June 11-12, 1999.  Graduation, again. (#222)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

I parked my bike at the Memorial Union and walked past rows of students meeting and studying.  Today was Friday, the last day of class for spring quarter, I had one thing to do on campus today, and it was all the way at the south end of campus, over half a mile from here.  But I was on no schedule today, and given the circumstances, it felt like a good day to take a walk across campus.  My life and work for the last five years had centered on this sprawling campus, with its widely varying architectural styles and green tree canopy, but after this walk across campus to Academic Building VIII, I would be done.

Today was warm and sunny, about ninety degrees outside with a light breeze blowing.  I walked along the western edge of the Quad, then down Shelley Avenue to where it ended in a T-intersection at Colt Avenue in front of Harding Hall.

“Greeeegggg!” I heard a familiar voice say enthusiastically.  I only knew one person who regularly greeted her friends this way, so I was not surprised at all when I looked in the direction of the voice and saw Hannah Gifford, one of the other youth group volunteers from church.  She was a sophomore this year.  I had first met her at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship at the start of last year, when she was new to Jeromeville and looking for a church in the area where she could work with youth. I told her about my church and the youth group I volunteered with.

“Hey, Hannah,” I replied.  “I could tell it was you, because you always greet people that way.”

“I know!” Hannah said.  “Oh, my gosh, it was so embarrassing!  A couple weeks ago, I was walking right here, and I thought I saw Jake coming toward me.  I said, ‘Jaaaaake!’ And the guy pointed back at me and said, ‘Nooooo!’  I was so embarrassed!”

“That’s hilarious.  I think we’ve all been there.  I remember a time I thought I saw someone from one of my classes sitting on a bench.  I was holding the Daily Colt, rolled up, so I lightly bopped her on the head.  She looked up, and it wasn’t her.”

“Oh, no.  So what’s up?  Getting ready for finals?”

“Actually, I’m done.  My student teaching seminar doesn’t have a final. My other two classes are all people in the student teaching program, and neither one has a final, just papers to write.  And all of the schools where we’re teaching are done now, so instead of making us stay for finals week, they just made the papers due this week instead.”

“Then why are you on campus?  Go home!  Relax!”

I laughed, then explained, “I’m here to turn in the last paper to my professor’s office.  I finished it last night.”

“Ohhh.  That makes sense.  Well, congratulations on being done!”

“How’s studying going for you?” I asked.

“Pretty good.  My finals are all late in the week this year, I don’t have to take a final until Wednesday, so I have time.”

“That’s good!  I hate when my finals are all early.  Or, the worst case scenario happened to me once, where my hard finals were all the first two days, and then I had an easy final toward the end.”

“Oh, no!”

“It all worked out, though.  It’s kind of surreal, knowing that today is the last day I’ll come to this campus for academic reasons.  Well, we have a graduation ceremony tomorrow, but you know what I mean.”

“You said you’re still living in Jeromeville next year, though, right?”

“Yeah.  I just won’t have to come to campus.  I’ll probably pass through on bike rides and stuff like that.  And I still know a lot of people at JCF, so I might show up to JCF occasionally, even though they’re mostly a group for students.  I just don’t want to keep going to JCF every week like some creepy old guy who can’t move on with his life.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.  I need to get going!  I’ll see you around church!”

“Thanks!  See you Sunday!  Good luck with finals!”

“Thank you!” Hannah said.  She walked toward the Quad, and I continued my walk toward Academic Building VIII, turning left on Colt Avenue, past Stone Hall where the street narrowed to a bike path, and around the small hills that were built specifically so that engineering students could practice surveying here in the flat Valley.  I walked between Ross and Bailey Halls to the entrance of the blandly-named Academic Building VIII, which at the time housed the School of Education.  I walked to the office of Dr. Guerrero, the instructor for Education 315: Educating Disabled Children, and dropped the paper in his mailbox.

Done.

Instead of returning directly to my bike, I continued walking south, to the Arboretum.  A long stretch of dry creek bed on campus had been filled with water decades ago, with trees and plants from all over the world lining its banks.  I found my favorite bench where I used to sit between classes to read the Bible.  I sat on the bench, pulled my Bible out of my backpack, and turned to the beginning of the book of Joshua, where Joshua had taken over leadership of the wandering Israelites from the recently deceased Moses and was about to lead his people into the Promised Land.  God told Joshua, “Have I not commanded you?  Be strong and courageous.  Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”  A couple weeks ago, I had written the first of what would be a monthly series of emails to stay in touch with friends now that I was done with school.  I was writing about how my life was very uncertain at the moment, with me finishing school and beginning work as a teacher, and Brianna Johns’ reply to my message included this verse, which I found comforting.

I spent about ten minutes under the trees of the Arboretum thanking God for getting me through five years of school, for opening the door for a job this fall, and most importantly, for bringing people into my life who led me to know Jesus Christ and taught me what it truly meant to love each other and be a supportive community.  After that, I walked back to the Memorial Union by a different route and ate lunch at the Coffee House for the last time as a student, feeling at peace.


The graduation ceremony for the student teaching program was much smaller and more informal than the one I had last year; in fact, the schedule of which colleges and schools had their graduations on what days did not even list ours.  It was not in the Recreation Pavilion like the others; we did not need seven thousand seats for the families of fourteen mathematics teachers, thirteen science teachers, eleven English teachers, and fifty-three elementary school teachers finishing the program.  There were actually seventeen of us in the math teaching program, but three of them were getting their teacher certification concurrently with a master’s degree, and had one more year of classes and a thesis to write next year.

Our graduation was being held outdoors in the grassy field next to the Arboretum Lodge, one of the few parts of the Arboretum without shade, and it was a hot, sunny afternoon in June.  I wore a dress shirt and tie, just acceptingh= the fact that I was going to get sweaty.  Everyone else probably would too.

Mom had Dad had driven up from Plumdale that morning, arriving at my house around noon.  They had about an hour to unwind at the house before we had to head to campus.  Now they sat in two folding chairs, among a group of a few hundred chairs that had been placed in rows on the lawn.  Other than having to wear a dress shirt and tie on a hot day, the field of grass with large, stately trees in the background, and the creek that was technically not a creek anymore, provided a beautiful setting for the ceremony.

Half an hour before the ceremony started, I walked inside the Lodge building, where the graduates of the program had been told to assemble.  Dr. Van Zandt was here, along with his counterparts who run the teaching programs for the other subjects.  The professors gave us instructions about what order to line up and where to stand, instructions that realistically did not need half an hour, so we had a long time to wait after that.

Ron Pinkerton wandered over to me and said hi.  “So when do you start at Jorgensen?  Are they on a regular traditional schedule, end of August?”  Ron had spent the last year doing his student teaching at the same school I did, Nueces High.

“Yeah. But I’m going to teach summer school there.  Get to learn my way around the school, and make some extra money this summer.”

“Sounds like a plan!”

“What about you?” I asked.  “You got a job back home, you said, somewhere down the Valley south of Ashwood?”

“Yep.  Gonna teach math and coach football at my old high school, Paxton High.  Have you ever been to Paxton?”

“No, but I’ve seen it on a map.”

“That’s more than most people.  You’re not missing much,” Ron chuckled.  “About three thousand people in town.  But I grew up there, and a lot of my old teachers are still there.”

“That’s going to be an interesting experience.  I could never do that.  Nothing against my old school, I’ve just never wanted to move back home.  I’m glad it worked out for you, though.”

“Yeah. We start in the middle of August.  We have a fall break, so we start earlier to make up for it.  And occasionally the fog gets so bad down the Valley that they have to cancel school, because it’s not safe to drive.  There are extra days built into the schedule for that.”

“Wow,” I said.  “I’d never thought of that.”

“Yeah.  In the winter we start school later in the day, because usually the fog near the ground starts to burn off around 9, but some days it doesn’t burn off at all.”

“Makes sense.”

A few minutes later, I heard murmurs that it was time to begin.  I lined up where I had been assigned to, and walked out with the others sitting where I had been told to.  A recording of Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 played in the background.  The dean of the School of Education gave a speech welcoming everyone to the ceremony, talking about the hard work shown by all of us future educators to rise to the challenge of educating the students of this state in the twenty-first century, which was fast approaching.  There was no valedictorian or salutatorian for this ceremony, probably since the classes were set up to fulfill state licensing requirements rather than to rank academic achievement, and most of us, including myself, earned straight As in our education classes this year just by completing all of our assignments.

The dean introduced the next speaker, Dr. Graciela Newman, the superintendent of the Nueces School District.  I had heard her name before, having student taught in Nueces, but we had never met face to face, nor did I know what she looked like until now.  The Nueces School District and the University of Jeromeville had an agreement where Jeromeville sent student teachers to Nueces schools every year, and a few full-time veteran teachers in the district had schedules where they taught one fewer period and observed and met with student teachers during that time.

Unsurprisingly to me. Dr. Newman’s speech was somewhat boring, full of educational buzzwords and jargon, with a few acronyms thrown in for good measure that the graduates’ families in the audience probably did not understand.  She elaborated on the aforementioned challenges that we would be facing in the twenty-first century.  Using the Internet to move toward a technology-based society. Collaborative learning styles.  Increased cultural diversity.  Training students for the new economy.  I tuned most of it out.  I was going to have an entire career ahead of me in which I would hear empty buzzwords and slogans thrown at me by people who were out of touch with ordinary students in ordinary classrooms.  I learned in some of my education classes that the education field was full of buzzwords and a so-called alphabet soup of acronyms, and that as new teachers, we would have to get used to it.  Instead of playfully poking fun at one’s own field for using arcane and constantly changing jargon, and demanding that teachers keep up with it, maybe a better approach would be to work to make things simpler to understand, but that was none of my business.

Dr. Newman went on for a while; it seemed like a much longer speech than it actually was.  After this, we each walked up to receive a certificate of completion, technically not a degree or diploma since the student teaching program was only a year long, not enough units to be called a master’s degree or anything like that.  We would get our official certificates from the state in the mail at some unspecified date in the next couple months, which we would immediately need to file with the offices of the respective school districts employing us.

“Gregory Dennison,” Dr. Van Zandt announced.  I heard generalized clapping from the audience, and I saw Mom and Dad standing for me.  But I also heard a young female voice shout, “Greg!  Woooo!”  Who was cheering for me?  I scanned the crowd and saw a familiar freckle-faced strawberry-blonde girl a few years younger than me standing and clapping.  Amanda Fry?  What was Amanda doing here?  I would have to go ask her.

We went back to our seats, and the dean gave a closing speech that, thankfully, only took a few minutes.  The whole ceremony had taken a little more than an hour, much shorter than the three hours I had spent in last year’s ceremony when I finished my bachelor’s degree.  I walked up to Mom and Dad, and Mom gave me a hug.  Dad shook my hand. “Congratulations,” Mom said.

“Thank you,” I replied.

“I heard a girl cheering for you specifically when they were calling names.  Who was that?”

“Her name is Amanda.  I know her from church.  I don’t know why she’s here, though.”

“You should ask her.”

“I will.  Are we still going to go to Dos Amigos for dinner?”

“That’s the plan, as far as I’m concerned,” Dad replied.

“Greg!” someone said. I looked in the direction of the voice and saw Amanda walking toward us.

“Hey,” I said.  “Amanda, this is my mom and dad.”

“Nice to meet you!” Amanda said, smiling and shaking each of their hands in turn.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.  “Do you know someone in the student teaching program?”

“My mom!  She went back to school to be an elementary teacher!”

“Good for her!  I don’t think I’ve met your mom, but tell her I said congratulations.”

“I will!”

“I’ll see you at church tomorrow?”

“Yeah!” Amanda replied.  “Have a good night with your parents!”


I congratulated a few of my classmates face to face, hoping Mom and Dad would not embarrass me in front of them.  They did not, for the most part.  Dr. Van Zandt also walked over to congratulate me face to face, and I got to introduce him to my parents.

We drove up Andrews Road, turned left on Coventry Boulevard, and then into the parking lot for the shopping center that included Dos Amigos.  As we walked in, I scanned the familiar room, decorated in a Southwestern theme.  The restaurant was not any busier than usual tonight, so we probably would not have a long wait.  We put in our orders and sat at a table.

“So that Amanda girl goes to Jeromeville Covenant?”  Mom asked.

“Yeah,” I said.  “She grew up in Jeromeville, and she goes to Woodville Community College now.  She’s a volunteer with the preteen youth group, so we’ve met a couple times at meetings for leaders of all the different age youth groups.”

“She seems nice.”

“She is.  She said her mom went back to school to teach elementary school, so that’s who she was there to see.”

“When does summer school start?” Mom asked.

“June 21.”

“So you have a week off.  You were going to come home sometime before summer school starts?”

“Yeah, if that’s ok with you.  I was thinking I’ll come home Monday morning, but only stay until Wednesday night.  Because I want some time off in Jeromeville too before I have to start summer school. And I have a meeting on Friday the 18th about summer school, to get the textbook and get the classroom set up and everything.”

“That sounds good.  I’ll have the bedroom ready for you.  Do you know what you’re teaching in summer school?”

“Algebra I.  I don’t know much else yet, though.”

Our food arrived, and we all started eating.  “This is really good,” Dad said after a few bites.

“Yes.  I’ve always liked everything I’ve ever had here.”

“I wonder what it would take to get them to open one in Plumdale?” Dad asked.  “Or at least Gabilan or Santa Lucia.”

“I don’t know.  They also have stores in Capital City and Oak Heights, and I heard they’re opening another one on the other side of Jeromeville, on the other side of 100.”

“We’ll go out to eat somewhere when you’re home, too,” Mom said.


That night, as I drifted off to sleep, I kept thinking about how surreal it was to be completely done with being a student at the University of Jeromeville.  This institution had dominated my life for five years, and now I was done with classes, possessing a degree and a teaching certificate. Sometimes I still felt too immature to be a teacher.  But I sure did know math, so that was something of value that I had to offer.

Mom’s sister, Aunt Jane, was a kindergarten teacher.  She sent me a card in the mail; it was waiting for me when I got back to Jeromeville after visiting home the following week.  On the front was an inspirational quote about teachers shaping the future, and on the inside was printed, “Congratulations on beginning your teaching career.”  Oddly specific.  I guess they had greeting cards for everything these days.  I appreciated that Aunt Jane was thinking of me.

I never did go back to school for a master’s or doctoral degree, at least not as of this writing, so that day really was the end of my formal education.  Next year, I would still be living in Jeromeville, but with no direct daily connection to this campus anymore.  I was an alumnus, though, twice if I counted the teacher certification program separately, so I would always be connected to this campus.  As long as I still lived in town, I would probably be there occasionally, even if it was just for bike rides.  I planned on returning every year for the Spring Picnic.  And from 2005 on, I started going back to UJ a few times a year for football and basketball games, something I had not done since I was an undergrad.  Life was changing, the world around me was changing, and the UJ campus itself was changing, but I would always have a connection to this campus.

Readers: Do you have a place from your past that you often return to? Tell me about it in the comments!

This is the end of Year 5. I will do the Year 5 recap next week, then the week after that I will probably go right into Year 6 instead of taking a break. I took too many unplanned breaks during Year 5, and I want to try to keep the timeline at the same time of year as real life. Also, Year 6 is the final year of DLTDGB, and it will not be a full year of storytelling.

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.

[Bush – Glycerine]

June 9, 1999.  Sometimes, all you need in life is a good water fight. (#221)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 7 Comments

Being a church youth group leader was never something I thought about doing until it just sort of happened.  Two and a half years ago, a few months after I started attending Jeromeville Covenant Church, I was getting ready to go home on a Sunday afternoon when three boys in their early teens came up to me out of nowhere and asked if I could give them a ride to McDonald’s.  I had a great time hanging out with those boys that afternoon, and my friend Taylor Santiago, who was a youth group volunteer already, heard about what happened and suggested that I get involved.  The junior high school youth group at J-Cov, called The Edge, had been a big part of my life ever since.

The Edge was led by Adam White, the youth pastor, and Faith Wiener, a paid intern who had just moved to Jeromeville in September for this job.  Some of the volunteers, like Taylor and my housemate Brody Parker, had been working with the group for longer than I had.  Others came and went after a few months, and at the end of the last school year, a lot of our volunteers left all at the same time.  We did get three new volunteer leaders, all University of Jeromeville students, joining in the middle of this school year, so we were not as understaffed as we had been in the fall.  Christian was a sophomore, originally from the suburbs south of Bay City. Jamie was a freshman, from Ashwood. And Jake, also a freshman, was from a beach town in California.

I really did not like Jake.

In Paul’s letter to the Philippians, he wrote, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.”  It was not my place to judge whether or not someone’s faith and relationship with Jesus Christ were genuine, but this spirit of humility that Paul wrote about seemed somewhat lost on Jake.  He constantly and loudly reminded everyone within earshot of him that he was from California, usually with some measure of disdain for the way things were here in Jeromeville.  The first time he showed up to The Edge as a leader, he was wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt, and one of the students complimented his shirt, making the statement in a completely neutral way with nothing further implied.  Jake loudly replied, to nothing that had been said out loud, “I like Abercrombie & Fitch.  It’s expensive, but it’s my style.  I can’t help having good taste.  And when people tell me Abercrombie & Fitch uses sweatshop labor, I just say I’m glad to be giving some Third World kid a job.”  Jake spoke as if this reply was rehearsed, like he had been asked this before.  One Sunday after church, a bunch of us went to Dos Amigos for lunch, and Jake spent the whole time complaining about the food, talking about how much better and more authentic the Mexican food was back in California.  I tried to explain that Dos Amigos was Santa Fe style Mexican food, intentionally different from most Mexican restaurants here or where Jake came from, and Jake just said it was nasty.  Another time, we carpooled to take students to play laser tag, I was in Jake’s car, and he almost got us in an accident. He was driving too fast and following the car in front of him too close, and the car in front of us had to slow down suddenly. Jake slammed on his brakes, stopping just inches before he would have hit the next car.  He dismissively pointed out that he came from California freeway culture, and people here did not know how to drive.

Perhaps Jake’s worst offense from my point of view happened about a month ago, when Taylor and Noah Snyder, another longtime Edge leader who had been Taylor’s best friend in high school, were talking about going to a Bay City Titans baseball game.  The Titans were the nearest big-league baseball team to Jeromeville, their stadium just seventy-five miles away, and they dominated most of the baseball world in the area.  Jake overheard Taylor and Noah talking and scoffed, saying, “Why would anyone want to go to a Titans game?”

I looked at Jake and replied, “Say that again to my face.  Better yet, say it to Taylor and Noah’s faces.”

Jake looked at all of us and proclaimed, “Why would anyone want to go to a Titans game?  My blood runs Blue Wave blue.”

“Take your attitude back to California,” I said.  “You’re not there anymore.”

“I don’t care.  My blood runs Blue Wave blue.”

“We don’t need to invite Jake, I guess,” Noah said.

“Wait.  Who here is a Titans fan?” Jake asked, looking genuinely surprised and confused that Titans fans actually existed.

Taylor looked around the room and replied, “Everyone but you.”

“Whatever.  Go Waves,” Jake said, walking off.  It figured that the most arrogant jerk I knew at J-Cov was a Blue Waves fan.

This week was the last weekly Edge meeting of the school year.  Usually we had something bigger than usual planned for the last week of the school year.  The leaders met an hour before students arrived to plan the night and discuss future youth group events, and most of the discussion this week centered around the upcoming Mystery Trip.  I went on last year’s Mystery Trip, in which parents dropped their kids off at the church and picked them up a couple days later, with the kids not knowing where we were taking them.  I knew that I would not be able to make this year’s trip, so I tuned out of most of that part of the discussion.  It sounded like this year’s trip was a small hike in the mountains and a day at a lake, along with some other tourist attractions in the mountains.

