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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” Jamal grunted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Three minus x,” Julia answered.

“Are you sure?”

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

“But how many are you taking away?”

“Three.  Because it says three less.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

“Good point.”

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.  Thank you for being flexible.”

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

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

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

“Is someone in trouble?”

“No.”

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

“Hi,” I replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We will!” Peter exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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[The Offspring – The Kids Aren’t Alright]

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 8 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Congratulations!”

“Thank you!” Mike and Courtney said together.

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

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

“I see.  That’s exciting.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nice!  Are you excited?”

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

“That’s good.”

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

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

“Not anymore,” Mike playfully retorted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Makes sense,” I said.  “Good idea.”

“Can we play that?” Candace asked.

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

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

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

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

“Same.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

“Bennett and I definitely are not getting married.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll have to check it out.”

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

“Are they doing contestant tryouts or anything?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s fair too.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes!”


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

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

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

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

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.

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

August 14-15, 1999.  Maybe acting my age was just a state of mind. (#229)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

From: “Bethany Bradshaw” <bjbradshaw@jeromeville.edu>
To: “Gregory J. Dennison” <jediofmath@arroyoverdenet.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 17:01 -0700
Subject: Re: Theorems & Conjectures, Vol.3, July 1999

Greg! Sorry it took me two weeks to reply to this.  I love your new email address, it’s perfect for you!  I hope summer school ended well, and that no more fights broke out or anything.  That was crazy!  Have you been swing dancing?  I haven’t been in a few weeks.  I’m taking two classes in second summer session, so I’ve been busy, but it looks like I’ll actually be able to graduate a quarter early in March!  I moved into my own room at the apartment last weekend.  Meghan and I are the only ones in the apartment now, and she’s working full time.  The other two roommates moved out, and two new girls will be moving in, but they don’t get here until the week before school starts, so it’s been pretty quiet at home.

Meghan and I signed up for a kickboxing class through the parks department.  We saw a flyer for stuff like that and decided to do it on a whim.  It’s been so much fun!  Your birthday is coming up, right?  Do you have any plans?  If you’re not busy, I’ll be home studying all weekend, and I could use a study break. It would be nice to catch up.  I might also go swing dancing Sunday, but I’m not sure since I have to be up early Monday morning for class.  Hope you’re doing well!

I sent my last Theorems & Conjectures life update to my email list around the end of July.  Since I was no longer a student at the University of Jeromeville, I would be losing access to the school’s dialup Internet service soon. I recently started paying for my own Internet service through a local provider called Arroyo Verde Net; they had dialup numbers covering Jeromeville and the rest of Arroyo Verde County. I sent all of my friends and family my new email contact information in that most recent newsletter.

Last night, I had written back to Bethany and said I would stop by sometime Saturday night.  When the time came, I walked to her apartment, just a quarter mile from my house on the other side of Coventry Boulevard, and knocked.  She answered, saying, “Hey, Greg!  Happy birthday! How have you been?” She gave me a hug.

“Pretty good, I guess.”

“Is today your actual birthday?”

“Tomorrow,” I explained.

“Well, happy early birthday!”

“Thank you!  How’s studying going?”

“It’s a lot of work, but it’s getting done.  Come on in.  That way, I can close the door and not let the cool air out.”

“Good idea,” I said, stepping into the living room and closing the door behind me.

“Our air conditioning bill is going to be so high this month, and there’s only two of us to pay it,” Bethany said.

“It’s just one month, and you’ll have more roommates to share the expenses soon.  And I bet it’s nice having your own room now.”

“Totally!  Come see!”

Bethany’s apartment was a two-story townhouse.  I followed her upstairs to her room and said, “I’m still going to be sharing a room next year.  It would be nice to have my own room, especially now that I’ll be working full time, but on the other hand, sharing a room is cheap.  I’m probably going to be the only teacher at school paying two hundred a month in rent.  First-year teachers don’t exactly make a lot of money.”

“You only pay two hundred dollars?” Bethany repeated, incredulously.

“We got really lucky.  The owner of our house has it underpriced for the neighborhood, I think, but I’m not going to tell him.  And Jed and I pay less than Brody and the guy who will be moving into Sean’s room.”

