chance.”

“That is a fair point,” I said.  “I guess I just don’t like attempts to rewrite my childhood.”

“That’s fair too.”

“I won!” Jed exclaimed.  “I finished just $10,000 ahead of Cambria!”

“What?” Cambria replied.  “Count again!”  Jed started to count his money again, and Cambria replied that she was not being serious and congratulated him on a good game, and on winning the Nobel Prize.

“I had fun, even though I didn’t do well in either game,” I said.

“I should probably clean up and get to bed,” Cambria said.  “I’ll see you at church in the morning, Greg?”

“Yes!”


I watched Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? a few times the following week, and I started watching it regularly when they brought it back a few months later.  I quickly became hooked.  As Noah had speculated, they did in fact hold contestant tryouts, and they were conducted over the phone.  Each show included questions requiring contestants to put four things in some kind of order, and the phone tryouts consisted of three questions like this, listening to recorded messages and answering with the phone buttons.  Players who got all three right got put into a drawing, where they would be randomly selected for another phone call and five more ordering questions.  In two years of actively trying out, I got called back once, and of the five additional questions, I got four correct, so I did not get asked to go on the show.

On the way home from apartment F-3, I kept thinking about how spectacularly my Catan plan failed.  I had put my entire focus into reaching that gold mine, and when things did not go as I expected, it left me shut out of the game without a plan.  I would learn this life lesson again in a harsh way the following year, but that was another story for another time.

The Game of Life brought even more lessons, since at its core the game was a simulation of life.  I did not like these new rules, where the Life tiles could add varying dollar amounts to players’ scores without anyone being aware of anyone else’s score.  To me, it made the game even more dependent on chance than it already was.  But maybe that was the point.  People can plan their lives out all they want, but really, so much of what happens in life comes down to chance.  All I could do was hope to be prepared for whatever life threw at me.  Sometimes I would be, sometimes I would not be, and everyone was more or less in that same position.

Readers: What’s your favorite board, card, or party game? Tell me about it in the comments.

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[Barenaked Ladies – If I Had $1,000,000]