All of us had gotten an email earlier this week from Adam saying to bring a towel and wear clothes that we would not mind getting wet.  “We’re going to have a big water fight,” he explained.  “We’re using zipper sandwich bags instead of water balloons, because they’re easier and faster to fill than real balloons.”

“That’s brilliant!” I said.

“We’re not going to divide into teams, or keep score, or anything.  Just a big free-for-all.  It’s been over a hundred degrees most of this week, and we’re just going to cool off and get wet.  The only rule is no throwing at the face or head.  You’ll want to keep an eye out, make sure no one is doing that.”  I nodded as Adam continued, “We’ll have two clean 50-gallon garbage cans full of water, so the kids can fill bags quickly.  We’ll need two of you to volunteer to make sure the garbage cans stay full, and to turn on the hose when they get low.”  Jamie and Christian got assigned this task. Adam continued to go over everything we needed to know for that night, and after that, we shared prayer requests and took turns praying for each other.

Although neither of these had been explicitly requested, Adam prayed for my upcoming new job, as well as Faith going back to school next year.  The church reorganized the youth ministry positions recently, with Adam’s youth pastor position now focusing specifically on junior high students, and high school intern Brad Solomon being promoted to a full-time high school pastor.  Faith, the junior high intern, now faced her position being cut entirely, a nice way of saying that the church was laying her off.  When she took the position last year, it was a one year contract with an option for a second year, but now the church had declined that option without Faith having any say in the matter.  Tonight’s youth group meeting, and the upcoming Mystery Trip, were Faith’s last official activities as a youth group intern at the church.

“How are you?” I asked Faith after prayer requests finished.

“Good,” she replied.  “Just going through and organizing everything at home.  What about you?”

“I’m good,” I said.  “I went to Man of Steel on Saturday.  And today was the last day of student teaching.”

“Congratulations on finishing!  What’s Man of Steel?”

“It’s a competition among the men of JCF,” I explained.  “Frisbee golf, taco eating, and poker.  I finished somewhere in the middle of the pack this year.  Not as good as my second place last year.”

“That’s okay.  I’m sure you had fun.”

“Of course,” I said.  “Good luck with organizing. I’ll miss having you here next year.  I feel bad that it didn’t work out.”

“I know,” she replied.  “But I guess those things happen.  God closes some doors and opens others.”

“So where are you going back to school?”

“Fuller Seminary, in California.”

“California?” Jake butted in, his ears perking up at the mention of his home state like a cat running to the kitchen at the first rustle of a bag of cat food.  “Where?”

“Fuller.  In Pasadena.”

“It’s okay there, but I never really hung out in Pasadena much.  I spent more time on the beach.”

As Jake turned around and walked away, I asked, “So you decided to stay out west instead of moving back home.”

“Yeah,” Faith explained.  “I’d heard good things about Fuller’s youth ministry program.  I went to visit the campus a while back, and I like the area.”

“That’s good.”

“What about you?  You got a job teaching, and it’s not too far away, right?”

“Yes.  Jorgensen High School, next to Tyler Air Force Base.  By Fairview and Nueces.”

“Teaching Air Force kids.  That’ll be interesting.”

“Yeah.  The school is about half kids from base; some of the outer neighborhoods of Fairview and Nueces feed into that school too.  And I’m starting in a week and a half, because they called me two days ago and asked if I wanted to teach summer school.”

“Wow!  That’s fast!”

“I figure that’ll be a good way to learn my way around the school,” I explained.  “I don’t really have other plans for the summer, and it’ll bring in some money.”

“Definitely.  Did you find a place to live for next year?”

“Yes!  Brody’s friend who was going to take my place in the house backed out shortly after I accepted the job, so I’m going to stay right where I am, and commute.”

“You are!  That’s great!  Still close enough to walk to church!”

“Yes!  Praise God that it all worked out.”


The beginning of the night went as it always did, with the doors opening at 7:00, students arriving to the sound of Christian music playing in the background, and Adam calling everyone to attention around 7:15.  As Jamie and Christian walked outside to man the refill stations, Adam explained that tonight’s game would be a water fight and reiterated safety concerns, like no physical violence and no aiming for heads or faces.  The students appeared excited at the thought of a giant free-for-all water fight.  “When I blow the whistle,” Adam said, “you have two minutes to fill up as many bags of water as you can hold.  Christian is outside the church office with a huge bucket of water, and Jamie is outside the sanctuary with another one.  Then I’ll blow the whistle a second time, and it’s on.  Go!”

Adam took a whistle from around his neck and blew it, and the students all went running outside.  Jamie and Christian each had several large boxes of zipper-sealing sandwich bags next to the garbage cans full of water.  I filled as many bags as I could hold and looked for a good hiding place nearby where I might be able to hit some people undetected.  I squeezed myself between a bush and the side of the building and ducked down, just barely able to see what the students gathered in front of me were doing.  Phillip Farmer paused to wait for a clear shot, and before he threw his water bag at Gavin Rodriguez, I tossed mine right at Phillip’s back.  As it popped open and soaked the back of his shirt, he turned around, looking to see where the water bag had come from.  He saw me hiding in the bushes and threw a bag at me as I started to run.  I shivered a little, getting wet for the first time tonight, and ran around, looking for a new hiding place.  A few others threw water at me as I ran, and I used up all my bags returning fire.

I went back to the bucket and got some more sandwich bags from Christian, filling and sealing them hastily.  At this point, it appeared likely to me that we would run out of bags eventually, but maybe the fun could continue by refilling bags that had broken open along the zipper without actually popping.  This would be something to remember if we ever did this event again.

I turned a corner of the building and saw Jake, just standing there looking away from me.  This was it.  This was my chance to soak Jake’s annoying, arrogant, Blue Wave fan butt all the way back to his beloved California.  I nervously threw the water bag right at his side; it burst, making a large wet stain on his Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt.  I ran off just as he turned to look at me.  I felt a water bag hit my back a few seconds later and turned to see Jake laughing, not laughing at me, just laughing playfully.

I had two bags left; I hurled one hastily in Jake’s direction, but since he was in motion, it fell harmlessly to the ground.  I held on to the other one until I had a good shot.  I was interrupted by Katie Hunter hitting me, getting me even wetter, but nothing mattered now; I had to hit Jake.  When I thought I could hit him, I hurled the water bag in his direction, then ran off before he could retaliate.  I ran back to Christian and the garbage can full of water, which Christian was refilling with the hose.  I filled a few bags with water when I saw Jake approaching.  I put my bags aside and held my hand out as if to slap something, and I slapped the surface of the water in the perfect direction to splash Jake.  He turned around and saw me as I was giggling at my direct hit.  He threw a water bag right at my chest; the water came up and splashed my face.

And suddenly, as the ninety degree heat surrounded me on that hot June early evening, something changed.

I was no longer mad at this annoying douchebag.  We were just two kids having fun splashing each other.

I splashed Jake again, and once he turned toward me, I fired a bag at his chest.  I laughed and ran off, carrying three more full bags.  I hid in a bush and watched carefully as Jake got hit by some kids and went after them.  I snuck up behind Jake and threw a bag at him, soaking the few dry spots left on his shirt.  I was completely unguarded now, so when he turned around and hit me, I was expecting it.  I was already very wet, so one more hit with a water bag barely fazed me.

I decided I had picked on Jake enough.  I threw my other bags at the nearest students I could find, then ran off to refill.  Christian’s refilling station was out of unused bags, so I ran over to Jamie’s, taking a hit from Gavin on the way, only to find that Jamie was out of bags as well.  I found a few discarded bags on the ground and filled them, taking another hit from a student I could not even see.  I noticed that one of the bags was leaking just as Brody walked by; I aimed the leak at him and squeezed.  “Hey!” Brody shouted, throwing one of his bags at me.

Adam blew the whistle a couple minutes later, and all of us filed back into the youth room, soaking wet.  I happened to get to the door at the exact same time as Jake.  “That was fun,” I said in his general direction.

“Totally!” he replied.

Adam had a brilliant way of getting students to clean up after a messy youth group game: turn the cleanup itself into a competition.  He divided the students into four teams, gave them each a wastebasket, and told them that they had five minutes to go outside and pick up as many discarded plastic bags as they could.  Everyone on the team that brought back the most plastic bags would get a fun size candy bar. After the cleanup game, the students sang a few worship songs while I took the wastebaskets into an adjoining room to determine the winner.  During the opening meeting, the other leaders nominated me for this task immediately. Apparently, having a degree in mathematics made me particularly suited to be given the job of counting, something that any six-year-old could do.

When I walked back into the room with everyone else, Faith was on stage, sharing a goodbye message for the students.  “I came here a year ago from North Carolina, not knowing what to expect.  I had never even heard of Jeromeville.  I had lived in North Carolina and Tennessee all my life, and I wanted to see other parts of the country, so I applied for a bunch of jobs at churches looking for youth interns, and God opened the door for me to come here.  I wasn’t really sure why, but he sure knew what he was doing.  I have had such a great experience working with all of you and getting to know all of you.  And I’ve learned so much about myself.  I always thought I wanted to do youth ministry full time, but now I know for sure I do.

“Unfortunately, that means I’ll be leaving you.  This is my last week at The Edge.  I’ll be on the Mystery Trip, but after that I’ll be getting ready to move to California, to get my master’s degree in youth ministry.  So be sure to come to church the next few weeks, so you can see me before I leave.  And Adam will know how to get in touch with me if any of you want to write, or anything like that.  Thank you so much, and God bless.”

Faith stepped off the stage as the students applauded.  There was no small group discussion that night; we played a few more games with the students, and at the end of the night, I passed out candy to the team that won the cleanup game.

“That was a nice speech,” I told Faith as the night was winding down.

“Thank you!  I’ll see you again before I leave, right?”

“Yeah.  I’m not going on the Mystery Trip; I didn’t sign up because I didn’t know what my schedule would be like. Now with summer school, I definitely can’t go.  But I’ll be around on Sundays.”

“Good!”


Faith was on my Theorems and Conjectures mailing list, but being busy with graduate school, she did not often reply. We lost touch through natural causes over the next school year, and I do not know what she is doing today.

Some people had asked me if I still wanted to do youth ministry as a full-time teacher.  Since I would be around students all day at work, maybe I would want a break from kids when I was not at work.  I honestly had never thought about that.  Maybe I just did not fully understand yet how demanding a career in teaching would be, but I was planning on sticking with youth ministry, at least for one evening out of the week.  I enjoyed investing in the lives of church kids, and the other youth leaders had become some of my best friends. Even Jake.

Sure, Jake was full of himself, and he was a fan of my team’s bitter rival, but after that night, I saw a more fun and playful side of him that I had not known before. I found Jake less annoying now that we had shared a fun moment.  Sometimes, all you need in life is a good water fight.  Jake was only nineteen years old, still immature, and still without much life experience beyond his California upbringing.  I was very immature at nineteen too.  Jake had plenty of time to grow up.

I do not know whatever happened to Jake.  We have not stayed in touch.  These days, I do not even remember his last name.  He stayed on The Edge staff another year, then began working with the high school group in the fall of 2000, since the boys in the group that he knew best started high school that year.  He was still kind of annoying, but ever since that water fight, I always felt a little less tense around him.  He meant well, and he had a good relationship with the students.  Jake and I would never be close friends, but that was okay; not everyone I met would be.  I walked home that night, still damp from the water fight, but glad that I felt a little less uneasy around Jake.

Readers: Have you ever had people in your life that you just could not stand? Did anything ever happen to change your perceptions of them? Tell me about someone like that 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.

[Collective Soul – Forgiveness]

May 31-June 4, 1999.  Theorems and conjectures. (#220)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 1 Comment

As spring quarter 1999 drew to a close, I was twenty-two years old, and practically everything I did reminded me of how much my life was about to change. I wanted to keep my friends informed of all of these new happenings.  Back then, though, social media and group chats did not yet exist, and the word “blog” had just recently been invented for a concept that was not yet mainstream.  There was email, so I painstakingly typed the email addresses of about a hundred people that I knew, including friends from Jeromeville who had graduated and moved away, younger friends from Jeromeville who were still around, Internet friends out of the area, and pretty much every friend or family member whose email address I knew, and I saved the contact list.  Then I started typing.

Dear friends,

Hi. :) I have been trying to write a form letter for about a month now, but I can never seem to finish what I start. Anyway, here goes.

I thought this would be a good time to start a mailing list, because when I started thinking about this a month ago, the possibility of me leaving Jeromeville at the end of the school year was looking more real than ever. I decided to name this newsletter “Theorems and Conjectures,” because some things in life seem certain, like mathematical theorems, while others are still just conjectures, anyone’s best guess.

For those of you uncertain exactly where I stand, let me catch you up. I will be completing the teaching credential program here at Jeromeville in June.  My current student teaching assignment is at Nueces High School, but they had no openings for math teachers in that district for next year, leaving me without a first choice for where I wanted to work.  I applied and interviewed with districts all over the region.  My first offer was at Petersburg High School.  I told a couple of teachers from Nueces about the offer, and they seemed less than excited about the idea of me going there. One even said, “Come on, Greg, you can do better than that.” (No offense, Kirsten, I know this was your alma mater, but you even told me it was kind of rough.)  I’ve also heard they are having a lot of internal administrative problems in that district, like with principals leaving and the like.  The second offer was at Northgate High School in El Monte, down the Valley about 70-80 miles or so south of here. The teaching assignment would probably be Algebra I and lower, at least for the first year, but someone said that the calculus teacher was retiring soon and my math background would make me good for that position. I liked what I saw, but I didn’t know much about the community.  It doesn’t seem like the most exciting place in the world, and I’m afraid of being lonely.

I held out for a few days on deciding about Northgate, because I was waiting to hear from Jorgensen High School, right on the edge of Fairview next to Tyler Air Force Base.  Parts of civilian Fairview and Nueces feed into the school as well. Northgate made their offer on a Thursday, and after praying about it, I asked if I could have until Monday to think about it, since I was waiting to hear from Jorgensen.  Jorgensen offers slightly better pay than most other schools around here, they seem to have fewer discipline problems than the schools nearby, and most importantly, it is only 23 miles from my house, close enough to stay in Jeromeville and commute.  Their offer came in that Monday morning, and it worked out for me to stay at the same house next year with Jed and Brody.  It all seemed like a clear message from God.

I don’t want to bombard uninterested people or people who never check their e-mail with these messages, so if you wish to continue receiving these form letters from me (probably once a month), please reply to this message and let me know. I don’t expect a personal reply to my form letters (although one will always be much appreciated and I will write back as soon as it is feasible for me to do so), so even if you want to read them but don’t expect having time to reply, let me know that you want to read them. However, even if all of you decide to reply personally to this message, I will make every effort to write back to all of you. I want to keep in touch with as many people as I can. My next mass mailing will only be sent to people who reply to this message.

Once again, I appreciate your prayers, concerns, and encouragements. Of course, life will be very different next year, with me working full time and not being on campus at all.  I will still see some of you at church at J-Cov, and I will still be working with the youth group there, but honestly I’m a little apprehensive about all of these big changes.  If you want to hang out, have lunch, go see Star Wars again, etc. with me before everyone scatters for the summer, let me know. Have a good week, everyone, and good luck with upcoming finals (for those of you for whom this applies).

Your friend in Christ,
Greg

P.S. I tried to hide all the addresses using bcc:. Did it work?

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
— Jeremiah 29:11

I clicked Send and listened to the screeching beeps as my Windows 98 PC connected to the dialup Internet to send my message.  Afterward, I shut down the computer and started getting ready for bed.  It was only ten o’clock, a little earlier than my usual bedtime, but I was tired.  I did not have class at the university or at Nueces High today, because of the holiday for Memorial Day.  Last night, Sunday, was swing dancing at the University Bar & Grill.  I had quit swing dancing seven months ago; after a bad experience at swing dancing, I chose the X-Files watch parties at Eddie and John’s house, which happened on the same night, over swing dancing.  But now that The X-Files was done for the season, I got brave and went back to swing dancing last night, and I enjoyed it enough that I wanted to go more often during the summer once school was out of the way.  After swing dancing, I had stayed up well past two in the morning on an IRC chat, talking to a random girl in another state, or at least someone claiming to be one.  By now I was tired.


I did not get to check email again until late afternoon the next day, after I came home from my class at the university.  A while after the screeching stopped, I heard the ding indicating that I had new messages, and I was a bit surprised to see that I had thirty-two of them, all replies to Theorems & Conjectures.  I smiled as I began reading the responses. Most were similar, offering me congratulations on having a job and telling me in some way that everything was going to be all right, that I would do fine.  A few of them simply said that they wanted to continue getting the newsletter. The response I was most excited to read, near the bottom of my list of incoming messages since it was just sent an hour ago, was from Brianna.

From: “Brianna Johns” <brjohns@jeromeville.edu>
To: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Date: Tue, 01 Jun 1999 15:24 -0700
Subject: Re: Theorems & Conjectures, Vol.1, May 1999

Congratulations Greg!  I know I already told you this in person, but I’m excited for you that you found a job, and that you’re staying in Jeromeville next year! I’m sure that must be a big relief with all you’ve been going through. Whenever you’re feeling anxious about next year, just remember to take it to God.  Pray about it.  Read Scripture about feeling anxious. A lot of Psalms are good for that.  And remember Joshua 1:9 “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”

Do you have finals in your education classes?  Do you have to grade finals for the class you’re teaching?  If so, good luck!  I’ll be going back home after finals, so I won’t be around to hang out this summer, but I’ll see you around the next few weeks, and I’ll see you around next year!  

-Brianna

I opened my Bible and looked up the verse that Brianna had quoted, reading the entire chapter in order to understand completely what was going on.  Moses, whom God did not allow to enter the Promised Land, had just died, and his successor Joshua was about to lead God’s people into the Promised Land.  God was speaking to Joshua about staying true to the law that God gave Moses, and preparing the people to take the land and face the opposing armies that they would soon encounter.  I did not remember having read this verse before, but it seemed perfect for what I was going through.  God had given me this opportunity to teach mathematics at Jorgensen High School, and he had given me everything I would need to face whatever difficulties I might encounter.  I sat for a few minutes and prayed, thanking God for this opportunity and asking him for strength and wisdom for whatever I might face next year.

But as my thoughts kept returning to this verse over the next few days, another truth began to surface in my mind: I really liked Brianna.  She was beautiful, with her curly blonde hair and blue-gray-green eyes that seemed to match her shirt, if it was any shade of one of those colors.  She was enthusiastically friendly, as I kept seeing over the last couple months as we had seen a little more of each other around campus and around town lately.  She was a Christian, the kind of serious faithful Christian whose first response to my email about my uncertain future was to quote the Bible and encourage me to read Scripture.  And, as far as I could tell, she did not have a boyfriend.

Over the last few months, I felt like we were becoming closer.  There was the time she invited me to the blood drive with her and her friends, and we talked in the waiting room.  I had lunch with her at the Spring Picnic.  She invited me to her birthday party.  And now I wondered if maybe it meant something significant that she liked having me around.  I just knew that I was terrible at communicating to a woman that I was interested in her.  None of my previous attempts at this had been successful, and no one had ever explained to me what I was doing wrong.  

My mind was even more preoccupied than usual that week.  I wrote a worksheet with math problems for the students to review for finals, and I named the character in the first word problem “Brianna.”  I looked for her when I was on campus, everywhere that I had run into her recently, but I did not find her.  And, of course, every night as I drifted off to sleep, I thought about her, going on dates with her, holding hands, making out, and more, which led me to frustration when I woke up alone as I did every morning.


That Friday night was the final large group meeting of the school year for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  Classes went for one more week, but there would be no JCF at the end of next week, since most students would be busy studying for finals the following week.  Usually graduating students gave testimonies at the final JCF meeting of the year; I had been one of those testimonies a year ago, when I finished my undergraduate degree.  As Todd Chevallier stood in front of all of us sharing about the rough times he experienced in high school, and how he turned to the book of Job in the Old Testament about going through hard times and staying faithful to God even under pressure to do otherwise, I was only half listening to his story.  I was more interested in the fact that I could see Brianna from where I was sitting, and she was wearing this really cute tank top and shorts.