The first thing I noticed in Bethany’s room was a wall shelf full of stuffed animals.  Normally I would have wondered what a shelf full of stuffed animals was doing in a twenty-one-year old’s bedroom in a university town, but Bethany was an animal science major and used to work at the zoo back home during summers, so I asked no questions.

“Meghan and I put that shelf in ourselves,” Bethany explained.  “I’m pretty proud of the fact that it isn’t slanted or anything.  I borrowed a level from a guy from church.”

“It looks good,” I said.

“Bethany?” Meghan called from the living room.  “Can you come here for a minute?”

“Stay here.  I’ll be right back,” Bethany told me as she left the bedroom and went downstairs.

I continued looking around the room.  Bethany’s bed had a much nicer comforter and pillowcases than mine; I still used the bedding that I bought from the Student Housing Department for my freshman dorm.  Her desk was relatively organized, with a textbook and notebook to the side of her computer, but no clutter other than that.  I looked back up to the stuffed animals.  A tiger stood on all fours on the far right edge of the shelf.  I grabbed the next most accessible stuffed animal from the shelf, one that would not cause the entire pile of animals to fall; it was a hippopotamus.  I placed the hippopotamus just behind the tiger, straddling it as if in the erotic throes of passion.

“Sorry about that,” Bethany replied as she walked back into the room.  “Meghan wanted me to look over–”  Her eyes fell on the hippopotamus violating the tiger, and, holding back a giggle, she said, “Seriously?”  She pulled the hippopotamus off of the tiger and threw it at me.  Both of us broke out laughing.

“Tomorrow is your birthday,” Bethany said. “You’re certainly not acting your age.” I laughed, as she continued, “I know you’re older than me. How old are you turning? Twenty-three, is it?”

“Yes,” I replied. “And you’re fifteen,” I added, referencing an inside joke from several months ago.

“Quiet. Not that again,” she said. We both laughed.

We walked back downstairs to the living room a few minutes later, where I noticed a pair of boxing gloves sitting on an end table next to the couch.  Picking them up, I asked, “This is for your kickboxing class?”

“Yeah!” she replied.  “The class is so much fun!”

I put on the gloves, then started hopping in place the way that I had seen the competitors do so in a boxing match.  Bethany threw a lighthearted soft punch in my direction, which I blocked.

“I can take you down,” she threatened playfully.

“I’m bigger than you,” I replied.

“I know what I’m doing.”

I lightly threw a jab in Bethany’s general direction, careful not to actually hurt her; she dodged it to the side.  I stopped moving and explained, “Remember that scene in Star Wars where R2-D2 is playing that game that’s like chess with Chewbacca, and Chewbacca gets upset when R2 makes a good move?  Remember C-3PO’s advice?”

“Kinda, but I don’t remember the exact quote.”

“‘Let the Wookiee win.’” I said.  “And I’m the Wookiee.  Big and hairy, just like Chewbacca.”  I softly punched her in the stomach with the boxing gloves just as Meghan walked in and saw us play fighting.

“Oh, this is classic,” Meghan said.  “I have to take a picture of this.”  She ran to her room and came back with a camera.  “Now pose,” she instructed us.

“How?” I asked.

“Whatever you want. Just do something fun.”

I extended my right arm toward Bethany’s face, and Bethany closed her eyes and leaned back, as if being punched.  Meghan snapped the picture and said, “That’s perfect.  And I only have a few pictures left on this roll, so I’ll get it developed soon.”

“Great!” Bethany replied.

“I’m taking off,” Meghan said, grabbing her keys from the coffee table and walking outside, closing the door behind her. “See you later!”

“Bye,” Bethany called out as she sat on the couch. I sat next to her, picking up a rented VHS tape from Blockbuster Video that was sitting on the coffee table.  I turned it to see the title of the movie: Deep Impact.

“Have you seen that?” Bethany asked.

“No.  I remember last year when it was out in theaters, I saw commercials for it, and it looked good.  But I know a lot of people didn’t like it.”

“Meghan and her boyfriend were watching it here last night.  I saw the first half hour or so.  It looked interesting.  You wanna watch it?”

“Sure!” I said.  I got off the couch and put the tape into Bethany’s VCR.

“You want popcorn?” she asked.