This was it.  I was going to say something tonight.  Either she liked me back, and I would be happy because there would finally be a good Christian woman in my life, or she did not, and I could stop thinking about her and move on.  Why did it feel so nerve-wracking to tell this girl that I liked her?  Either one of the two possible outcomes would be preferable to having her on my mind all the time and not knowing.

After the last worship song and prayer, I stayed in my seat, looking at Brianna.  She was talking to some of her friends, so I sat by myself, waiting.  I saw Todd walk by, so I told him I enjoyed his testimony, thanking him for sharing.  He started asking me about classes and my upcoming new job, and as I was telling him about finals, I noticed that Brianna was now by herself.  But by the time Todd wrapped up his conversation, Brianna was now talking to Janet McAllen, one of the JCF adult staff.  I sat in my seat and waited another three minutes until Brianna was alone again, then I walked up to her, trying to control myself and not shake.

“Brianna?” I asked, my voice sounding a little weaker than usual.

“Hey, Greg!” she exclaimed.  “Is your student teaching class done yet?”

“Wednesday is the last day,” I said.  “They take finals next week.”  I took a breath and said, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure!  Like, here, or did you want to step out where it’s quiet?”

“Quiet,” I said, walking up the aisle to the lobby of 2101 Harding, where it was much quieter, and only a few people were standing around talking, at the opposite end of the room.  Brianna followed me.

“What is it?” Brianna asked, standing with her back to the wall.

I began speaking, hoping that the words would come out the way I had rehearsed it in my head.  “Thanks for your thoughtful reply to my Theorems and Conjectures newsletter.”

“You’re welcome!  You can do this with the Lord beside you,” she replied.

“I just… well… you’re really great, and I really like talking to you, and I was kind of hoping that maybe there was a chance that we could, you know, be more than just friends.”

“Oh, Greg,” she replied almost immediately, as if she had already anticipated what I was going to say.  “That’s really sweet of you to say that.  And now I feel bad, because I don’t feel the same way, and now I’m going to have to break your heart.”

I nodded crestfallenly.  “Thanks for being honest.”

“Thank you for being honest too.  I know it probably wasn’t easy for you to say that.”  I shook my head as Brianna continued, “I hope you’re not upset with me.”

“I’m not,” I said, trying to force a smile.

“You’re a great guy, and you’ll find someone someday.”

I just nodded, reluctant to agree vocally because my entire experience in life up to that point seemed to indicate otherwise.

“I should probably go back inside,” Brianna said.  “I don’t want this to be weird.”

“It’s not.  And you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Take care of yourself, okay, Greg?”

“I will.  Thank you.”

I stood by myself in the lobby for about another minute, then walked back into the lecture hall.  It was starting to empty out by then, so I sat in an empty seat in the back, just silently watching people.  Two people asked me if something was wrong, and I gave a noncommittal answer that I just had stuff on my mind that I did not want to talk about.


In my heart, I had a feeling that Brianna would not be interested back.  That had been the result of every other attempt like this on my part, one in high school and three since then.  And, honestly, Brianna was out of my league.  I was not realistically expecting her to like me back.  Mostly I just spoke up in order to have her reject me and get it over with, so that I could move on with my life and stop thinking about her all the time. If she did end up liking me back, that would be a pleasant surprise.

Of course, with decades of hindsight, I can say that I probably caught Brianna off guard.  I had never asked her out on a proper date or anything like that, nor had I acted in a way that suggested interest on my part.  But I understood none of that back when I was twenty-two.  No one taught me anything about dating or girls growing up.  The only thing I ever learned about dating was from Taylor and Brent’s BWF seminar a few months ago, where we talked about male-female interactions.  Taylor had this book that was popular in Christian circles at the time, called I Kissed Dating Goodbye; I had borrowed it from him and started reading it, but never finished it.  I felt like I was not the target audience of the book, like it was written for young people who had previously made un-Biblical choices in relationships before and were now approaching relationships from a Christian perspective.  As someone who had no idea about relationships at all, I found the book disappointingly unhelpful.

One takeaway I did have from the BWF seminar and that book, though, was to get to know someone as a friend first, and then discuss a relationship if that went well.  And that was exactly what I had done with Brianna.  I had gotten to be friends with her over two whole school years, I learned that she was the kind of girl I would want to be in a relationship with, and I told her so.  Even though she said no, I had done nothing wrong.  The reality of the situation was that sometimes the person you like just does not like you back.  And now that I knew that Brianna was not interested in me, I could let her go, just as I had hoped would happen.

I called my new monthly newsletter “Theorems and Conjectures,” because some things in life are known, proven without a doubt, like mathematical theorems, but other parts of life are just conjectures, guesses based on patterns and evidence.  No matter what I did, no matter how much I attempted to learn about the subject, or practice social skills, dating and relationships would always be a conjecture, because other human beings did not follow definable and predictable patterns of behavior.  I had no way of knowing for sure what was going on in someone else’s mind, and nothing related to relationships would ever be certain in the way that mathematical proof was certain.  I could expect to have my share of disappointment in relationships, and it was completely normal for every romantic experience to end in disappointment, except for the one that would last forever.

Readers: Tell me about a disappointing rejection you experienced… let’s all commiserate… haha.

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.

And, finally, my song choice for this episode is the greatest girl rock song of the ’90s. I said what I said, and I will not be debating this. 😝

[Natalie Imbruglia – Torn]

May 22, 1999.  Forgetting makes remembering sweeter. (#219)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

The crowd at Saint Mary Park was fairly sparse when I arrived that day, which I saw as a good thing because I found crowds difficult to deal with sometimes.  The park was more like a small plaza tucked among tall buildings in the grid of streets in downtown Capital City.  On one side of the plaza was a commercial shopping street that at some point in the city’s history had been closed to motor vehicles, with light rail trains running down the middle of the street.  The Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, where two of my concerts with University Chorus were held, was a few blocks to the east, along this pedestrians-only street.  To the west of St. Mary Park was a two-story outdoor shopping mall, the product of a downtown realization effort that had happened several years before I moved to this area.  I had been to that mall before; there was a game store there where I bought my copy of Catan, or as it was called back in the ’90s before it was mainstream enough to be sold in general stores, The Settlers of Catan.

I had made the drive across the Drawbridge from Jeromeville on that hot morning to attend the Under Heaven Festival, an all day exhibition of Christian music and art across two downtown parks.  My friend Darius Curtis from church had some friends from another church who were involved in planning this event, and I had also heard about it from the email list of Carolyn C. Parry, a friend from University Chorus who had graduated and was now performing small shows throughout the region and would be performing here later this afternoon.  

As I walked across the mall toward St. Mary Park, I heard music getting gradually louder.  The mall was not busy, but not completely empty either.  When I arrived at the park, a four-piece band I did not know was playing a song I did not recognize, but they sounded pretty good.  The festival had begun about half an hour ago. I did not make much of an effort to get there right on time, since the artists I actually wanted to see were all playing later.

I saw an information booth at the edge of the park.  “Can I help you?” a volunteer asked as I walked up.

Looking at the table at the information booth, I said, “Can I get a program?”

“Sure,” he replied, taking a folded 8 ½-by-11 inch page off of a stack.  The paper had a schedule of performers, and a map showing the two parks and the four block walking route in between.

I then pointed at a pile of black t-shirts and asked, “Do you have one in extra large?”

“We sure do,” he said, holding up a shirt in my size.  The front said “uh!” in large lower case letters.  Clever, I thought.  The initials of “Under Heaven” spelled “uh,” like the sound people made when they were trying to think of something.  The volunteer turned the shirt over to show me the back, which said in much smaller printing, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.  Acts 4:12.”  I gave him the money, rolled up the shirt, and stuffed it into the side pocket of the cargo shorts I was wearing.  It would be wrinkled the first time I wore it, but that was no big deal; I would wear it around the house the first time and then wash and dry it properly.

When that band finished playing, I walked to the other stage at Ninth Street Plaza.  I gradually heard the music from the St. Mary stage recede into the background, followed by an equally gradual crescendo of the music from the Ninth Street stage.  The band playing there, another one that I had never heard of, was much louder and heavier than the band playing at St. Mary Park.  They finished a song, and the singer approached the microphone, motioning for the crowd to quiet down and listen.  “I wrote this song one day when I was deep in prayer, and I was just overwhelmed thinking about how much God loves each and every one of us, and I wanted to just praise his name and sing of his love.”  His band began playing loud, high-energy hard rock as he screamed unintelligible words into the microphone.  I wondered exactly how one would learn of God’s love through unintelligible screams.

At the opposite end of the Ninth Street Plaza from the stage were three temporary shade pavilions.  According to the program, this was the art exhibit.  This event called itself an art and music festival, and I was curious about what the art would look like.  I saw a very well done painting of Jesus hanging on the cross, his face showing detail of the anguish his physical body must have been going through.  Next to this was a simple but effective sculpture of two men embracing, meant to represent the Prodigal Son returning to his father.  As I walked through that tent full of paintings and sculptures, I thought about how visual art could bring glory to God the same way that music did.  Each one of these artists used their creations to do just that, as had many classical artists throughout history.

A little before three o’clock, I walked back to St. Mary Park.  Carolyn, my friend from chorus, was playing there next.  When I arrived at the stage, Carolyn was just beginning the first song of her set, “Seasons Change,” the title track of her CD.  I thought that song was appropriate for this time in my life, and with Carolyn having just finished her degree as well, it was appropriate for hers too.  A guy I did not know was on stage with her, accompanying Carolyn’s vocals and acoustic guitar with some sort of hand drum.  At one point during the show, she played a song with a male backing vocal, and the drummer sang this part.  I never heard his name, but I wondered if he was the same guy who sang the backing vocal on the album recording.

I had seen Carolyn perform once before, at the Spring Picnic last month on campus, and I bought her CD at that show.  Today, she performed most of the songs on the CD, in addition to a couple of new ones she had been working on.  She did not say anything about if or when she would release another CD, but if it sounded anything like this, I would buy it.

After she finished, I walked toward the stage, and I waved when she looked up and saw me.  “Greg!” she said.  “Thanks for coming out!  Are you enjoying all the other bands?”

“So far,” I said.  “How have you been?”

“Good!  What about you?”

“Not bad.  I got a job for next year!”

“You did?  Congratulations!  Teaching math, right?”

“Yes!  At Jorgensen High School, next to Tyler Air Force Base.”

“Good!  That’s not too far away.”

“Yeah.  I’m gonna stay in Jeromeville and commute.”

“Greg!” I heard a familiar male voice say behind me.  “You know the singer?”

“Yeah,” I said, turning around to see Darius.  “This is Carolyn.  She went to Jeromeville, and we were in chorus together.  Carolyn, this is Darius.  He goes to church with me at Jeromeville Covenant.  And he has an older sister who lived downstairs from me in the dorm freshman year.”

“Nice to meet you!” Carolyn replied, smiling at Darius.  “I need to get my stuff put away, but it was good talking to you!”

“Yes!” I replied.  “Enjoy the rest of your weekend!”

Darius turned to me and asked, “Have you heard this next guy up?”

“No,” I said.  I looked at the program and read the next performer’s name.  “Justin McRoberts.  I don’t think I’ve heard of him.”

“He’s from somewhere near Bay City.  I think it’s just going to be him and an acoustic guitar.  My friend has his CD, and it’s really good.  Raw and authentic music for Jesus.”

“I see.”

“Are you having fun?”

“Yes!  I just wonder why this wasn’t better publicized.  I didn’t hear anything about it at church.  I didn’t hear anything about it at JCF.  I heard you talking about it, and I’m on Carolyn’s email list and I saw this gig in an email, but that’s it.”

“Yeah.  I think it’s because it’s their first time putting this on, and they haven’t really figured out all those details.”

“That makes sense,” I said.  “And maybe because it’s in Capital City, they didn’t advertise it as heavily in Jeromeville.  Even though Jeromeville and Cap City are only like ten miles apart, Jeromeville feels like a different world sometimes.”

“That could be too.”

I heard chords strumming from the stage a couple minutes later.  I looked up; the guy on stage strumming his guitar was a young guy in a t-shirt and jeans, probably in his mid- to late 20s.  “Hi,” he said into the microphone.  “I’m Justin McRoberts.”  He began playing and singing right after that.

Justin’s singing voice was much louder than his speaking voice.  Justin was a talented singer, and if he wrote all of these songs himself, a talented songwriter as well. Maybe he would be another artist I would have to start paying attention to.


After Justin’s set, I walked back to the Ninth Street stage and watched a couple more bands that I did not know.  I did not particularly like either of them.  I wandered back to the St. Mary stage early in the evening, when the sun was low in the sky and much of the area around the downtown buildings was in shadow.  I made a plan earlier to come back to St. Mary Park for the final two artists playing at this stage, Sherri Youngward and Sarah Masen, because I recognized both of their names.  Every year, the youth pastor from J-Cov made a mix tape of Christian music to hand out to the students, called the Edge Mix.  Sherri Youngward and Sarah Masen each had a song on Edge Mix ’97.

Sherri was just taking the stage as I arrived.  Her music was mostly soft and slow, with thoughtful lyrics.  She played the song I knew about halfway through the show.  The lyrics were based on that passage in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus says that by taking care of the lowly, we take care of him.  I could not remember the title of the song; it was one of those songs where the title was something seemingly unrelated that did not appear in the lyrics.  She played for about an hour, and I applauded after her set finished.

After Sherri finished playing, some crew people began taking down her stuff, and others set up for Sarah Masen.  Her set was scheduled to begin at eight o’clock, and surprisingly, the festival was not running much behind schedule.  Back in 1999, I was still new to the world of concerts, so I did not fully appreciate at the time that the most well-known artist usually played last.  Sarah Masen was not exactly a superstar in 1999, but I had actually heard of her, unlike most of the artists here today, and she was a nationally touring artist, whereas many of the others were local to this part of the United States.

Although I had not heard much of Sarah’s music, I had seen her first self-titled CD in the church music library, and I knew approximately what she looked like from the cover photo.  The woman who walked on stage as the crowd cheered was definitely Sarah Masen, but she did not look like what I expected from the picture on the CD case.  She had cut her hair short in a pixie cut at some point in the years since that photo on the CD case was taken, and she also appeared to be pregnant.  Sarah sat down and awkwardly put a guitar on her lap in front of her baby bump.

“How is everyone tonight?” she said into the microphone.  The crowd cheered again, and by the time the crowd stopped, Sarah was strumming on the guitar.  She began singing a song I did not recognize, something about seasons changing.  I found it strangely appropriate that both Sarah and Carolyn had sung songs about the seasons changing, especially now when my season of life was about to change.  Maybe this was God’s message that everything I was going through was normal and part of his plan.

“I’m a little rusty,” she said after the song ended.  Gesturing toward her belly, she explained, “My husband and I are expecting our first child in September.”  The crowd cheered as she continued, “I’ve been taking a break, just playing a few shows here and there.”  I wondered how the organizers of this event had managed to get her to come all the way to Capital City for this show, especially while pregnant.  Did someone have a personal connection?  Did they just contact as many artists as they could and see who replied?  I never did find out.

As Sarah played more songs, I looked at her and noticed that she looked younger than I expected, probably just a few years older than me at the most.  (I would learn later that I was correct; she was 24 years old at the time.)  She was already married and pregnant, but marrying and starting families young was fairly common for Christians.

Sarah had a distinct voice, high and soft like some of the girl rockers that were popular at the time, but different in her own way that was hard to describe.  A few songs into the set, she played the more upbeat song “All Fall Down,” the one song of hers I knew.  It sounded different from the way I knew it; I realized that this was because today, she was just sitting on stage alone with a guitar, and in the album recording I was familiar with, she had a backup band.

After that, Sarah said, “This next song is on the new album.  I have it here for sale, and I’ll be at the table signing CDs after the show if you want.  It’s called ‘Tears Like Flowers.’”  She began playing, and about a minute into the song, she kept strumming the same chord for several seconds.  Finally, she stopped playing and said, sheepishly, “I forgot the words.  It must be pregnancy brain.”  As the crowd laughed, a crew member quickly scurried on stage holding what appeared to be the booklet from the CD; Sarah turned a few pages and began singing again.  That was definitely a first for me, seeing an artist forget the words in the middle of the show.

By the end of the show, I had decided I was going to buy the CD, and get it signed.  The way she said “the new album” made it sound like this was a more recent release than the one that had All Fall Down on it.  I liked this music.  Having grown up in the kind of environment where young boys were mercilessly made fun of by their classmates for doing anything feminine, I was self-conscious sometimes about liking music by women.  I was starting to get over this, since the people around me now were not like that, and I had bought Sixpence None the Richer’s CD recently, so I was just going to ignore what anyone might have thought about me and buy Sarah’s CD.  The skies had turned dark by the time she announced that the next song would be her last one.  She also reminded the crowd again that she would be signing autographs after the show.

When she finished, I wandered nervously to the merchandise table.  I never seemed to know how to act when meeting someone slightly famous.  Should I just act naturally, as if I had known Sarah forever?  Should I tell her how much I love her music?  Did it matter that I only knew one of her songs before today?  I still had not planned in my mind what to say by the time I reached the front of the line.

“Hi!” Sarah said, looking me right in the eye and smiling. 

“I really enjoyed the show,” I said.  “I only knew one song before today, but I really liked what I heard.  And don’t worry about forgetting the lyrics.”

She laughed.  “That’s never happened before!  I promise!  I swear, this pregnancy is getting to me.”

“Could be.  It makes the performance feel more authentic, I guess.”

“That’s a good way to look at it.”

I picked up the CD and asked, “Can you sign it?”  I was correct in that this was not the album that had All Fall Down.  I would have to buy that one now too, but apparently I would have to find it somewhere else.

“Of course!” Sarah replied, removing the shrinkwrap and turning to a page in the middle of the CD booklet.  I became curious a few seconds later when I noticed that she was writing something that seemed longer than a typical autograph.  I handed her the money and took back the CD, flipping the booklet open to see what she wrote:

Forgetting makes remembering sweeter.
Sarah Masen

She wrote the M in her last name with the two vertical strokes on the sides angled inward toward each other, meeting at the bottom, so that the M looked like a heart.  Wow.  This no longer seemed like just an autograph so much as a personal message.

“Thank you so much,” I said, turning back to Sarah.

“You’re welcome.  Have a blessed night.”

“You too!”


The Under Heaven Festival did not continue after that first year.  I wondered how much of that had to do with the lack of publicity.  Most of my friends, even those who were very heavily involved in their churches and the type to listen exclusively to Christian music, had not heard about the festival.  The next morning at church, I was talking to Faith, the youth leader intern on staff, about what I had done that weekend, and she had not heard anything about the festival.  She had heard of Sarah Masen, and she was excited to find out that I had met her.

That day was the only time I have ever seen Sarah Masen play live.  Justin McRoberts and Carolyn C. Parry were the only artists from that day I would see again.  That day was also the first of only two times I would see a musician forget the words to her own song in the middle of a show.  The other was Carolyn, about three years later. She admitted to the crowd after strumming the same chord for about ten seconds that she had forgotten the words, and I had the great privilege of saving that show by shouting the next line to her.

I thought about Sarah’s words often as I listened to that CD over and over again during the next few weeks.  Forgetting makes remembering sweeter.  I have found that I sometimes tend to remember the most random details of my life for years, yet other things I forget quickly.  Time passes, and events of life become forgotten and lost until, sometimes, one word, sight, or sound will set off a chain reaction in my brain to bring a torrent of sweet memories flooding back.

I write these stories to keep these memories alive, not only the memories of my personal history, but also more generally, memories of a time that has passed and a world and way of life that passed with it.  Back in 1999, the world felt new and exciting as the Internet emerged as a newly mainstream technology, with the new millennium on the horizon.  But now in 2026, even the world of 1999 with its dialup Internet and a hundred channels of cable television seems quaint and dated.  I remember more of my life in 1999 than most people I know do, but I certainly have forgotten a lot of details.  As I was working on preparing for the next few episodes, I found, buried in a long-ignored folder that I had copied from old computer to new computer many times over the years, copies of monthly newsletter emails that I wrote to stay in touch with my friends.  I will tell more about those newsletters in an upcoming episode, but while reading what I wrote in 1999, I noticed that I had forgotten an important detail of that time of my life.

That spring, about a month before Under Heaven, our landlord needed to know who was staying at our house the following year.  I did not know for sure yet if I would have a job close enough to Jeromeville to commute.  My housemate Brody had a friend ready to take my spot if I would be leaving.  I prayed about it, and I put it in God’s hands, ultimately telling my housemates to give up my spot.  If I got a job close enough to stay in Jeromeville, God would find a place for me to live somehow, even though most rentals in Jeromeville for the fall are taken by March.  Shortly after I got the job offer from Jorgensen, Brody’s friend backed out, so I got to stay at my house another year.  All of the pieces of the story worked out perfectly for me to not have to move that summer.  I had completely forgotten about this until a few days before this writing, and just as Sarah Masen had told me, forgetting about that time that God worked so clearly in my life made the memory that much sweeter.  God continues to work in my life today, and he will for the rest of my life.

Readers: Tell me in the comments about an interesting story about something you forgot and remembered.

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.

Disclaimer: Justin McRoberts, Sherri Youngward, and Sarah Masen are actual musicians.  I actually did meet Ms. Masen, and a few years later I would meet Mr. McRoberts.  But none of them were involved in the creation of this story.

[Sarah Masen – Seasons Always Change]

May 18-19, 1999.  But you can’t stop the change. (#218)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 1 Comment

The 1977 film Star Wars, written and directed by George Lucas, followed Luke Skywalker’s quest to become a Jedi and learn the ways of the Force, during a rebellion against an authoritarian Galactic Empire. It quickly became wildly popular, leading to the release of more Star Wars films.  The next two movies in the series, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, were released in the early 1980s with the additional subtitles “Episode V” and “Episode VI.”  The original movie was subtitled “Episode IV: A New Hope” in later rereleases.  The numbering started at four because Lucas had intended to make three more movies, explaining the origin of the Empire and Luke Skywalker’s father’s descent into darkness to become the villain Darth Vader.  But for the last sixteen years, no new Star Wars movies had been produced.

Until now.

In the last few years, the collective Star Wars fandom got hints that more was coming.  The three movies were rereleased in theaters, with changes made that more closely matched Lucas’ original vision for the films, unburdened by the limitations of earlier special effects technology.  I had Brian Burr as a roommate that year, and he was a huge Star Wars fan.  He quickly got me hooked.  I had seen the first two, but I had never seen Return of the Jedi until that year.  When I saw it with Brian, that was my first time ever seeing a movie on the day it was released.

As the prequel trilogy entered production over the last few years, more and more hints were given about the cast, the characters’ names, and finally the title of the movie, The Phantom Menace.  I was not sure entirely what that title referred to; those were not words I associated with Star Wars.  I had mostly tried to avoid spoilers; I did not want to know what was going to happen in the movie beforehand.

The opening day of The Phantom Menace was announced some time ago as Friday, May 21, but a few weeks earlier it was announced that the opening would be moved back to Wednesday, May 19, so that the most serious fans could see it during the week, and the more casual fans and those with children in school could see it on the weekend.  Jeromeville had two movie theaters, one with five screens and one with six. The Phantom Menace would only be playing on two screens in Jeromeville, with the earliest showing beginning around nine in the morning.  Nueces, on the other hand, had a brand new sixteen-screen theater just sixteen miles from Jeromeville; this theater would be playing The Phantom Menace on five screens the first day, with the earliest showing beginning at 12:01am, right at the start of May 19.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, serious fans of movies like Star Wars would line up outside, sometimes camping out for days, to make sure to get into the earliest possible showing. These days, the movie theater industry offered more options for buying tickets in advance, and people were allowed to buy up to twelve tickets in advance for this movie, beginning on May 12.  Five of the same guys I watched X-Files with every Sunday, all of whom I met at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, went to Nueces last week late on the night of May 11 to camp out overnight and get as many tickets as possible for all of their friends, so that we would have a huge group going at midnight on opening night.

They got a ticket for me, but this situation presented an interesting logistical challenge.  I had my student teaching every morning at Nueces High School, and it seemed kind of wasteful to get out of a movie in Nueces around two-thirty in the morning, drive all the way home to Jeromeville, have at most three hours of restless poor sleep, then drive all the way back to Nueces for class.  So I came up with a plan to go to the movie theater with a change of clothes for school in the car, and after the movie I would just find a safe-looking parking lot, or a quiet side street, and sleep in the car.  I drove a 1989 Ford Bronco, with plenty of room to sleep in the back if I folded down the back seat.

A few days ago, I mentioned casually to Judy Tracy, my master teacher for the geometry class, my plans to see The Phantom Menace and sleep in the car.  She replied, “Don’t find some random parking lot!  Park in front of my house.  We don’t really have a place for you to sleep inside, but you can come in and eat breakfast with me and my husband before work.”  She wrote down her address and handed it to me.


I arrived at the theater around 10:30 on Tuesday night. A bunch of people were already in line, since the advance tickets being sold were not assigned seats, and they wanted a good seat.  Ajeet Tripathi and Todd Chevallier were right in front of me in line, and I recognized many other people I knew from JCF ahead of us. Eddie Baker and John Harvey.  3 Silver, Marlene Fallon, Lacey Kilpatrick, Randy Smith, Blake Lowry, Tim Walton, and Chelsea Robbins, whose birthday was yesterday.  Seth Huang and Ellie Jo Raymond.  My roommate Jed Wallace, who drove separately since I was not coming straight home.  And many others I either knew or recognized. I got excited as I realized I was actually doing this, going to a midnight opening showing of a movie in a group of literally sixty people.

“You excited, Greg?” Todd asked me when he saw me get in line.

“I think overwhelmed is a better word,” I said.  “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“You and Jed didn’t come together?” he continued, pointing to Jed ahead of us in line.  “Don’t you live together?”

“Right,” I said.  I then explained to him my plan to stay in Nueces and sleep in the car.

“I guess with a big car like yours, that won’t be so bad,” Todd said.

As the night went on, I kept looking as often as I could at people arriving in line, and I noticed that Brianna Johns was not here. Did this mean that she did not like Star Wars, or did she have some scheduling conflict not allowing her to be here?  No big deal, although that meant that there was no way I would be sitting next to her.  Oh well.

“Hey, Greg,” Eddie said, walking back from his spot in line to talk to me.  “So what do you think will happen in the movie?”

“I’m not even trying to speculate,” I answered.  “I’m just going to enjoy this night.”

“That’s a good way to look at it.  Without a lot of expectations going in, then you don’t have as much of a chance of being disappointed.”

“Exactly!”

“I’m glad you could make it.  You got your plans to stay overnight in the car all worked out?”

“Yeah.  My master teacher from Nueces High said I could park the car in front of her house, and come inside for breakfast.”

“That was nice of her!  This isn’t the same school where you got the job, right?”

“Right.  Nueces High didn’t have any openings for a math teacher.  I got a job at Jorgensen High, about five miles that way,” I said, pointing to the south.

“I see.  That’s not a bad commute from Jeromeville.”

“It really isn’t.”

About half an hour before the movie was scheduled to start, the theater staff began letting us in.  The seat I found was near the end of a row about halfway from the door to the screen; the best seats, in the middle of the theater toward the back, had filled up by the time I got inside.  Todd and Ajeet sat to my right, and Jed to my left.  A series of ads ran on the screen as conversations swirled around me, some related to the movie, some not.  Finally the theater darkened as previews for upcoming movies began playing, and the crowd cheered.

As the movie began, the excited, rowdy crowd seemed to cheer for just about everything, and I joined them.  The logo for THX Sound appeared.  “Woooo!!!!”  The logo for Twentieth Century Fox appeared, accompanied by the familiar drumroll and fanfare, segueing into the logo for Lucasfilm.  “Yeaaahhhh!!!!!”  The blue text that opened every Star Wars movie appeared on the screen next: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” “Wooooo!!!!!”  The loudest cheers of all went up with the yellow Star Wars wordmark appearing over a backdrop of stars, just as every other Star Wars movie had begun, followed by the title “Episode I THE PHANTOM MENACE” and scrolling text telling the movie’s backstory.  This text told of a trade blockade of a planet called Naboo and two Jedi being sent to negotiate a settlement.  Sixteen years of anticipation for this movie was about to pay off for a couple hundred people in this room, and while I had not been a big Star Wars fan until recently, I felt the excitement completely that night.

The two Jedi on the Trade Federation ship lowered the hoods that had initially obscured their faces, and another round of cheers went up.  The younger one was Obi-Wan Kenobi, a main character from the original movie, and the older one was named Qui-Gon Jinn.  The Trade Federation had no interest in negotiating; they were communicating with, and taking orders from, a hooded figure named Sidious, who told them to kill the Jedi and invade the planet with a droid army.

I was curious about this Sidious, called Darth Sidious in the promotional material on the Star Wars website.  He looked just like the future Emperor from Return of the Jedi, and the title Darth suggested that he was a Sith Lord, one who had Jedi powers but used them for evil.  But, also according to the same website, the Senator from Naboo was named Palpatine, which was also the future Emperor’s name, and in this movie, Senator Palpatine was played by the same actor who, under heavy makeup, had played the Emperor in Return of the Jedi.  The supposed implication of all this was that Senator Palpatine was secretly the same person as Darth Sidious, and he would become the future Emperor.

The Jedi reported to Queen Amidala about the nonexistent negotiations, and she requested that they accompany her to Coruscant, the capital, so she could tell the Senate in person what was happening.  The Queen, along with her security detail and handmaidens, boarded the Jedi ship, which was damaged as it flew through the blockade. R2-D2, the astromech droid from the original movies, was on this ship, and everyone cheered loudly again when he appeared.

The group landed on a remote desert planet called Tatooine to repair their ship.  Tatooine was the planet where Luke lived with his aunt and uncle at the beginning of the original movie.  While searching for spaceship parts, the group met a servant boy named Anakin Skywalker, known to fans as the future Darth Vader.  Anakin showed them that he was building a protocol droid named “C-3PO.”   I found it amusing that the theater was completely silent at the first appearance of C-3PO; he was, like R2-D2, a character in the original trilogy, but presumably no one cheered for him because of his whiny mannerisms.

With no money for repairs, Qui-Gon and Anakin made a plan to gamble on racing, a hobby of Anakin’s.  Qui-Gon sensed that Anakin had strong Force abilities, and that he would win the race.  I laughed when I saw that the race announcer was a two-headed creature, both heads having the collective mannerisms of a typical sports announcing duo.  Anakin won, and with the ship repaired, he joined the rest of the group on the way to Coruscant, where Qui-Gon said that he would be trained as a Jedi.  Anakin was excited at first, but then felt conflicted when he realized that he would have to leave his mother.

“I don’t want things to change,” Anakin told his mother.

Anakin’s mother, who had encouraged him to take the opportunity before him, replied, “But you can’t stop the change, any more than you can stop the suns from setting.” I noticed that she said suns, in the plural, because Tatooine had two suns in the original movie.

I was confused soon after when Anakin and the Queen’s handmaiden, Padmé, had a touching scene together on the ship. I was under the impression that the Queen, not Padmé, would be Anakin’s future love interest, but I decided to just wait and see how the rest of the movie played out. After arriving in the capital, the Queen and Palpatine discussed political proceedings and bureaucracy, while, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan brought Anakin to the Jedi Council. The Council included Yoda from the original movies, and Mace Windu, a new character played by recurring movie badass Samuel L. Jackson.  The crowd around me cheered again when these two appeared.

As the final act began, with the group back on Naboo to protect the Queen from the impending invasion, Padmé revealed herself to be the real Queen, with the other Queen just a decoy.  This answered my earlier questions about Padmé and Anakin.  During the battle, Anakin secretly flew a ship into orbit around Naboo and destroyed the enemy ship controlling the battle droids.  Darth Sidious’ apprentice, Darth Maul, fought Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon with a double-bladed lightsaber, wielding it like a long staff; the battle was accompanied by dramatic music, featuring a choir singing undecipherable syllables over the sort of orchestral music typical of the Star Wars movies.  Maul killed Qui-Gon in the battle, but Obi-Wan eventually defeated Maul.  At the end, Yoda said that the Sith always have a master and an apprentice, and Mace Windu asks, “Which was destroyed? The master or the apprentice?”  The camera then focused on Palpatine, lending credence to my assumption that he was in fact the Sith master. The title The Phantom Menace must be referring to Palpatine, working in the background to rise to power and take control of the galaxy.  (The other characters would learn of Palpatine’s true nature in Episode III, released in 2005.) The crowd cheered once again as the ending credits rolled.

“Well, that was interesting,” Jed said as we walked out of the theater.

“I feel like I have more questions than answers at this point,” I said.  “Hopefully they’ll be answered in Episodes II and III.”

“If Anakin built C-3PO, then how come C-3PO didn’t recognize Luke Skywalker’s last name?”

“Good question,” I admitted.  “Maybe his memory got erased at some point.”

“Another thing I’m wondering,” Jed continued.  “Where were Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru? The only family Anakin had in this movie was his mother.  So who was that who raised Luke?”

“Maybe they weren’t his real aunt and uncle,” I speculated.  “Maybe they just called themselves that so Luke wouldn’t look too deeply into his parentage and learn that Vader was his father.”  I had some questions too, but every question Jed asked made me wonder if maybe this movie was not as brilliant as I wanted it to be.

“So, you’re off to sleep in the car?” he asked.  “You know where you’re going to park for the night?”

“Yeah.  My master teacher from Nueces High said to park in front of her house, and come inside for breakfast.”

“Good. Glad you found a safe place. I’ll see you back home, then.”


Sleeping in the car was surprisingly uneventful.  It took a while to fall asleep, but I did get about three hours of sleep, and I was still sleeping when the alarm I set on my watch went off.  Judy welcomed me enthusiastically when I knocked on the door; she had a towel laid out for me in the bathroom so I could shower, and she made me a bagel and a glass of orange juice.

A few hours later, as I stood in the front of Judy’s classroom, ready to begin student teaching, some of the students had questions for me.  “How was the movie?” Andy Rawlings asked.  I had told the students yesterday that I was going to see The Phantom Menace at midnight. If only they remembered everything I told them about geometry as well as they remembered my plans with my friends.

“It was good,” I said.  “I enjoyed it.”

“Was Yoda in it?” Kayla Welch asked.  “He’s my favorite.”

“Yes, he was,” I replied.  As the classroom filled up, many more students started asking me about the movie, all simultaneously.  I knew what I had to do.  As soon as the bell rang, I said, “Does anyone have any questions,” and at that point. Becky Bautista raised her hand.  She had worked hard over the last few months to bring her D up to a B, and she had her math book open and her homework in front of her.  I would need to come back to Becky’s question later. I continued, “About Star Wars?” Becky’s hand went down, and every single other hand in the classroom went up.  I chuckled a little under my breath as I pointed to T.J.

“I saw a commercial where the bad guy had this sweet double-bladed lightsaber.  What was that battle like?” he asked.

“It was amazing.  It went on for several minutes.”

I pointed at Angelica next.  “Were those cute little bears in it?” she asked

“Ewoks, from Return of the Jedi?  They were not.”

I spent the next three minutes or so answering all of the students’ questions about the movie.  After that, I went over the previous homework assignment and made sure to answer Becky’s serious math question.


Both of Jed’s questions regarding continuity between this movie and the classic Star Wars trilogy were in fact answered in the later movies.  By Episode II, released in 2002 and set ten years later, Anakin’s mother had married an older man with a young adult son from a previous relationship, and this stepbrother of Anakin was the uncle who raised Luke.  And late in Episode III, someone mentioned getting C-3PO’s memory erased, explaining how C-3PO did not recognize the names Skywalker or Kenobi in the original movies.

Although the Star Wars prequels all did well at the box office, many fans held the opinion that they did not age as well as the classic trilogy, some even to the point of disowning the movies and insisting that there were only three Star Wars movies.  After the initial excitement wore off, I have not rewatched the prequels nearly as many times as I have seen the original trilogy, but my view of them was not as harsh.  The acting was not great, but I enjoyed the story, for the most part.  I always wondered how many of these disappointed Star Wars fans felt that way because they saw the classic trilogy as children, and their taste in cinema had become more sophisticated by the time they saw the prequels as adults.  Star Wars was not considered great cinema when it premiered in 1977; it only became the legendary movie it is now after it proved to be so popular.

Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 and released Episodes VII, VIII, and IX later that decade, along with two spinoff movies that filled in key parts of the backstory between Episodes III and IV.  The sequels also have not stood the test of time well, in my opinion; I have only watched them a few times each.  I enjoyed the two spinoffs, but many critics did not.  In recent years, Disney produced many Star Wars spinoff series, which I have not watched since I do not pay for their streaming service.  I considered myself a Star Wars fan through the sequel trilogy, but with all of these other series set in the Star Wars universe, I am not sure if I can claim that label anymore.  Good thing I never cared much for labels; I will enjoy the movies I like and not worry about the ones I do not.

My own life was about to change back in the spring of 1999, just like Anakin’s was when he left his mother to become a Jedi.  Anakin’s mother was right; I could not stop the change, any more than I could stop the sun from setting.  I would be finished with school in less than a month, and I would be employed as a teacher a few months later.  I would still have some of my friends in Jeromeville next year, and I still had my church, but nothing would ever be the same.  I did not like change, but it was inevitable, and this did not have to be a bad thing.

Readers: Do you like Star Wars? What did you think of the prequels? Did you see them in theaters? 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.

[John Williams – Duel of the Fates]

May 15, 1999.  Brianna and Chelsea’s 20th birthday party. (#217)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 2 Comments

A week ago or so, when I was in the middle of job hunting, I sat at a table in the Memorial Union one afternoon, ostensibly reading for one of my classes, but actually people-watching and trying to get my mind off of all the stress of job hunting.  At the other end of the room, I spotted Brianna Johns and her unmistakable blonde curls walking toward me.  When it appeared that she was looking in my direction. I waved.

“Hey, Greg!” she said, approaching my table.  “I have to get to class, but I have something for you!”  I waited excitedly as she opened her backpack; what could this pretty girl have to give me?  She handed me a paper, a photocopied homemade flyer with printing in the middle and clip art of balloons and cake around it.  I read:

You’re invited!
BRIANNA & CHELSEA’S
20TH BIRTHDAY PARTY
Come join us for the celebration!
No gifts required

Saturday, May 15, 1999 2pm
Fleur-de-Lis Apartments Event Room
720 Alvarez Ave.
For more information, call Brianna or Chelsea
555-0147

I looked at the invitation again, and my mind was instantly full of questions.  Was May 15 Brianna’s actual birthday?  I felt like I should know this, but I did not. Did Brianna and Chelsea have the same birthday, or were they a few days apart and they just decided to combine their parties into one, since they had a lot of the same friends?  For that matter, was I even correct in assuming that the Chelsea on the invitation was Chelsea Robbins?  I knew that Brianna and Chelsea were roommates and ran in the same circles, but I did not know Chelsea’s birthday either, and maybe Brianna had another friend from somewhere else named Chelsea who also had a May birthday.  But the important thing was that I just got invited to a birthday party for a cute girl.  Two cute girls, if Chelsea was in fact Chelsea Robbins. I looked at the flyer again, particularly something I had not noticed at the bottom. The wording “call Brianna or Chelsea” suggested that the two of them lived together, since they had the same phone number, so apparently this was Chelsea Robbins. Maybe there were two roommates in the same apartment named Chelsea, but that was unlikely. “Awesome.  I’m pretty sure I can make it,” I said.