“Yes, please.  Should I pause it?”

“You don’t need to.  I’ve seen the beginning.”

Bethany came back from the kitchen a few minutes later with a bag of microwave popcorn, which we shared as we watched the movie.  In the movie, a teenage astronomy buff discovered a new comet, and some time later, a reporter was ambushed by government officials. She had been investigating what she thought was a Cabinet member having an affair, but she ended up uncovering the fact that the government was making plans for the possible extinction of humanity.

“That would be so scary, something that big that you can’t really escape from,” Bethany observed aloud.  I got up to throw away the empty popcorn bag and wash my hands as the movie continued. Astronauts flew to the comet to attempt to blow it up with bombs, but they failed, splitting it into two parts each big enough to cause a major disaster on Earth.  The movie continued, following the lives of the teen astronomer, the reporter, and their loved ones, as the American government randomly selected a few hundred thousand people to live in a bunker.  The people selected would stay in the bunker until the surface of Earth became habitable again.  The astronauts decided to sacrifice themselves in a desperate attempt to at least spare Earth from the more destructive of the two comet fragments.  One of them said, “Look on the bright side.  We’ll all have high schools named after us.”  I laughed loudly.

“You would notice that,” Bethany remarked.  “You work at a high school.”

“Right.”

“Was your school named after someone?  What’s it called?”

“Jorgensen High.  It’s just off a road called Jorgensen Road, but I don’t know who that was named after.”

We finished the movie, as some of the main characters dealt with their impending deaths and others managed to escape to the mountains. The remaining comet fragment hit the ocean and formed huge waves that reached hundreds of miles inland.

“I liked that,” I said as the credits rolled.  “Emotionally intense.”

“Yeah,” Bethany replied.  “I don’t know why everyone hated it.”

“I was talking to someone who had seen this movie last year.  His thought was that people hear the premise, a comet big enough to destroy everything is headed for Earth, and they expect it to be an action movie with a lot of explosions and stuff.  Not this emotional drama.  And just a few months later, the movie Armageddon came out, with a very similar premise, and that movie was full of action and explosions like people wanted.  So people didn’t like Deep Impact by comparison. I didn’t see Armageddon either, but that makes sense.”

“It does.”  Bethany looked at the clock and said, “I don’t mean to kick you out, but I really should get to bed.  I have church in the morning.”

“I do too,” I replied.  “Thanks for hanging out!  This was fun!”

“Yeah!  I hope you enjoy your birthday!”

“Thank you!”  I hugged Bethany and left her apartment.


Last fall, when Brody first moved into the house, he got the idea for the four of us to have dinner together once a week, as a community-building routine.  I was definitely the least skilled cook of the four of us, so as much as I appreciated the intent of spending time with my housemates, the actual cooking part was not my favorite.  I typically just made scaled-up versions of the same three or four simple meals that I already made for myself.  The others would sometimes attempt more adventurous meals.  Jed was an excellent cook, and I always looked forward to his turn to make dinner, since I knew that I would be eating something nicer than what I usually ate.  Brody tried to roast a duck once, to this day the only time I have ever eaten duck, and although it caught fire in the oven because it was so greasy, it was still tasty.  I often apologized for not making adventurous meals, and the others reassured me not to worry, because the intent was more about the community than the food.

The tradition had started to fizzle, becoming less frequent over the last couple months as life got busier, schedules got in the way, and Jed got a girlfriend and spent more time at her apartment.  We still had our Sunday dinner every once in a while, but not every week, and we did not keep close track of whose turn it was to cook.  This week, though, Jed had made a point of wanting to cook, in honor of both my birthday and Sean’s last week in Jeromeville.  Jed had told us a few days ago that his mom used to make chicken pot pies from scratch, and he had this dessert recipe that had also been passed down in his family, but he wanted to surprise us.  Sean asked if he was making me a birthday cake, and Jed said, “It’s better than cake.”  Jed had checked with me to make sure I liked chocolate and mint, so I had a little bit of an idea of what was coming.

On Sunday afternoon, the day after Bethany and I watched Deep Impact, I walked out to the kitchen while Jed was cooking.  I saw him spreading something brown in a cake pan.  The brown substance was much thicker than cake batter, only filling the pan to about half an inch deep.  “So this dessert you’ve been bragging about, it looks like fudge?  With mint flavoring, since you asked me about mint?”