“Share the flyer with Jed.  He’s invited too.”

“I will do that!  Thank you!”


On the afternoon of the party, my roommate Jed and I walked into the event room next to the office of the Fleur-de-Lis apartment complex.  I had been here exactly once before, about three years earlier when I was looking for an apartment to rent with Brian Burr, Shawn Yang, and Josh McGraw.  I chose a different apartment instead of the one here, mostly because I misread the poor-quality photocopy of the floor plan of the other apartment and thought that the master bedroom, which Shawn and I shared, was larger than it actually was.  The master bedroom of the three-bedroom apartment at Fleur-de-Lis is actually significantly larger than most.  But I most likely would not be seeing the insides of any bedrooms today, since the party was in the event room.

Apparently Brianna was expecting a large crowd if she reserved this event room for the party.   But the large crowd had not shown up yet: so far, other than Brianna and Chelsea, the only other guests who had arrived were Tim Walton and Blake Lowry.

“Greg!  Jed!” Brianna exclaimed as we walked in.  “Thanks for coming!”

“Happy birthday!” I said. “Is today your actual birthday?”

“Yes! Mine is today, and Chelsea’s is the 17th. Monday.”

“Greg!” I heard Chelsea’s voice.  I looked to the other side of the room, where Chelsea, standing five feet, one inch tall, was struggling to hang a streamer high enough on the wall.  “You’re tall!  Can you help me?”

“Sure,” I said, chuckling because this was not the first time I, at six foot four, had been asked to do things like this.  I reached about a foot above where Chelsea was reaching, taped the streamer to the wall, and let go.

“Thanks!” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I replied.  “And happy birthday.”

“Thank you!”

I wandered back over to Brianna.  She was wearing a casual sundress and flip-flops, and her blue eyes seemed to match the light blue of the dress, as always seemed to be the case whenever she wore any shade of blue, green, or gray.  “You got roped into helping because you’re tall, I see,” she said.

“I’m used to it,” I replied.

“How’s the job hunting going?”

“I got a job!”

“You did?” she asked, her face bright.  “That’s so exciting!  Where?”

“Jorgensen High School, next to Tyler Air Force Base, between Nueces and Fairview.  The next school district over from where I’m student teaching now.”

“Congratulations!”

“What?” Blake asked, passing within earshot.

“I got a job,” I replied, humbly.

“That’s awesome!”

“So is that close enough to commute?” Brianna asked.  “Are you staying in Jeromeville?”

“Yes!  Still in the same house with Jed and Brody.  Sean is graduating, but he knows someone who will be taking his spot.”

“That’s great!  I’m happy for you!”

“Thanks,” I said.  Jed walked up at that point and started talking to Brianna, Tim, and Blake as I looked around the room.  A few more people had arrived by then.  Morgan King, Jill Finch, and Randy Smith were standing near the bowl of chips and salsa, and Marlene Fallon, 3 Silver, and Lacey Kilpatrick were just walking through the door.  I walked over and began talking to the new arrivals.

“Greg!” Marlene exclaimed.  “Good to see you!  How are you?”

“Pretty good,” I replied.  “I got a job!”

“You did? Congratulations!” Marlene gave me a hug, and 3 high-fived me.

“Where?” Lacey asked.

“Jorgensen High School.  By Tyler Air Force Base, between Fairview and Nueces.”

“Oh, ok!  Are you gonna move down there, or stay in Jeromeville and commute?”

“I’m staying in Jeromeville, at least for next year.  Probably move closer at some point in the future, but we’ll see.”

“That’s good!” Lacey exclaimed. “So I’ll still be seeing you around next year!”

“And you’ll still be coming to X-Files?” 3 asked.

“Of course!” I replied.

“Are you ready for Tuesday night?”

“Yes!  It’s gonna be crazy.  Everyone has waited for this for so long.  I just hope I can stay awake.”

“Dude.  I think you’ll be so full of adrenaline that you’ll stay awake just fine.”

“I hope so.  But if I’m tired enough, I can sleep through movies and TV shows.”


A little while later, I walked back over to where Jed was.  “3 was just talking about Tuesday night,” I explained.  “It’s gonna be really fun.”

“I know!  We’ll need to drive separately, right?”

“Yeah.  Because we’ll already be in Nueces, it’ll be over around three in the morning, and then I’ll have to be back at Nueces High for student teaching at 8.  I’m just going to find somewhere to sleep in the car, so I don’t have to drive all the way back.”

“That sounds crazy.  Are you sure?” he asked.

“It’s only for one day.  I’ll take a nap as soon as classes are over on Wednesday.  Maybe I’ll get a quick nap in during second period in the staff room, when I’m not teaching.”

“That works,” he replied, laughing.

“Greg!” Brianna called out, approaching me with a guy I did not know and a birthday card.  “I need you to settle a debate, with all of your mathematical wisdom.  Joe, he was my next-door neighbor in the dorm last year, he just gave me a birthday card, and he wrote, ‘I hope you have a great 20th year!’  But I think that if I’m turning twenty, I’ve already lived twenty years, so this will be my twenty-first year.  Who is right?”

I thought for a minute, and said, “You are.  Turning twenty means you have completed twenty years, so this upcoming year will be your twenty-first year.”

Joe protested, “But then why can’t she buy beer?”

“Because that’s not how the law works.  Being twenty-one years old means that you have lived for a full twenty-one years.”

“That’s dumb,” Joe said, looking confused.

After he walked off, Brianna turned to me and said, “I knew I was right.  Thanks.”

“There’s no place in the world for bad math,” I explained.

“That’s why you’re gonna be a great teacher.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you know yet what classes you’ll be teaching?”

“I was told Basic Math A, Algebra I, and geometry, although that could still change.”

“What’s Basic Math A?”

“That’s the class for freshmen who aren’t ready for algebra,” I explained.  “Like pre-algebra.  From there, they can either go to Algebra I as sophomores, or if they just want to graduate from high school and not apply to a four-year college, they take Basic Math B and then they’re done with math.”

“I see.  I was in all honors and college prep classes, and so were most of my friends, so I don’t really know how it works for students who aren’t on that path.”

“Same,” I said.  “I took Algebra I in eighth grade.”

“Me too.”

“That’s one thing I’ve learned from student teaching.  The world I lived in, the world of honors classes and doing your work and going straight to a four-year school, that’s not the world most students live in.  So I need to adjust the way I think about things sometimes.”

“That’s so true,” Brianna replied.  “You don’t really think about that much when you’re somewhere like Jeromeville.”


I sat on a couch by myself as I watched the party fill up.  I needed to take a break and sit by myself for a minute.  I knew the majority of people here, from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship or from church, or both, but some of Brianna and Chelsea’s friends from classes and their freshman dorms were here too.  Music was playing in the background, loud enough to make the whole party feel loud, but not blaring to the point that I had to shout in order for someone right next to me to hear me.

I noticed Tim and Chelsea sitting and talking across the room from me.  The last few times I had hung out around this crowd, the two of them had been looking awfully chummy.  I could not tell if they were an actual couple or just close friends; I was always the last one to hear whenever a new couple got together, or broke up.  I hated being the last one to know.  I feared putting myself in the awkward situation of trying to get close to a girl who already had a boyfriend.  And, many times, the way I found out about a breakup was by seeing the girl with someone else.  That always made me feel like I missed my chance with that girl.

A while later, after I had caught up with a few more people, the music stopped, and I heard Brianna shout, “Time for cake!”  Tim and 3 walked into the room carrying a sheet cake from a grocery store that said “Happy 20th Brianna & Chelsea” written in frosting, with twenty lit candles on top.  Everyone began singing “Happy Birthday,” then Brianna and Chelsea blew out the candles together, all twenty of them.  The crowd applauded.  When I got to the table with the cake, I cut a piece a bit larger than I probably should have and stood to the side, slowly eating it.

I heard someone put on a song that I recognized from when I used to go swing dancing.  A few of the party attendees who knew how to swing dance got up and started dancing, and I saw Jed lead the girl he was talking to out to the dancing area, teaching her some basic moves.  I did not know Jed’s dance partner; she appeared to be one of Chelsea’s friends who did not go to JCF or our church.

Brianna was standing near me as I ate my massive slice of cake.  “Don’t you know how to swing dance?” she asked.

“Kind of,” I said.  “I used to go regularly last summer, but then when X-Files started up again in November, the watch parties at the De Anza house were the same night as dancing, and I had just recently had a bad experience swing dancing.  I’ve only been once since then.”

“What kind of bad experience?”

“Nothing really.  Just people not being very nice.  What about you?  Do you dance?”

“I went a few times spring of freshman year, but it’s been a while.  I’m kind of rusty.”

“I’m rusty too, but would you like to dance?” I asked, extending my hand toward her.

“Sure!” Brianna took my hand as we walked toward the dancers, and I started leading her in the basic step.  I turned her to the outside a few beats later.  “It’s kind of hard to do that turn in flip-flops,” she said.

“Yeah,” I agreed.  Brianna kicked her shoes off toward the area where we had just been standing, and continued to dance with me, barefoot.  We danced for the rest of that song, with me leading her in various turns to both sides, and dipping her on the song’s final beat.  I looked down at her, smiling, and she smiled back.

“You don’t seem that rusty to me,” she said as we walked back to the edge of the dance area.

“I guess it’s coming back to me,” I explained.  “This week is the last X-Files of the year.  I might start going swing dancing regularly again after that.  I know now that I’ll be in Jeromeville next year, so I won’t be spending the whole summer looking for jobs.  And Jed will be in town this summer, so I’ll at least have someone I know there.”

Brianna looked at Jed, who was now dancing a second song with Chelsea’s friend.  “He’s pretty good,” she remarked.

“He really is.  He got really into it last summer when he went home and found a place to go dancing down there, and he’s been a regular at swing night at the U-Bar ever since.”

“That’s cool.  I think you should keep it up.”

“Would you like to dance again?” I asked as another swing song started.  I noticed that Tim and Chelsea were now on the dance floor, as were Marlene and 3.

“Sure!” Brianna replied. We danced again, with me leading her in mostly the same moves I had for the song before.  I noticed over her shoulder that Tim and Chelsea definitely looked like a couple on the dance floor.  Marlene and 3, on the other hand, had insisted for the last two school years that they were just good friends, and I was inclined to believe them.  Everyone on the dance floor looked like they were having a lot of fun.  This was a great party.

After that song ended, Brianna and I walked away from the dance floor.  “My friend from last year who I haven’t seen in forever just got here,” she said.  “I need to go say hi to her.  But I’ll talk to you more later, okay?”

“Sure,” I said.  I wandered over to Tim and Chelsea, who had also just walked off the dance floor.  “How’s it going?” I asked them.

“Good,” Tim replied.  Chelsea nodded as Tim asked, “Are you ready for Tuesday night?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Don’t you teach in Nueces the next morning?  Is there somewhere you can stay, so you won’t have to drive all the way back to Jeromeville in the middle of the night, then drive all the way to Nueces again a few hours later?”

“I’m thinking I’m just going to sleep in the car in the parking lot.  Or maybe find a quiet street somewhere, where no one will notice that I’m sleeping in the car.”

“That’s a good idea.  But be safe.”

“I will.  It’s only for one day.  And it’ll be worth it.”

“Totally.”


Jed and I got home around dinner time.  I stayed home the rest of the night, doing some reading for one of my classes, and working on a new episode of Dog Crap and Vince.  I had been trying to post my creative illustrated stories more often, and I had a lot of ideas.  In the previous episode, I had introduced a new character, a pretty blonde blue-eyed girl who went to school with Dog Crap and Vince.  Using MS Paint to make the graphics for the episode, I put this new girl in this one also, but I made her shirt a little more brighter blue than it had been before, and I made her eye color match her shirt exactly.  Just like how Brianna’s eyes always seemed to match her shirt, whenever she wore any shade of blue, green, or gray.

As I would learn over the next few weeks, Tim and Chelsea were most definitely a couple.  Unfortunate, because that was one more cute girl off the market, but Chelsea and I probably would not have worked out anyway with the fifteen-inch height difference.  Tim and Chelsea got married a few years later, they still were married when I last saw them in person in 2017, and to my knowledge, they still are today.

I had plans to look forward to next Tuesday night.  Very large plans with a very large group of around sixty people.  That will be a story for next time.  Maybe I could somehow work things out so that Brianna would be sitting next to me.  If there were sixty people coming to this, I had a one in fifty-nine shot of sitting next to her.  Two in fifty-nine, if I was not sitting on an aisle.  That was better than three percent; unlikely, but not out of the question.

And Brianna had agreed with me that this was her twenty-first year, not her twentieth.  It was always nice to see a pretty girl appreciate being mathematically correct.  I am writing this in the year that many of my classmates are celebrating the milestone fiftieth birthday, and I still to this day remind them that they are not looking forward to their fiftieth year, as some have said in their social media posts.  Proper mathematics is still important.

Readers: Tell me in the comments about a memorable birthday party you attended.

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[Goo Goo Dolls – Iris]

Late April – Early May, 1999. Finally, I had a plan for next year. (#216)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 7 Comments

I walked into the staff room during second period, my break between my student teaching periods.  Three other teachers, Jim, Sally, and Phil, were in the break room; Jim and Sally were grading papers, and Phil was sitting in an armchair, apparently doing nothing.

“Hi, Greg,” Jim said.  “How are you today?”

I had been thinking about how to announce the exciting news to anyone who asked about my day today, and I decided to just blurt it out.  I had told Kate before I started teaching in her classroom, and she seemed mildly enthusiastic, which was about what I expected from someone who had a rather unemotional personality.  “I got a job offer,” I said.

“Congratulations!” Sally exclaimed.

“Where?” Jim asked.

“Petersburg High,” I replied.

“I’d turn it down.  You can do better than that,” Phil said from this chair.  I chuckled awkwardly, not expecting such a blunt response.

“Are you gonna take it?” Jim asked.

“I’m not sure.  They want to hear back from me by tomorrow.  I’d kind of like to stay in Jeromeville and commute if I can, and Petersburg is too far.  I still have friends in Jeromeville.  I don’t know how long I should hold out to see if I get a job closer to home.  Also, Petersburg seemed, well, a little rough.”

“It is rough,” Phil interjected.

“But I don’t know if I should hold out too long.  I don’t want to be stuck without a job.”

“Everyone who has seen you teach says you’re a good teacher,” Jim said reassuringly.  “You’ll get another offer.  Maybe by July or August if you don’t have a job, then take the first thing that comes along, but it’s too early for that.  You’ll get something better.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You have any more interviews coming up?” Jim asked.

“Yes, actually.  Jorgensen tomorrow afternoon.  That would be close enough to commute from Jeromeville.  And on Friday, Northgate High School in El Monte.”

“Jorgensen is a good school,” Phil said.  “That’s one worth holding out for, especially if you already have an interview there.  They’re in their own school district, you know, separate from Nueces and Fairview, and when there’s only one high school in the district, you’re not competing for attention from the district office.  And they get money from the Air Force for the kids who live on base.”

“Military kids also usually have parents who are more involved with their education,” Sally added.

“That’s true,” I said.  Regardless of what happened in the next few days, I would have some big decisions to make very soon.


In the late nineteenth century, a community of Norwegian farmers immigrated to this region, settling and farming the land between Nueces and Fairview.  During World War II, Tyler Air Force base was built on their land, but a few remnants of this previous community remain.  The road leading south from Nueces to Tyler Air Force Base is called Jorgensen Road, after one of these families, and the school that was about to interview me took its name from this road, even though the school’s address itself was on a short side street  I had only been this way once before, a month ago or so, when I was driving around looking up close at schools where I had sent job applications.  The school was on the right side of the street, undeveloped farmland with cattle grazing in a pasture on the left, and a residential part of the base straight ahead past the school behind a fence.

I drove past the school looking for a parking place.  The sign near the entrance said JORGENSEN HIGH SCHOOL – HOME OF THE VIKINGS, apparently another nod to the region’s Scandinavian heritage.  But something clearly appeared off.  Large groups of students were standing around outside, beyond the gate at the entrance to the school, along the street.  It was too early for these students to be dismissed to go home, and if it was an early release day for some reason, these students would be heading to cars and buses, not just standing around.  I was confused.  I also saw police cars parked in the staff parking lot; hopefully everyone was okay.

I parked, got out of the car, and headed toward the office, trying to figure out what was going on.  A woman approached me and asked, “May I help you?”

“I’m coming for a job interview.”

“What was your name?”

“Greg Dennison.”

“I’ll let Mr. Harbison and Mrs. McCall know you’re here,” she said.  Then, apologetically, she gestured at all the chaos around us and explained, “Sorry for all this.  We had a bomb threat.  We had to evacuate the school.  This has never happened in the fourteen years that I’ve been here.”

“Oh, wow” I replied, not sure how to respond to that.  It made sense, though.  Last week, there was a major attack on a school in another state that was all over the news, so it made sense that there would be copycat incidents.  And if I was planning on spending my career working in schools, I could expect chaos like this to happen every once in a while.

A few minutes later, an older gray-haired man whom I remembered from the job fair a few weeks ago approached me; this was Bob Harbison, the principal.  “Good to see you again, Greg,” Mr. Harbison said, shaking my hand.  “I apologize for the delay.  We had a bomb threat, and the police are still investigating, but they said they should be finishing soon.”

“Wow,” I replied.

“I need to go check on things.  If the police say we’re clear, we’ll send students to class and then get the interview started shortly.”

“Sounds good,” I said.  I looked toward the gate at the main entrance of the school.  I stood with my back to a bus drop-off lane; an iron fence with a gate separated me from a courtyard with picnic tables painted green.  The school office was to my left, the gym to the right, and another building that was probably the cafeteria was at the opposite end of the courtyard.  Farther back on the left and the right were small buildings that appeared to house classrooms.

About fifteen minutes after I arrived, I heard someone on the public address system announce, “Attention all students!  The campus is clear and safe.  Please go get your things, then immediately go to your fifth period class.”  I breathed deeply; apparently this bomb threat was not real.  Someone from the office who knew that I was there told me I could come inside and sit, and after sitting in the office for about another ten minutes, Mr. Harbison led me to his office.  Two others, a woman in her thirties and a man with thinning hair, sat in the office.  They introduced themselves as Vice Principal Shannon McCall and Jerry DeBoer, mathematics department chair.

The interview began with many of the same questions I have been asked at other interviews.  Tell me about your mathematics background.  What is your plan for classroom management?  How do you determine what grade a student receives in your class?  How do you make sure all students meet the standards, including those with special needs and those from disadvantaged backgrounds?  I had been asked these questions several times over the last month by now, and I felt like I was prepared to answer them.

I did get one question that I did not remember having been asked before.  Mr. DeBoer asked, “The state has approved new funding for class size reduction in ninth grade, to make sure students are better prepared for success in high school.  Both of our current openings will include reduced-size freshman classes.  How will you teach differently in a class of twenty students, compared to a standard-sized class of up to thirty-three?”

I thought about this.  Class size reduction was a big fad in education at the time, and the state was implementing a plan to provide extra money for this, but it was not distributed evenly among ages.  The smaller classes would only be in kindergarten through third grade, plus the first year of high school, because these years had been identified as times where many students fall behind and never recover.  “With a smaller class, students get more one-on-one time with the teacher,” I explained.  “So I would use that time to watch more closely which students need redirection or additional instruction.  For example, I’d have more time to walk around while students are working, and pay attention to what each of them is doing individually.  Students also just feel less lost in the shuffle when classes are smaller.”

“That’s true,” Mr. DeBoer said, nodding.  The three of them continued asking me questions, taking notes on my responses.  After about ten questions, Mr. DeBoer offered to show me around the campus, and I said sure.