“Yep!” Jed replied enthusiastically.  “My aunt makes this at Thanksgiving.  I asked her for the recipe.”

“That sounds really good.”

“And Candace had to come with me to the store, because there’s an ingredient I couldn’t buy,” he added.  I looked at him for about five seconds, confused, until he pointed on the counter to a bottle of crème de menthe.  Of course, I thought.  Crème de menthe contained alcohol; Jed’s girlfriend had turned twenty-one, the legal age for buying alcohol in the US, in the spring, but Jed would not turn twenty-one until November.

“Alcohol.  I get it now,” I explained.  “I was confused.  When you said she had to buy something for you, my first thought was, ‘Why do you need to buy tampons to make mint fudge?’”

“Haha!” Jed laughed loudly.  “Tampons!  You know men are allowed to buy tampons, right?”

“Well, yes, not that I’ve ever needed to.  But that’s the first thing you think of that guys don’t buy.”

“Wait,” Brody interjected as he walked past.  “What about tampons?”  I repeated my misunderstanding to Brody, and he laughed.

Jed’s meal was so good.  I had never had a chicken pot pie made from scratch before.  In my experience, chicken pot pies were things people bought in a box from the freezer aisle.  The mint fudge was wonderfully rich and flavorful.

“So how old are you now?” Jed asked.

“Twenty-three,” I replied.

“That’s what I thought.  I knew you were a few years older than me.”

“What’s it like now that nobody likes you?” Brody asked.

“Huh?” I replied.

“You know.  That song that goes ‘nobody likes you when you’re twenty-three.’”

“Oh, yeah.  Blink-182, is it?”

“Yeah.  I’m just messing with you.  We like you.”

“Yes, Greg,” Sean added. “We like you.”

“Thanks!” I said.


A couple weeks later, I got a package in a padded envelope.  I was confused, I was not expecting a package at that time, but then I noticed Bethany’s return address on the envelope.  I opened it and read a note inside:

Dear Greg-
Please enjoy this belated birthday present!  I hope the start of the school year is going well for you!
-Bethany

In the package was the photograph Meghan had taken of me pretending to knock out Bethany with her boxing gloves, in a frame.  Bethany had added a thought bubble coming out of my head, and had written “Let the Wookie win!” in the thought bubble.  It was such a kind gesture that I was willing to overlook the fact that Chewbacca’s species was actually spelled “Wookiee.”  I would learn later that the earliest Star Wars books did in fact spell it with one E, though.

Every time I heard that song that said “nobody likes you when you’re twenty-three,” I listened a little more closely, now that I was actually twenty-three.  The singer (Mark Hoppus, although I did not know his name at the time) recalled tales of acting immature during and after a date with a girl, singing near the end of the song, “I never want to act my age.”  Twenty-three was an interesting age to be, especially in a university town like Jeromeville.  I was older than most of the undergraduates that dominated the local population, but much younger than most of the adults living in town.  I was also younger than my coworkers, since I was starting my career as a teacher at a young age.  But I was definitely getting older.  Life was going to involve more responsibilities now.  That did not, however, mean that I had to give up everything I enjoyed.  I could still make time for volunteering with the youth group at church, watching movies with friends, or even jokingly placing my friends’ stuffed animals in compromising positions.  Maybe acting my age was just a state of mind.  Maybe twenty-three was going to be the perfect age after all, no matter what that song said about it.

Readers: How did you celebrate your last birthday? Tell me about it in the comments!

Also, I did just have a birthday in real life… as for how old I am now, I’ll let you do the math…

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.

[Blink-182 – What’s My Age Again?]

August 2-4, 1999.  The time my brother came to visit. (#228)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

“Have you been to this one before?” Mom asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.  “A few times.”

“Is this the only In-N-Out Burger in Nueces?”

“Yes.”

“How many different In-N-Out Burgers have you been to now?”

“Seventeen.”

“Explain to me again, what’s the story behind why you’re keeping track?”