The classrooms were clustered in small buildings of six to ten rooms each, with courtyards and picnic tables in between, including two such clusters of portable classrooms.  Mr. DeBoer showed me his classroom, in building C.  “The math classes are all in building C,” he explained, “but we might also have two small rooms in building E for the small freshman classes.  They’re still figuring that out.  You probably won’t have your own room, though.  You’ll have some classes in one room and some in another.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “It’s the same way at Nueces High right now.”

“We’re losing a math teacher this year, and we’ll be adding another math position because of increased enrollment.  Our district office tends to post openings later than other nearby districts, so we didn’t have a lot of applications.  We had just posted those jobs when the University of Jeromeville had their job fair, so the timing worked out perfectly.”

“I see.”

“I went to Jeromeville myself, class of 1969.  It’s grown a lot since then.  There were only about five thousand students back then.  That was a crazy time to be on a college campus.”

“I’m sure it was,” I said.

“Did you have any more questions for me?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.  “Thanks for showing me around.”

“You’re welcome.  We have a few more interviews scheduled this week, and we’ll make a decision sometime next week.  We’ll be in touch.”

“Sounds good!  Thank you!


Two days later, I again found myself leaving straight from student teaching to another interview.  This one was a bit more of a drive, about an hour and a half through a part of the state that was mostly farmland.  Instead of taking Highway 100, which ran northeast back to Jeromeville, I took a back road directly east until it hit Highway 117, then turned right, south, to where 117 ended in a T-intersection with Highway 212.  This was a long road, starting far to the west past Valle Luna and extending east across the Valley into the mountains, but most of this road was rural highway with one lane in each direction, as my entire drive had been so far.  I drove east for about half an hour from that point until I reached Highway 9, the main highway through the Valley, then south for a while until I got to El Monte, a city slightly larger than Jeromeville in population.  I had consulted a map before I left, and the directions I had written for myself got me to the school with no problems.  

Northgate High School, like Jorgensen, appeared to have been built a few decades ago.  The architecture was similar, with small buildings clustered around a courtyard.  The school mascot was the Knights, and the colors were red, white, and blue.  I walked to the office and explained who I was and why I was there; the secretary directed me to sit, and I would be called when I was ready.

“Greg?” I heard an adult voice say after about ten minutes.  A woman stepped toward me and said, “I’m Christine Reese, the principal.  It’s nice to meet you.”  Ms. Reese directed me to follow her into her office, where a vice principal and two math teachers waited around a table and introduced themselves to me.

“Shall we get started?” Ms. Reese asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

The questions were, again, similar to many of the questions I had been asked in interviews before.  I gave my standard answers to questions about classroom management and grading.  I was asked at one point to give details of my discipline policy, and I said that I would start with a warning, to make sure the student knew what the problem was.  If the misbehavior continued, I would give after-school detention, and if that did not change, I would refer the student to the administration.  “And definitely no later than the point of assigning after school detention, I would contact home and explain the situation,” I added.

“Good,” Mr. Quincy, the vice principal said as the four interviewers took notes.  “Now suppose you have a student who turns in all the homework, makes an effort to participate in class, but fails tests.  What grade would you give that student?”

I paused.  This seemed like an unfair question.  Grading should not be subjective; a student’s grade was determined by a well-defined mathematical formula.  Rewarding effort may have been trendy in educational circles, but doing so would not make the grade reflect what the student actually learned or accomplished.  I gave an honest answer.  “Most math classes have a policy that at least half the grade is based on tests, with a greater percentage for more advanced classes.  So if a student gets near full credit on homework but does poorly on tests, usually that averages out to a D.”  I paused, then added, “But if the student is really making effort on the homework, it is unlikely that the student would do that poorly on a test, since the student has been practicing the material.  And if this did happen, I’d try to find out why.”

“Good,” Mrs. Santana, one of the teachers, said.  The interview continued, much like most of my other interviews had.  Afterward, I thanked everyone asked if I could look around the campus, and Mrs. Santana showed me around.  I drove home to Jeromeville after that, and by the time I arrived, it was dinner time and I was hungry.


The following Thursday, six days after my interview at Northgate, I was in the seminar class with the other student teachers.  This time of year, my classmates were beginning to get job offers, and we often started class with announcements of any job offers that we had accepted.  “Melissa has accepted a job offer at Thomas Jefferson High School in Stockdale,” Dr. Van Zandt announced as everyone applauded.  “And Ricardo has accepted a job offer at Jorgensen High School, in Fairview next to Tyler Air Force Base.”

I clapped, but much less enthusiastically.  I knew that Ricardo had interviewed at Jorgensen also. He grew up nearby in Nueces, still lived at home, and wanted to stay near home.  But this felt like a bad sign for me.  If Ricardo had already heard back from Jorgensen, and I had not, clearly they wanted him more than they wanted me.  However, it was not yet time to give up.  Mr. Harbison had said that there were two positions open, and maybe they had not yet made a decision on the second position.

My decision was further complicated when I got home and saw the blinking light on the answering machine.  I pressed Play and heard, “Hi, Greg.  This is Christine Reese at Northgate High School, El Monte School District.  We would like to offer you the position for teaching mathematics.  Please call us back at your earliest convenience.”  I wrote down the phone number that Ms. Reese gave, although I was pretty sure I already had it written somewhere.

Applying for jobs was not like applying to universities, where the process included time to weigh multiple offers.  I would not have weeks or months to wait and see if other offers came in.  The administration at Northgate needed to know quickly whether or not I would take the position.  It was not easy for me when I called Petersburg a week ago and turned down their offer, even though I had decided I did not want that job.  I had no such reservation about working at Northgate, but I did not want to leave a possible offer from Jorgensen on the table,  mostly because it was close enough to commute from Jeromeville.  If I stayed in Jeromeville, I would not have to leave Jed and Brody hanging, trying to find a fourth housemate at the last minute.  I could stay involved at Jeromeville Covenant Church, volunteering with the youth group as I had the last two years.  I had friends in Jeromeville who were sophomores and juniors this year, so I would not have to build a community from scratch as a newcomer, as I would if I were to move to El Monte.

When I called Mrs. Reese back, instead of giving a definitive answer, I asked, “Can I have a couple days to think about it?  I had one other interview last week that I’m still waiting to hear from.”

Mrs. Reese paused for a minute, then said, “Can you have an answer for me by the end of the day Monday?  Does that work?”

“Sure,” I said, wishing for more time but not wanting to ask something unreasonable.  If I had not heard from Jorgensen by Monday afternoon, I would take the job at Northgate, so now I  had a job for next year either way.

“May I ask who I’m competing with?” Mrs. Reese asked.

I was not expecting her to say this, and I was not sure if it was a good strategy to let on too much of what I was thinking, but I decided, as I had multiple times with unexpected questions from prospective employers, that honesty would be the best policy.  “Jorgensen High, by Tyler Air Force Base,” I said.  “That’s close enough to commute from Jeromeville, and I’m still deciding whether or not I want to stay in Jeromeville another year.”

“That’s a good reason,” she replied.  “I look forward to hearing from you on Monday, then.  Take care.”

“You too.  Thank you for everything,” I said.


The following Monday was a hot day.  It was now the second week of May, and summer weather had arrived.  I drove back from student teaching in Nueces with the air conditioner on full blast, both because of the blazing sun outside, but also because I was nervous.  I would have to make a decision today.  Either I would have a message on my machine from Jorgensen at some point today, or I would be calling Ms. Reese at Northgate, accepting that job, and making plans to move to El Monte next year.  All were overwhelming and scary prospects, but at this point it was in God’s hands.  I walked in the door, saw the blinking light on the answering machine, and pressed Play with trembling hands.

“Hi, Greg.  This is Bob Harbison from Jorgensen High School.  We would like to offer you a job for next year.  You’ll be teaching freshman algebra, Basic Math A, and geometry.  If you are still interested, please call back and let me know as soon as possible.”

I dropped my backpack and exhaled deeply.  Finally.  I had a plan for next year.  I was going to stay in Jeromeville.  I was going to live here at 902 Acacia Drive with Jed, Brody, and a friend of Sean’s whom I had met a couple times who would be taking his place in the house after he graduated.  I would continue to attend J-Cov with many of my existing church friends.

I nervously called Mr. Harbison and accepted the job.  Then I nervously called Ms. Reese at Northgate, who was in a meeting and unavailable, and left a message that I had accepted another job, thanking her for her time and consideration.  I rode my bike to campus, treated myself to a burrito at the Coffee House to celebrate, and told Dr. Van Zandt at the start of class that I had a job.  Everyone clapped for me when he announced it, and Ricardo looked over at me, smiling.  Ricardo and I would be coworkers next year.  A familiar face on campus.

Jorgensen High was not my final career move, and I did not end up spending the rest of my life in Jeromeville.  When and why I left that job and moved away are stories for another time.  At the time, I was hoping to stay in Jeromeville indefinitely, but in hindsight, it was not realistic to have everything figured out for the rest of my life now, at age twenty-two.  Some people do figure things out early; Noah Snyder from church, for example, still lives in Jeromeville to this day, where he raised two boys who attended Jeromeville public schools and youth group at the church.  That did not happen to me, but that was okay.

I rode my bike home from class slowly that afternoon, admiring the view of all the large trees on campus and the familiar trees and houses along Andrews Road a little more than usual.  I had done it.  I had a job in the area.  I still had some time left in this quirky but charming university town, where I hated the politics but loved the surroundings and the community I had at church.  For now, at least, for the indefinite future, Jeromeville was going to be my home.

Readers: What was your first actual adult job? If you haven’t had one yet, what was your first job, or what do you want your first adult job to be? 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.

[Hootie & the Blowfish – I Will Wait]

April 20-23, 1999.  A week of sad news. (#215)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

Disclaimer: This week’s episode involves major tragedies in which people lost their lives. If this is your first time here, you might want to start with Episode 1 instead. I am not writing this to capitalize on the deaths of others, nor do I want to reopen any emotional wounds. But I strive to make DLTDGB as historically accurate as possible. One of the events described here was very widely reported in the national media. The other involves someone who was not a national celebrity, but this event was widely reported in the media in the region where it actually occurred, and the individual in question has been mentioned by name in previous episodes of DLTDGB. My sympathies to anyone reading this who may have been affected by these events.

Today was starting out like a typical Tuesday.  I woke up in the morning, drove straight down Highway 100 westbound to my student teaching assignment in Nueces, dealt with a lot of kids not paying attention in Basic Math B, hung out in the teachers’ lounge during my period off, taught geometry, and assisted in Honors Algebra II.  Around noon, when the students went to lunch, I drove back to Jeromeville, flipping around on the radio, changing the station when a song I did not like came on.  Usually, if the DJ started talking between songs, I would also change the station, or put on a CD for a song or two before checking the radio again.  Somewhere between Silvey and Jeromeville, my brain had settled into a lull, watching nut orchards and cattle ranches pass by along the mostly straight six-lane freeway, so I was slow to change the station when I heard a song end and the DJ begin speaking in a more serious voice than usual.  As my brain processed the words I heard, I realized that maybe this would not be a typical Tuesday after all.

“Breaking news today out of Colorado,” the DJ began.  “Two active gunmen shooting on campus at Columbine High School in Littleton.  The number of dead and wounded is still unknown.  This is a developing story; we will have more updates later.”  The broadcast then went to a commercial.

I let the commercial play, tuning out anything that was actually said.  This was certainly not the kind of news that one would hear every day.  And I did not want to seem insensitive, but tragedy happens all the time, and this one happened a thousand miles away, so there was not much I could do except go on with my day.

My university classes that afternoon, like all of my classes that year, were full of other student teachers, so of course I overheard my classmates talking about the events unfolding that day in Colorado.  It happened at a school, and school was our world now.  Some had not heard the news yet, and some had heard wild speculation about the number of fatalities.  One news outlet had estimated twenty-five dead and many more wounded, the deadliest shooting to ever occur at an American school.  Although I read the Capital City Record newspaper and the Daily Colt campus paper every morning, I was not one to follow the news constantly around the clock.  That was not really a thing in 1999, before everyone had the Internet in their pockets, and when the news media was just beginning to embrace the Internet as a delivery method for their news.  So I did not really hear any more details about Columbine High School that night.

I did get some good news for me personally on that day, though.  When I got home from class in the late afternoon, the answering machine light was blinking, indicating that I had a message.  I pressed Play and listened to the message:

“Hi.  This is Joe Valdez, principal of Petersburg High School.  We’re interested in interviewing you for the open math position next year.  We can do that Friday at two o’clock.  Give me a call back and confirm that that works for you.”  Mr. Valdez gave the school phone number, and then hung up.

My first job interview.  This was a big deal.  Maybe this would be a good week after all, despite the sad news in Colorado.  I went to bed that night, still unaware of many details of that breaking story, and unaware that something equally tragic and much closer to home would happen that night while I was sleeping.


Of course, the events at Columbine High School were all over the newspaper the next morning.  As I ate my morning bowl of Cheerios and read the paper, I learned more details of what had happened.  Much was still unknown, including the motive of the attack, but the two gunmen were students at the school, and they shot themselves at the end of the attack.  The death toll had also been revised downward; the report was now that twelve students and one teacher had been killed in the attack, still enough to make it the deadliest attack at a school in the history of the USA at the time.

The shooting was on everyone’s mind the next day at school.  After Basic Math B class, I went to the teachers’ lounge, where Sally Stein, Jim Emerson, and Phil Johnson, three other teachers who were on their prep periods, sat around the table talking.  Jim was grading papers while the others spoke.  I got out papers to grade as well.

“These kids have so much negativity in their lives,” Sally said.  “Violent video games, dark music, and all that stuff.”

“And, of course, it’s so easy to get a gun in America,” Phil added.  Go figure, I thought, someone has to make every terrible tragedy into a political statement.  I kept silent, though.

“It’s more important than ever that teachers make an effort to reach out to those students who feel like outcasts,” Jim pointed out.  “Those two shooters were on the fringes of society, angry at all the people who rejected them.”

“It’s kind of scary working at a school right now,” Phil said.  “Especially this one.  We don’t have a PA system, we don’t have phones or intercoms or anything in the classroom.  If something like this happened here, we wouldn’t have any way to warn everyone.”

“I know!” Sally replied.

“I think this might actually get the Board to approve putting phones in the classroom here.  It’s a safety issue now.  I’m going to sign up to speak at the next board meeting.”

“That’s a good idea.”

I paused from my grading and stared off into space, as I do sometimes when deep in thought.  Although the Columbine High shooting had been on my mind a lot ever since I heard about it yesterday, this was the first moment I had ever connected it to my own day-to-day life.  Apparently there were teachers, and probably students, who were afraid to come to school now.  When I was getting ready this morning, it never once crossed my mind that being shot at Nueces High was something I had to worry about.  Theoretically, I could be shot anywhere, while doing anything, and if it was my time to go, there was nothing I could do about it, so I did not live every day in fear of something like this.

That night, The Edge, the youth group at Jeromeville Covenant Church, had their weekly meeting.  Before the kids got there, the staff and volunteers would meet to go over the night.  Adam, the youth pastor, opened by saying, “Wow.  It’s been quite the week, and it’s only Wednesday.”

“Yeah,” added Faith, the paid youth intern.  “I just can’t imagine what all those people are going through right now.”

“I’ve been to Littleton,” Adam said.  “That summer camp in the Rockies where I worked for a few years. Littleton was where I’d go into town to do my shopping, and I went to a midweek small group at a church in Littleton.  It reminds me a lot of Jeromeville.  An upper-middle-class area, a lot of parents who work long hours, and that can make kids feel neglected.  Jeromeville is the same way, with so many parents being busy academic types.  Some of these kids feel neglected, alone, and rejected, and they could easily turn to violence to deal with that.”

“Yeah,” Faith added.  “I’ve never been to Littleton, but I could see that.”

I would learn years later that Columbine High School was actually outside of the Littleton city limits, in an unincorporated suburban neighborhood that was also called Columbine on some maps.  But the Post Office used Littleton as the city name for the school’s address, so all the news reports said that the school was in Littleton.  I had never been to Littleton, or Columbine, or Colorado at all, so I did not know if this technicality would change Adam’s opinion of the area.  I had, however, lived in Jeromeville for almost five years now, and what he said about Jeromeville being the kind of place where something like this could happen certainly seemed plausible.  Hopefully J-Cov, as a church with a strong youth program, could be a place where some of these troubled students could find hope and connection.


I woke up Thursday morning and read the Capital City Record while eating a bowl of Cheerios, as I usually did.  I made a note to go to the store, since the box of Cheerios was almost empty.  Maybe I would get Rice Krispies instead this time.  The front page of the newspaper had more unfolding details about the shooting in Colorado, some of which came from official reports, and some of which was pure speculation, mostly about the gunmen’s motives and connections to the victims.  On page two of the paper, a headline unrelated to the shooting jumped out at me that made me do a double take, to make sure that what I thought I just read was correct: “Paul Sykes, 31, local musician and poet, found dead at home.”

What?  No.  How? I thought.

I continued reading, and looked at the picture with the article.  This was definitely the man I had seen perform four times, and met once.  Paul Sykes grew up in Jeromeville in a family that was very active in the local performing arts community.  He and his siblings spent several years performing in a band called Lawsuit, touring up and down the West Coast, and more recently he had been performing spoken-word shows of his own poetry around the region.  He was found late Tuesday night, his death having been ruled a suicide.

I heard about Lawsuit from an older student four years ago, when I was a freshman.  They always performed at the Spring Picnic.  I saw them at my first two Spring Picnics, then twice more at other shows, before they broke up during my third year.  I loved their music; it sounded like nothing I had ever heard before.

In addition to the news being absolutely heartbreaking, I found the timing of this to be a little chilling.  Shortly after I first saw Lawsuit freshman year, I noticed that Tina Nowell down the hall had their CD, so I made a tape of it.  I bought Lawsuit’s next, and final, album on CD the following year.  Around the time they broke up, I started volunteering with the youth group at church, and I got really into the Christian rock that was popular at that time.  I listened mostly to Christian music for about two years.  Just a few months ago, I had bought a new computer that had the capability to record audio CDs, and I had started making mix CDs of some of the songs I liked from albums that I did not listen to all the way through anymore.  One of my mix CDs had a Lawsuit song on it.  My friend Brennan Channing, a freshman this year, knew of Lawsuit from his older brother who also went to Jeromeville.  Brennan had on CD the same Lawsuit album that I had the copied tape of, so I copied Brennan’s CD and had just recently begun listening to that album again, in CD-quality sound this time.  The Spring Picnic was just a week ago, and I always remembered Lawsuit around that time of year, since their show was the highlight of my first Spring Picnic in 1995.  Suddenly, this music was back in my life in a big way, and just as suddenly, the vocalist was gone.

I sat for a few minutes in silence after I finished my Cheerios.  I eventually got up and drove to Nueces for student teaching, listening to Lawsuit on the way.  I tried to act normal at student teaching, and for the most part I did, but the weight of the thoughts in my head got to me a few times.  Toward the end of geometry class, I instructed the students to work in groups, and instead of walking around and helping them, asking leading questions to informally assess their understanding, I stood in the corner of the room and stared off into space.

“Mr. Dennison?” Kayla Welch said.  I continued staring.  “Mr. Dennison?  Did I do this right?”

Snapping back to reality, I looked at Kayla.  “Sorry,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.  Just a lot on my mind today.”

“I hope things get better.”

“Thank you,” I replied, smiling.  “What was your math question?”

Kayla showed me the problem, where she had to find the volume of a figure made from a cylinder and two cones attached at the end.  I looked at her work and told her that it looked correct to me.


As if the timing of Paul Sykes’ passing was not unsettling enough, when I got back to campus and looked for a place to sit on the Quad and eat lunch, the first person I saw was Brennan.  He was sitting and talking with some of his friends, some of whom were also eating lunch; I recognized one of his friends from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  “Hey, Greg,” Brennan said, watching me approach.  “Wanna sit with us?”

“Sure,” I said, taking the sandwich I packed out of my backpack.  I tried to think about what to do next.  Do I say something?  Would Brennan have heard the news?  Do I just stay quiet?  After a few seconds, I blurted out, “Did you hear what happened to Paul Sykes?”

“Who?” Brennan asked.

“Paul Sykes.  The singer from Lawsuit.”

“Oh!  No, I didn’t.  What happened?”

“He died.  It was in the paper this morning.”

“No way,” Brennan replied, trailing off, then asking, “The Daily Colt?”

“I haven’t read the Colt yet today.  I saw it in the Cap City Record this morning.”

“That’s sad.  How’d it happen?  He wasn’t that old, was he?”

“Thirty-one,” I said.  “They ruled it a suicide.”

“Wow.  That’s really sad.”  Brennan sat quietly for a few seconds, then mused, “I wonder if this was a hard time of year for Paul.  Because Lawsuit always used to play the Spring Picnic, and now they aren’t together anymore.”

“Could be.”

“Was he still doing music at all?”

“I heard a while back he was doing spoken-word poetry shows, as a solo artist, or something like that,” I said.  “I’m sorry to be the one to bring bad news, especially with everything else that’s been happening this week.”

“Yeah.  What’s it like being at a school this week, after the shooting in Colorado?”

“A lot of teachers are talking about it.  Specifically that Nueces High is an older building with no PA system, and no phones or intercoms in the classroom, so there would be no way to warn everyone if something like that happened there.”

“No PA?  Wow.  When was this school built?”

“The current building is from about 1950, I think I heard.”

“And they haven’t remodeled it to put in a PA?”

“I guess not.  But hopefully they will now.”

“Really.”


That night, I was sitting at my desk, writing out lesson plans and listening to Lawsuit again.  My roommate Jed walked into the large bedroom that we shared and asked what I was listening to.

“Lawsuit,” I said.

“Never heard of ’em,” Jed replied.

“They were from Jeromeville,” I explained.  “They used to play the Spring Picnic every year until they broke up at the end of 1996.  And it was in the paper this morning that the singer died.”

“Oh no.  What happened?”

“Suicide.”

“Wow.  That’s sad.”

“I do have some good news from my own life, though,” I said.  “Tomorrow afternoon, I have a second interview at Petersburg High School.”

“Congratulations!” Jed exclaimed.  “Do you want to work there?  Or are you just going through with the interview for practice?”

“I’m not really sure, honestly,” I said.  “I’ve only actually been to Petersburg twice.  Parts of it look kind of ghetto, but every city has those places, and I haven’t seen the school up close.”

“Where is Petersburg, anyway?”

“South of here.  On highway 42 east of Pleasant Creek and Los Nogales.  Between Pleasant Creek and Stockdale, but much closer to Pleasant Creek.”

Jed seemed to be thinking through everything he knew about the geography of this state, then finally he said, “Oh, okay.  I don’t really know that area well.  But good luck!”

“Thanks!  I’m going to have to miss my student teaching seminar class tomorrow, but the professor said that he understood we might have to miss class for interviews.”

“Of course.  If you’re training students for a specific job, the students need to be able to interview for that job.”

“Exactly!  I’m gonna leave straight from Nueces after student teaching, but I should have time to stop for lunch somewhere.”

“Sounds good.  Hope it goes well.  Hey, would you ever consider moving down south?”

“You mean, like Sand Hill?  Is this coming from your dad?” I asked.  Jed’s father was a high school vice principal at the opposite end of the state.

“Yeah.  He said there are a few schools in his district looking for math teachers.”

“I wasn’t planning on moving that far away, but if I don’t have much luck here in the next couple weeks, and he still has an opening, I’ll let you know.”

“I told him the same thing, that you wanted to stay closer to home, but he told me to ask you.”

“I’ll keep you posted.”


I listened to Lawsuit again the next afternoon on the drive from Nueces to Petersburg, across the Marquez Bridge.  Four years ago, there was a bad accident on this bridge, just after I had driven across it in the opposite direction, coming back to school after Christmas with my family in Plumdale.  My mother heard about the accident on the news and was convinced that I was dead.  I was annoyed with Mom’s excessive worrying, and lack of trust in my driving skills, but on the other hand, anything could happen to anyone at any time.

Tragic celebrity deaths were a sad part of life.  I would learn years later that some of Paul Sykes’ friends and family suspected that his death had been an accident, not a suicide.  I supposed that no one on this side of the afterlife would ever know for sure.  I knew the depths of despair that might lead people to want to end their lives, and I knew the feelings of rejection and loneliness that have led some to commit mass murders in public places, like the two gunmen at Columbine High.  These tragedies always made me wonder if I could have ended up a disturbed mass murderer, or a victim of suicide, had not my friends from freshman year introduced me to the love of Jesus Christ and the hope that he brings.  As a teacher in training, I hoped that my career would bring me opportunities to bond with troubled students and help them find hope and meaning in life, even if I would not be allowed to talk about Jesus directly working in a nonsectarian public school.

Although Paul Sykes was a very minor celebrity at most, I wondered if this was how people of my parents’ generation felt after the untimely deaths of people like Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon, or how my dad felt a few years ago when Jerry Garcia died.  Later that year, the Jeromeville Parks Department put a plaque on a small outdoor stage in a plaza downtown, dedicating the stage to Paul. I found it by accident at some point when I was exploring on my bike.  At least there was now something permanent to remember this man and his music.

As a music fan, I have also been through many band breakups in my lifetime, especially since I have been a fan of numerous local and obscure bands over the years.  Some of my all time favorite songs were written and recorded by long-defunct bands that most people have never heard of.  But through all the breakups, lineup changes, and tragic deaths, one thing remains true: great music never dies as long as someone is listening to it.

This is the actual unedited photo of the plaque. I removed the name and put it as a featured image so that the identity of the person in question would not be spoiled to people who saw this post in their feeds.

Readers: Do you have a favorite song by an obscure, long-defunct, and/or forgotten artist? Share it in the comments, and tell me a story about what the song means to you.

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.

[Lawsuit – Psychic Woman]

April 17, 1999.  My fifth Spring Picnic. (#214)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 3 Comments

Note to readers: About a month ago, I noticed that I had just finished an episode that was set in early March, and it was early March in real life as well. From that moment on, I have been trying to go back to writing weekly, so that the time of year in the story will stay approximately the same as the time of year in real life. But sometimes, episodes in the story have either more or less than a week passing between them, so it will not always be a perfect match. I may take a week off here and there if it is necessary and appropriate to keep the story matching the actual time of year. Right now, the story has moved a couple weeks ahead of real time, but a lot will happen to character-Greg in the next month or so of his life, so the next few episodes take place less than a week apart, and then the timing will match real life again soon.

I arrived on campus feeling that odd combination of cold and hot that comes after riding a bicycle for two miles on a cool morning.  I wore shorts and a t-shirt, because it was supposed to warm up this afternoon, but at a few minutes after eight in the morning, it was not very warm yet.

I parked my bike at the bike racks outside of Stone Hall, the building that housed the chemistry department.  Its room 199 was the largest lecture hall on campus.  I made a note to remember where my bike was, since Stone Hall was not usually my first stop in the morning on the day of the Spring Picnic.  There was already a long line snaking down from the entrance to 199 Stone, around the building, and south hundreds of feet almost all the way to Ross Hall.  I walked all the way to the end of the line and stood.

Ninety years ago, this campus in Jeromeville was an extension campus of its sister school, the University of the Bay, where students studying agriculture would get experience in the field, in a part of the state that actually had farms.  The school invited the public to a dedication of a new building and a presentation about the research being done there, with attendees instructed to bring a picnic lunch.  The event proved to be so popular that it became an annual tradition, evolving into a huge open house and festival held all across the campus of what eventually became the University of Jeromeville.  The event had been canceled a few times over the years, so today was officially the 85th Annual Spring Picnic.

I took out my guide to events and a pen while I waited in line.  The line did not appear to be moving yet, so it looked like I would be here for a long time.  This was my fifth Spring Picnic, and some of the recurring events I kept hearing about I still had yet to experience.  I had never milked a cow.  I had never put my hand inside the stomach of a cow that had a window and door to its stomach surgically added for research purposes, and I never would, since animal rights activists shut that event down a couple years ago.  And I had never seen the Chemistry Club’s show, which is what led me to arrive early enough this year to stand in line and get a ticket, hopefully.

In the guide, I marked the events that I was hoping to see.  The Math Club would be doing their exhibit for most of the day, so I could go there whenever I had time.  I would probably be able to see part of the parade, even if I ended up seeing the first performance of the chemistry show, since the parade lasted for over an hour. But everything was tentative for now, since I was not sure what time I would be seeing the chemistry show.  There were four performances, and tickets were free, but by the time I got to the front of the line, some of the performances might be out of tickets.  The lecture hall held close to four hundred students, but the line was so long that there were easily more than four hundred people in front of me.

I looked through the list of musical acts performing today.  At my first Spring Picnic freshman year, an older friend told me about a really good local band called Lawsuit.  I saw them that year, and again the following year, and then twice more at events that were not the Spring Picnic.  They broke up the following year, so I knew that they would not be performing, but I had been listening to their music again recently.  My friend Brennan Channing, a freshman with two older siblings who had also attended Jeromeville, knew Lawsuit and let me borrow their CD recently so that I could burn a copy on my computer.

I did see one musical act that I recognized: Carolyn C. Parry, at three o’clock at the Coffee House in the Memorial Union.  Good for Carolyn, I thought.  She made it in the music world, at least she made it big enough to play the UJ Coffee House for the Spring Picnic.

Carolyn C. Parry graduated from UJ last year, the same age as me.  I knew her from chorus, and she also was on the worship team for University Life, the college ministry of First Baptist Church of Jeromeville.  I went to Jeromeville Covenant and Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, but I had been to U-Life a few times over the years, and I had friends who went to U-Life.  I knew Carolyn well enough to say hi to.  The last time I saw her, several months ago, she mentioned that she was going to record a CD of original music and was looking into performing small shows like this.  Her appearance in the Spring Picnic program was the first I had heard of this endeavor of hers being successful.

The line slowly inched forward as I continued reading through the guide, marking events that I might want to check out.  I had been to enough Spring Picnics by now, though, that I knew that part of the fun was specifically not making a detailed plan in advance.  So much happened simultaneously during the Spring Picnic that it was impossible to see everything, and I enjoyed wandering around and seeing whatever I happened to find.  Between the exhibits about the research done on campus, food booths, sporting events, performances, and demonstrations, there was always plenty to discover during the Spring Picnic.  For now, though, I was stuck in this line, although not many of the events had begun this early.

The line at least seemed to be moving.  Every few minutes, I took a step forward, and I could see people leaving the front steps of 199 Stone, presumably with tickets in hand.  The people around me looked like a mix of students and non-students, and some students were with their families.  The Spring Picnic was a big enough event in this part of the state that it attracted people not otherwise affiliated with the campus, and some families came to visit their students for the occasion.  My parents and brother had come for last year’s Spring Picnic, but the wandering around and exploring part did not seem to appeal to them.  UJ always hosted a major track and field invitational on the day of the Spring Picnic, and my cousin Rick Lusk was on the track team for North Coast State University, so my family and I spent about two hours at the track, watching Rick’s two races and talking a lot with Rick’s parents while we waited between his two races.  Aunt Jane had given me the times that Rick would be running today; I planned to watch just one of them, whichever one fit in better with the rest of my schedule for the day, and say some quick hellos to the Lusks, but nothing that would require waiting there for two hours.  As I had explained to Aunt Jane over the phone, though, I could not plan any more specifically until I knew which of the chemistry show times I got tickets for.

The 9:00 chemistry show had already begun by the time I reached the front of the line, and I saw a sign saying that tickets for the 10:30 show had already been distributed.  “Are there any left for the 12:00 show?” I asked.

“Just a few left,” the guy handing out the tickets said.  “How many did you need?”

“Just me.”

“You’re good, then,” he said, handing me a ticket.  I put the ticket in my pocket and proceeded to Kerry Hall to see the Math Club’s exhibit.  I could get that out of the way early, since it opened earlier than many of the other exhibits, and it was near the route of the parade that would be starting at 10:00.  By the time I finished the math exhibit, the parade should be starting.

“Greg!” I heard a girl’s voice say as I approached the tables outside the front of Kerry Hall, about five minutes after I got my chemistry ticket.  I recognized Natalie Reese, a math major who was a year younger than me, at a table with polyhedron-shaped bubble wands, demonstrating different patterns formed by the films of soap in the wand, although bubbles blown from these wands always end up round.  “What’s up!  Welcome back!”

“Thanks,” I replied.  “I didn’t really go anywhere, though.  I’m still here, in the student teaching program.”

“Well, I haven’t seen you all year!  How’s student teaching?”

“It’s a lot.  But it’s going okay.  We had the job fair on campus this week, and now I’m just waiting to hear back from those school districts, for second interviews.”

“Good luck!”  Natalie turned to the guy running the table next to her and asked, “Mike?  Do you know Greg?”

“No,” he replied.  “Hi, Greg, I’m Mike.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Greg graduated last year.  He helped me through Math 168.”

“I’m sure you would have done fine without me,” I said.

“I don’t know,” Natalie replied, laughing.

I continued looking at the Math Club display and the adjacent Statistics Club display.  Everything was mostly the same as last year.  I said goodbye to Natalie, Mike, and a few other familiar faces, and walked toward the west side of the Quad, where the parade was about to start.

The most memorable part of the parade was the float for the university’s MBA program.  The students, as they did every year in the parade, wore tops of business suits with boxer shorts, carrying a sign that said “Cover Your Assets.”  I always chuckled at that.  But this year, when the float was about fifty feet past me, something broke on the float, and it stopped.  The students all stood around, trying to tell each other what to do, but no one seemed sure what actually needed to be done.  I overheard a man sitting next to me point out that this was typical of students studying to be business managers, that all they could do was delegate instead of actually fix the problem.  I laughed.

The MBA students did eventually figure out how to get their float moving again a few minutes later, and I sat for a while longer, watching floats and decorated cars go by representing student clubs, local businesses, community organizations, and local political figures, occasionally broken up by marching bands from various high schools and colleges from around the region.  I had a ticket for the 12:00 chemistry show, Aunt Jane had said that one of Rick’s races was supposed to be at 1:40, and Carolyn C. Parry’s show started at 3:00.  In between those three scheduled events I had plenty of time to wander around exhibits, exactly the way I wanted the Spring Picnic to turn out.  And I did wander.  I learned about the university’s experiments in making square-shaped tomatoes, easier to pack in boxes.  I saw a display about different types of soil in this region.  And I learned about diseases that affect common plants used in landscaping.


The chemistry show was one of the biggest disappointments I have ever experienced at a Spring Picnic.  It was not exactly bad, just definitely not worth the hype.  For one thing, I arrived ten minutes before the start of the show, but the room was already so crowded that I had to sit way in the back corner, after climbing over six other people.  The show began with attention-getting explosions on stage, chemical reactions causing bright lights and colored smoke, or as I preferred to think of it, the fun part of chemistry.  But the rest of the show was fairly routine to someone who had taken a full year of freshman chemistry.  I had seen many of the same demonstrations in class at some point.  Definitely not worth waiting in line for almost an hour this morning.  At least I knew in the future that I could skip this event in future Spring Picnics.

By the time I got back to the Quad, I had an hour before I had to go meet the Lusks at the track.  I saw a table where Nu Alpha Kappa, the fraternity for Latino students, was selling carne asada tacos; I stood in line for about fifteen minutes and bought two.  I walked to an empty area of the Quad and began eating.

“Greg,” I heard a familiar voice call out.  I looked up to see Brianna Johns walking toward me, holding a slice of the really good pizza from the Coffee House in the building right next to us.  She wore khaki shorts, white canvas shoes, and a green-gray tank top that seemed to match the color of her eyes, as anything she wore in any shade of blue or green seemed to, for some reason.  I thought she looked hot.

“Hey,” I said, smiling.  “How’s your Spring Picnic going?”

“Fun!  I was watching the parade earlier with Chelsea and Morgan, but Morgan went to go meet her parents, and Chelsea has lunch plans with Tim.  So I’m just hanging out for a while.  Are you here by yourself?”

“Yeah.  My parents came last year, and they didn’t really enjoy it all that much.”  I wondered about Chelsea and Tim having lunch together.  I had seen the two of them together a lot recently, and the way Brianna had worded her reply made it sound like they might officially be a couple now.  I was always last to figure these things out, but I did not want to ask and reveal how out of the loop I was.  “You want to sit down?” I asked.

“Sure.”  Brianna bent over and sat cross-legged on the grass across from me.  “Where’d you get those tacos?” she asked.

“Over there,” I replied, pointing.  “The Latino fraternity is selling them.”

“Nice!  They look yummy.”

“You have Coffee House pizza, though.  Also very yummy.”

“True!  What do you have planned for the rest of the day?”

“My cousin runs track for North Coast State.  He’s here at the track meet, so I’m going to go say hi to them later.  And then at 3, I’m seeing…” I trailed off, trying to remember if Carolyn and Brianna knew each other.  “Did you ever know Carolyn C. Parry?  She was my year, and she was on the worship team for U-Life.”

Brianna thought for a second.  “I don’t think I did.  I only went to U-Life a couple times freshman year, and that was a long time ago.  She’s here today?”

“Yeah, as a performer.”

“Performer?  Like, she’s playing music?”

“Yes!  I knew her from chorus.  The last time I saw her was last summer, I went to U-Life since they still meet in the summer, and she asked the group for prayer, because she had an opportunity to record a CD of some songs she wrote.”

“That’s so cool!  I might show up to that!  Where is it?”

“Three, at the Coffee House stage.”

“I’m supposed to meet up with one of my friends from last year, but if I’m not doing anything around that time, I’ll check her out!”

“Awesome!” I exclaimed.  Brianna and I continued talking for about half an hour, catching up on her classes, my job hunt, and our respective Bible study groups with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  When it came time to go see Rick run, part of me wished that Brianna could come with me, and that we could continue talking, but I also knew that if Aunt Jane saw me with a girl, she would immediately tell Mom, and I would never hear the end of it.


As I should have suspected, but did not think about until it was too late, the track meet ran late, and Rick’s race did not start until much later than scheduled.  I had plenty of time to tell the Lusks all about my year of student teaching and the disappointing chemistry show.  Rick was a little disappointed in his time in the 400 meter race, but I thought he looked respectable.  Rick’s sister Miranda, who was just finishing her last year of high school, made the trip with the rest of the family.  She had more of a reason to be interested in Rick’s track meet this year, because she would be joining Rick at North Coast State next year, also running for their track team.

Since the track meet was running late, I cut it close getting back to the Coffee House, arriving just a few minutes before Carolyn was scheduled to start playing.  Fortunately for me, the Coffee House stage was running late as well, and Carolyn was still setting up and tuning her guitar when I sat at an empty table at 2:59.

Carolyn looked up and surveyed the crowd.  “Greg!” she said, waving to me.  “You made it!  I’m setting up, but I’ll talk to you after the show, okay?”

“Yes,” I replied.

Carolyn’s music was exactly what I expected.  It was just her and an acoustic guitar.  She opened with a song about all the changes that come in life, but God staying the same through all of it, a good message for someone in that transition period between student life and adulthood.  In between songs, sometimes she shared stories about what inspired the songs.  One of the songs she performed was for her best friend, and one was a thought she had after hearing a really good sermon at church, for example.  Her music definitely had a Christian influence, but without being overly preachy or exclusive.  She closed the show with a beautifully upbeat song about chasing her dreams.

I walked straight to Carolyn’s table after the show closed.  “I would like to buy the CD, please,” I said.

“Great!” she replied enthusiastically, taking my money and handing me the plastic case.

“Great show.  I really liked it.”