“Taylor Santiago and Brent Wang were talking about taking a road trip to every In-N-Out Burger last summer.  They never did it, but that seemed like a fun goal to keep track of, to go to as many In-N-Out Burgers as I can.  And it gives me a reason to not always take the same boring road home, so that’s why, when I’ve driven back and forth between Jeromeville and Plumdale over the last year, I’ve taken little side trips to go eat at an In-N-Out Burger where I’ve never eaten before.  You know how I like roads and highways and maps and stuff like that.”

“How many are there?”

“There were 130 at the time they were talking about this last summer, and there are probably a few more by now.  And they’re only in a few states here in the West, so this wouldn’t require a trip across the country,” I explained.

An employee behind the counter called our order, and Dad walked to the counter to get the food.  My seventeen-year-old brother Mark loudly interjected, in his usual sarcastic fashion,  “Aren’t all In-N-Out Burgers pretty much the same?”

“Yes,” I answered.  “For me, it’s more about the road trips, and seeing new places, and just something fun to keep track of.”

Dad returned with our food, and the four of us ate while making small talk.  I kept nervously looking over my shoulder, looking for any students or colleagues who knew me from student teaching at Nueces High last year, or from summer school at Jorgensen High, but I did not see anyone I knew.  Mom filled me in on a lot of news about people back home, most of whom I barely knew, or did not know at all.

After we finished eating, we spent almost an hour driving around Nueces and the outskirts of Tyler Air Force Base a few miles south of the city limits.  Mom and Dad wanted to see where I worked now, as well as where I did my student teaching last year.  Mom said that both schools looked like wonderful places, which did not surprise me one bit.  If Mom disapproved of Jorgensen High, she would not have said anything to my face, except maybe if things went poorly there, she might be more honest after I left.

When we got back to the parking lot at In-N-Out Burger, I helped the others unload Mark’s bags into my car.  Mom and Dad said their goodbyes to us and drove home as I drove Mark in the other direction toward Jeromeville.  In my mind, a seventeen-year-old like Mark was perfectly capable of driving two and a half hours by himself. The first time I made a road trip of this distance by myself, the first time I came home from Jeromeville freshman year, I was only a few months older than Mark was now.  But Mom tended to baby Mark, and Mark did not have the same desire for independence that I had at his age, so here we were, with Mom and Dad driving all the way up here to drop him off to stay with me.  It was Monday afternoon now, and Mom would be making the return trip to pick him up Wednesday evening, this time without Dad since he had to work.

“What is that?” Mark shouted, horrified.

“What?” I asked.

“That!  That place looks disgusting!”  Mark pointed to a billboard depicting a hand holding a slice of pizza, with streamer-like banners representing hot melted cheese dripping down from it.  A caption to the right of the hand said “Hanging out at Karen’s Pizza Barn.  Slivey Ave. Exit – Turn Right.”

“I’ve never been to that place, but I drive by that billboard every day,” I explained.

“It looks sick!”

“The name ‘Karen’s Pizza Barn’ certainly doesn’t sound very good.”

“We’re not gonna eat there, are we?”

“No.  Didn’t Mom say you brought Paco’s for yourself?”

“Yeah.  I’ll just need a bowl and a microwave,” Mark said.  I found it comical that Mark was such a picky eater that he brought his own three-day supply of beans, rice, and chips from the Mexican restaurant right down the street from the house back home for this visit.

When we arrived back at the house, Mark put his stuff on the living room floor next to the couch, since he would be sleeping there.  Sean, who was gradually packing and getting ready to move out at the end of the month after having graduated in June, was the only one home now.  The first thing Mark noticed in the living room was a VHS tape on the coffee table with a handwritten label saying “SOUTH PARK.” “Can we watch this?” he asked me.

“It’s Sean’s,” I replied.  Turning to Sean, I asked, “Can Mark and I watch your friend’s South Park tape?”

“Sure,” Sean said.

“Have you seen South Park?” Mark asked me.

“No, but I know a little about it.  I don’t have cable here. I watched a couple of these with Sean a few weeks ago.”

“That’s why I borrowed the tape,” Sean explained.  “My friend has cable at his apartment, and he recorded some episodes off of TV.”

“We don’t get it back in Plumdale,” Mark explained.  “There are a lot of channels the cable there doesn’t carry.  But the McCalls have a satellite dish, and John and I went to see that South Park movie that’s out right now.  I didn’t really know about all the characters, because I hadn’t seen the show, but it was so funny.”