“Thank you so much!  Thanks for coming!  So what are you doing this year?  Are you still in Jeromeville?”

“Yeah.  Doing the student teaching program, teaching math at Nueces High.  And right now in the middle of applying and interviewing for jobs in the fall.”

“Like, real teaching jobs?”

“Yes!  I’m nervous.  But through all this change, God remains the same, just like your song says.”

“Yes!”  Passing me a clipboard, Carolyn continued, “Sign up for my email list.  That way you’ll always know when the next show is.  And are you going to the Under Heaven Festival?  Have you heard about that?”

“I’ve heard some people talking about it, but I’m not really sure what it is.”

“Some people from U-Life and from Jeromeville Assembly of God got together to do this.  It’s a Christian music and art festival in Capital City, next month.  I’m going to be playing there; that’s my next show up this way.”

“Sounds good!  I’ll probably be there, then!”

“Do you know Sarah Masen?  She’s headlining.”

“I have one song of hers on a mixtape that we handed out to the youth groups at J-Cov.  ‘All Fall Down.’  It’s a good song.”

“She’s really good.  So make sure you stay for her show.”

“I will!

“I need to talk to these guys, but it was really good seeing you!  Hopefully I’ll see you next month?”

“Yeah!” I said as Carolyn turned to some people who appeared to be friends of hers.  I looked around the room, noticing that Brianna had never shown up, and then left the building, walking south across the Quad. (Brianna did ask me about Carolyn’s show the next morning, though, when I saw her at church.)


An important part of the Spring Picnic was the Battle of the Bands, where marching bands from Jeromeville and several other universities around the region meet on the shore of Spooner Lake, next to Marks Hall, and take turns playing songs late into the night until they are out of songs that they know.  After Carolyn’s set, I walked to Spooner Lake and watched the bands play for about an hour and a half, then walked back to where my bike was parked (near Stone Hall, I remembered) as the marching band from Capital State’s rendition of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” gradually grew softer behind me.  These marching bands always seemed to play the songs I would least expect to be set to a marching band arrangement, but that was part of the fun.  I was not much of an Alanis fan, her voice was annoying, but if I had to pick a least annoying Alanis song, it was that one.

It would be fun if Carolyn became a girl rock superstar like Alanis Morissette.  Carolyn had a way better voice than Alanis, that was for sure, and her lyrics were more appealing to me than those of Alanis.  It was exciting to think that I was at one of her first shows.  Maybe that would be a claim to fame someday.  Seeing music at the Spring Picnic just did not feel the same after Lawsuit broke up, but maybe now Carolyn would be the new musical act to look forward to seeing every year at the Spring Picnic.

Readers: I probably asked this before, but tell me about an annual event in your area that you look forward to every year.

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.

And if you follow me on Instagram, I don’t post often these days, but I’ll be sure to post pictures of this year’s Spring Picnic, later this month.

[Alanis Morissette – You Oughta Know – warning, song contains explicit language]

April 13-16, 1999.  Job interviews and unsettling coincidences. (#213)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

Disclaimer: While something similar to the events in this story surrounding the band Watching the Geese actually happened to me, Watching the Geese is not the actual name of a band that played worship music, as far as I know. I used Keith Green’s original 1982 recording of the song mentioned in the story for this episode’s song. Neither Mr. Green, who was deceased by 1999, nor any of his band members had any connection to the events that inspired this story.

“Hey, Greg,” Mr. Bowles greeted me as I walked into his classroom at the start of fourth period.  This was the class that I was just observing and helping as part of my student teaching; I was not going to take over and start teaching the class.  It was in the room next to Mrs. Tracy’s geometry class that I had taken over, so I usually got to Mr. Bowles’ classroom before most of the students.

“Hi,” I said.

“How are you?”

“Kind of nervous.  The education job fair at UJ is this week.  I’ve never interviewed for teaching jobs before.”

“You’ll do fine.  You really know your stuff.  You’ll get a job wherever you want,” Mr. Bowles said reassuringly.

“I hope so,” I replied.

Mr. Bowles’ class was Honors Algebra II, full of strong academic students who were mostly very nice and well-behaved.  One student from this class, a sophomore girl named Colleen McKinney, sat in the desk next to where I sat, and she was always especially friendly toward me.  Today, as I was headed to my usual seat, Colleen asked, “Did you say you’re going to the education job fair at Jeromeville this afternoon?”

“Yeah.  All of us in the student teaching program signed up to be interviewed for jobs.”

“My dad is going to be there.”

“Oh yeah?  He’s a school administrator?”

“Yes.  For Petersburg School District.”

“Oh!” I said.  “I’ll probably see him, then.  I applied there.”

As Mr. Bowles taught the lesson, I sat there, processing what Colleen just said.  She attends Nueces High, so presumably she lived in Nueces.  Why, then, did her dad work in Petersburg?  Petersburg was forty miles away from Nueces by road, with a toll bridge in between. Did people actually commute that far?  Or were Colleen’s parents divorced, and she lived in Nueces with her mom, and her dad lived in Petersburg?  I never did find out, but over the years I came to learn that many school administrators did in fact live far from their jobs, possibly because they wanted privacy from people in the community who disagreed with them, and also because their jobs paid well.

Interestingly enough, this was not the first weird coincidence that had happened recently involving Colleen’s family.  A couple weeks ago, she asked me what I was doing for spring break, and I mentioned that I was not going to be able to visit my parents like I usually did, since my classes at the university did not have the same spring break.  Colleen asked where my parents lived, and when I started to explain to her where Plumdale was, since most people did not know, she replied, “I know where that is! My Grandma McKinney lives right near there, in Gabilan.” I mentioned this to my mother, who grew up in Gabilan and seemed to know everyone whose family has been there for a long time.  Mom said that she knew of two McKinney brothers when she was growing up, David and Reuel; I found it interesting that both McKinneys had Old Testament names, but one name was much more common than the other these days.  Mom said that she hoped Colleen’s dad was David, because one of Mom’s childhood friends knew the McKinneys well and always used to say that David was cute and Reuel was ugly.

It bothered me the way Mom always said things like that.  To Mom, commenting on people’s appearance was a big joke, but it was hard to get what Mom said out of my head when I actually had to interact with that person. So, that afternoon at the job fair, when I saw the names of the people who would be conducting the interviews, and I read “Petersburg School District – Reuel McKinney, associate superintendent,” I tried hard to focus on the task at hand and not blurt out anything about him being the ugly brother.  I was about to meet this man face to face, and he may have the power to determine my fate for the following school year.

I did not find Reuel McKinney particularly ugly, but I was a guy, so I did not know what Mom and her friends considered cute or ugly back in the 1960s.  He called my name and introduced himself; I shook his hand and followed him to his table.  When we sat down, I asked him, “Aren’t you Colleen’s dad?”  Although I was not going to say anything about his past connection to my mother, I figured that Colleen seemed to like me as a teacher, so it might help my chances of getting a job if I had approval from a family member of his.

“Yes,” Mr. McKinney replied, looking confused.  “How do you know my daughter?”

“I’m a student teacher at Nueces High.  I’m helping out in her math class, with Mr. Bowles.”

“Oh!”  Mr. McKinney looked at my résumé, and continued, “Student teacher, Nueces High.  I see that now.”

“Yes.  She told me that you would be at this job fair.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” Mr. McKinney said, smiling, looking at his notes.  “Let’s get to the important questions.  Tell me how you go about planning lessons.”

“I tend to start with what’s in the teacher’s edition,” I explained.  “I outline what I’m going to say, what problems I’m going to work out, any important definitions the students need.  But I’ll make changes if I need to, from what I’ve noticed in class.  Sometimes I can tell what I need to spend more time on by the things they struggle with in class, and on their homework.  And I also use that to decide which homework problems to assign.”

Mr. McKinney nodded as he wrote something down, then he continued, “Tell me about your philosophy of classroom management.”

I took a deep breath, knowing that this was not my strength as a teacher, but maybe speaking in theoreticals, I could make it sound like I knew what I was doing.  “When a student isn’t doing what he or she is supposed to, first I make sure to communicate clearly to the student what they should be doing.  If the misbehavior continues, we have a room at Nueces High where we can send students who need a time out from the classroom.”

“Room Two,” Mr. McKinney said.  “I’ve heard about that.  Petersburg High doesn’t have that currently, unfortunately.”

I thought quickly, then said, “In that case, the next step would probably be something like after school detention.  And when it gets to that point, I’d contact home to make sure the parents know what is going on.  And if the student is still misbehaving after these more minor interventions, then I’ll send them out on a class suspension, and call home again.”

“Makes sense.”  Mr. McKinney took some more notes, then continued the interview.  He asked for my own self-assessment of my strengths and weaknesses as a teacher.  I said that my strength was the subject matter itself, and my weakness was that I tended to wait a little too long for behavior problems to correct themselves without intervention, and I was learning that they usually did not.  He also asked how I assign grades, and how I work with students who have special needs to make sure their needs are met.  When the interview ended, I shook his hand again and told him, “Tell Colleen I’ll see her tomorrow.”

“I will,” he replied, smiling.


After a few more interviews, I went home and ate dinner, knowing that I had papers to grade at some point tonight.  After dinner, I sat at my desk and looked through my CDs, trying to decide what to listen to while I worked.  On top of my CD shelf was a disc that did not belong to me, by a band I had never heard of until a few days ago called Watching the Geese.  Darius Curtis from church had just come up to me Sunday after the service, handed me the Watching the Geese CD, and said, “Here.  You have to listen to this.  It’s so good.”  I thought this was odd, since Darius had never talked much with me about music, let alone given me music to borrow.  I listened to it once Sunday afternoon; it was worship music, the type that might be sung in church, and Darius was right, it was pretty good.

I put the Watching the Geese CD in the drive on the computer and began the process of making a copy of the CD, something that I had just acquired the ability to do a few months ago when I bought this computer.  The process took a long time; I had to wait for every song to copy to the computer’s hard drive, then remove the disc, replace it with a blank one, and wait for the computer to write the songs that were now saved on its hard drive to the blank disc.  At the speed of a typical home computer in 1999, the whole process took around an hour, giving me plenty of time to get papers graded while I wanted.  But I was in a mood to procrastinate, so I did not get out my papers to grade right away.

Instead, I opened the case of the Watching the Geese CD and took out the booklet with the credits.  I glanced at the photo of the band and began reading below that.  Watching the Geese was the worship team employed by a large Christian retreat center called Sugar Pine Lake Bible Camp.  I had never been to Sugar Pine Lake, but I had seen it on a map, in the mountains east of Ashwood, probably about a four hour road trip from here.  I had listened to the CD twice now; Watching the Geese had two vocalists, one male and one female, as well as the usual guitar, bass, and drums.  After I read the paragraph detailing the band’s connection to Sugar Pine Lake Bible Camp, I continued reading.  The male vocalist was named Jonathan Torres, the female vocalist was named Cindy Houck, the guitarist was–

I did a double take as I felt a jolt of adrenaline rush through my body.

I looked at the band photo a second time, at the short, slightly chubby blonde girl standing second from the left.  It was not a great photograph, and it was small on the page, but yes, that was definitely Cindy Houck, crossing paths with my life now a third distinct time.

Twelve years ago, I was in fifth grade, living in Gabilan. I was part of a pull-out program at my school where, a couple times a week, the students who were identified as gifted would leave their regular classes for about an hour for special enrichment activities.  The group from my class often did things together with the fourth grade gifted students, and a friendly blonde girl from the fourth grade gifted group named Cindy Houck would often smile and say hi to me.  I was just starting to get over my girls-have-cooties phase, and while I never knew Cindy well, I always found her friendliness comforting, in a world where most kids were mean to me for no reason.

A few years later, I moved from Gabilan to Plumdale, about ten miles away, in a different school district.  When I was in tenth grade, I was looking through the yearbook and found Cindy Houck in there as a freshman.  Our elementary school normally fed to Gabilan High, so she must have coincidentally also moved some distance to the north at some point.  We had a class together the following year, but I never said anything about having known her in elementary school, nor did she acknowledge that she knew me.  I always found strange coincidences like this unsettling and disturbing. Also, my years in elementary school were not happy ones, and I wanted to put all that behind me, even though Cindy was not part of the bad memories of elementary school.

I never knew what happened to her after high school.  Apparently she was now working at Sugar Pine Lake Bible Camp, on the worship team.  And for some reason, Darius Curtis had just felt an overwhelming urge to lend me this particular CD after church last week so I could listen to it.  I did not know whether Cindy had grown up in a Christian family or found Jesus later in life, but if she had grown up Christian, that might explain part of the reason she was nice to me in elementary school when most people were not.

But what would I do with this information now?  I ended up doing nothing.  I never really knew Cindy that well, so if I were to attempt to contact her at Sugar Pine Lake Bible Camp and tell her that I heard her band’s music, and I remembered her from two separate times in my life, that would probably not be received well.  But it made me wonder if I was going to keep crossing paths with Cindy every six years or so.


The following afternoon, I had more job interviews.  Dr. Van Zandt had canceled our afternoon seminars on the days of the job fair, so that we could have time for all of our interviews.  My first one on that day was with Nueces School District, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the interviewer’s name: “Martin Garrett, principal, Nueces High School.”  The principal of the school where I was already student teaching.  A familiar face.  Then I got a little nervous when I saw the names for my next interview after that, with Blue Oaks School District: “Ralph Stevenson, principal, Granite Lake High School; Maria Vasquez, vice principal, Blue Oaks Middle School.”  I sat in my chair, uncomfortably trying to figure out what to say to Mr. Stevenson, how to figure out whether he remembered me, and if so, how to avoid the obvious sensitive topic, when I heard Mr. Garrett call me.

“Hello, Greg,” Mr. Garrett said after sitting at the table opposite me.  “Good to see you here.”

“You too,” I replied.

“I can kind of skip the first question, since I already know you.  So let’s get right to it.  Describe to me what a typical day looks like in your classroom.”

“Students walk in, and I have a problem on the board for them to work on while I take attendance.  Then I take questions on the previous day’s homework, or sometimes I’ll have a problem from the homework that I know I want to go over. In the classes that use the CRM curriculum, there will already be an exploratory problem in their book for them to do, so I have them try that problem and discuss it in groups.  Then we discuss as a class, and they write the important information in their notebook.  For the rest of the period, students work on more problems, discussing them with each other, and I’ll walk around watching what they’re doing, and asking questions to get them to discuss their learning.  This also gives me an idea of what they might be struggling with. The classes that don’t use CRM, I tend to use a similar structure.”

“Okay,” Mr. Garrett replied, taking notes on a clipboard.  “Tell me about your classroom management strategy.”

The interview with Mr. Garrett was relatively predictable; by now, the second day of the three-day job fair, I was starting to notice that most of these interviewers asked very similar questions.  At the end of the interview, Mr. Garrett gave me a look that suggested unfortunate news.  “What can I say,” he said.  “You’re doing a great job at Nueces High, we’d love to hire you, but we don’t have any openings for math this year anywhere in the district.”

I nodded sadly.  “That’s what I’ve heard,” I said.

“We’ll keep your application on file if anything opens up, but I just want to be honest, it’s not likely at this point.”

“I understand.”

Mr. Garrett shook my hand and said that he would see me tomorrow.  I went back to the waiting room, feeling a little discouraged, thinking about my upcoming interview with Blue Oaks School District.  Blue Oaks was in the foothills about forty miles east of Jeromeville, but I had just learned recently that the neighboring community of Granite Lake was in the same school district as Blue Oaks.  From what I knew, Granite Lake was a fairly affluent community; that might be an interesting place to teach, with parents who likely valued education, but rich parents could also be demanding, and there was no way I could afford to live in Granite Lake.

“Greg?” a man asked, walking into the waiting room.  I did not recognize him right away, but it had been a long time, and I never really knew Mr. Stevenson well. I mostly only remembered the name, and the thing I had heard about him after the fact.  I stood up, walked toward the man, and he introduced himself, saying, “Ralph Stevenson.  Nice to meet you.”

“You too,” I said, a little nervously.  So far he showed no indication that he remembered me.  Back at the interview table, his colleague, Mrs. Vasquez, introduced herself.  Mr. Stevenson had a copy of my résumé right in front of him, he had access to all of the pertinent information, so I decided to just say it now, while giving no hint that I knew something that may not be public knowledge.  “Didn’t you used to be at Plumdale High?” I asked.

Mr. Stevenson looked at me for a few seconds, slightly surprised.  He looked down at my résumé, then back at me, and smiled.  “Yes!” he replied.  “Wow.  That was a while ago.  I was vice principal there.  I see you went to Plumdale High?”

“Yes.”

“Honestly, I don’t remember you, but, let’s see, if you were class of ’94, then I would have left after your freshman year.  And you probably weren’t the kind of student who got sent to the vice principal’s office very often.”

“Right,” I said, nodding.  Not entirely true, but it would probably be good to let him keep thinking that.  I tended to deal more with my school counselor than with Mr. Stevenson on my bad days.

The questions I got from Mr. Stevenson and his colleague, Mrs. Vasquez, were again similar to what the other school administrators had been asking me.  After the interview, they said they would be in touch, and I thanked them.  As I began to walk back to the waiting room, I had a fleeting thought very out of character for me.  I imagined myself pulling Mr. Stevenson aside, looking him in the eye, and telling him, “Listen, Ralph.  I know why you aren’t at Plumdale High anymore.  You resigned after it got out that you and Mrs. Anderson were having an affair.  Do your bosses at the district office in Blue Oaks know this?  If you don’t want them to find out, then you better offer me a job.”  Of course, I would never do anything like that.  Blackmail was not a good job-hunting strategy for someone just beginning his teaching career.  And technically I had no proof of Mr. Stevenson’s past; I had heard this secondhand from an older student a while after Mr. Stevenson left Plumdale High.  I never had Mrs. Anderson as a teacher in high school, but I knew her better than I knew Mr. Stevenson, and I totally would not have put it past her to have an affair with a supervisor.  I dismissed this thought and returned to the waiting room, to wait to be called by my next interviewer, one Mr. Robert Harbison of Jorgensen High School, next to Tyler Air Force Base, just outside of Nueces and Fairview.


A couple days later, I was driving to Nueces for student teaching, listening to the Watching the Geese CD.  I heard Cindy Houck’s voice sing “There Is A Redeemer,” harmonizing with her bandmate Jonathan Torres.  This song sounded like a classical hymn, but according to the liner notes of the CD, it was originally recorded in 1982 by Keith Green, a Christian singer whose name I was vaguely familiar with.  I thought back to all the strange coincidences that had happened to me recently.  I had an interview with Mr. McKinney, whom my mom’s childhood friend had had a crush on many decades ago.  I also had an interview with Mr. Stevenson, the supposedly disgraced former vice principal of my own high school.  And both of these connections to me, as well as my connection with Cindy Houck, happened back in Santa Lucia County, a hundred and sixty miles from Jeromeville.  

I did not cross paths with Cindy six years later, as I had wondered if I would.  As of now, I have not heard from her, or heard her name anywhere, since borrowing Darius’ CD of Watching the Geese.  I did not see Colleen McKinney or her dad again after that school year, and I never saw Mr. Stevenson again.  But I have had many other strange coincidences happen in my life.  It seems that, while I can remove myself from emotionally unhealthy situations, I can never expect to completely run from my past.  Somehow, somewhere, someone or something from the past would always catch up to me.  I did not have to let uncomfortable moments in the past define me anymore, but I also could not ignore the fact that they happened.  “Jesus, my redeemer, name above all names,” Cindy and Jonathan sang through my car speakers.  Jesus was my redeemer, and he could redeem my uncomfortable past and give me a future, hopefully involving a job at one of the school districts that had interviewed me this week.

Readers: Have you ever unexpectedly met up with someone from the past in an unusual situation? Or has there ever been anyone in your life who keeps reappearing unexpectedly every few years? Tell me about it in the comments.

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[Keith Green – There Is A Redeemer]