Mark and I watched episodes of South Park from Sean’s friend’s video for a while, laughing our heads off at the animated antics of the four foul-mouthed children and the strange people living in their town.  I had heard that this show was full of vulgar humor and bad language, far worse than other adult-oriented cartoons like The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead, and now, watching the show for the first time, I could say that this show’s reputation was well-deserved.  But it was hilarious, and much like the other two edgy adult cartoons, the stories delivered biting satire, one of my favorite kinds of humor.

Mark chose to stay home and watch more of South Park while I made a quick trip to the grocery store.  When I got home, I surveyed the back of my car, trying to figure out if I could carry all six bags of groceries and a 24-pack of toilet paper in one trip.  I awkwardly slipped each arm through the handles of three bags, then used my arms to grab the toilet paper in an embrace that completely blocked my view forward.  Looking down at the ground, I carefully carried the groceries to the front door.  Once there, I reached into my pocket, just as slowly and carefully so as not to drop anything, to get my key out.

I put the case of toilet paper down while I put the kitchen groceries away, then I picked the toilet paper back up to carry it to the bathroom that was attached to my bedroom.  I did not realize that Mark was in my bedroom at the time, and when he looked up and saw me carrying the toilet paper, he laughed and said, “Whoa.  I have to get a picture of this.”

“What?” I asked.

“I just look up and you have a giant thing of toilet paper.  That’s funny.  How many dumps will that last you?  Like six?”

“Shut up.”

“Seriously.  Don’t move.  Do you have a camera?”

“It’s over there, on my desk,” I said, laughing in my head about how Mark’s sense of humor had not changed one bit in the five years since I had moved out.  Everything with him was about taking dumps, it seemed.




Mark had long been a contributor of ideas to my Dog Crap and Vince stories, so when I started attempting to make a Dog Crap and Vince video game a month or so ago, I knew that I wanted Mark to be involved.  After I showed him some of what I had been working on so far, I said, “So I have two characters with different voices that you can play.  There’s a scene at the end where they end up out in the country, and there’s this crazy redneck guy who won’t let them pass.  Here’s your line.  Say into the microphone, ‘Hey!  Y’all can’t be here!  No trespassing!”

“Let me practice,” Mark replied.  He made his voice deeper and repeated the line in an exaggerated accent somewhat resembling that of the American South.

“Perfect!” I said.  I handed Mark the microphone and recorded him saying the same line.  I then explained, “To get past him, earlier in the game Vince found an empty beer can.  You distract him by putting the can on this fence here, and he sees the empty can and has to shoot it off the fence.  Then you walk past him while he’s shooting.”

“That’s great!”  Mark read my script, then repeated back, “All right!  Empty beer cans!  Time to do some shootin’!”  He repeated the line again into the microphone as I recorded him.  “What does this guy look like anyway?”

“I’ll show you,” I said, opening my drawing of the cartoon country guy in MS Paint.

“He needs more tattoos,” Mark noticed.  “Can I add some things to the drawing?”

“Go ahead.”

I watched as Mark zoomed in and made the man’s T-shirt sleeveless.  He added a dark blue tattoo of barbed wire around his bicep, then began drawing another tattoo below that.  At first I could not tell what he was drawing, but gradually the shape became more familiar.  It was not the shape of an actual physical object.

“Is that second tattoo supposed to be Texas?” I asked.

“Yes!” Mark exclaimed.

“Oh, that’s good.  I love it.”

Mark and I continued recording the voices for all of the possible interactions that the player could have with this man.  Next, I explained that the other character Mark would be playing ran a store that sold strange random items, some of which Dog Crap and Vince would need to complete their quest.

“What does he look like?” Mark asked.  “Can I draw him?”

“Sure.”

“Because I had this idea for a funny character a while back, something we could use if we ever did any comics or cartoons or anything again.”

“I didn’t give this character much personality,” I explained, “so go ahead, make him as interesting as you want.”

I opened an MS Paint file of a blank outline of a human being and watched as Mark transformed him into his vision.  He gave the character a large mop of curly red hair, bloodshot eyes, and hairy arms, using the airbrush effect.  He used the same effect to give him a brightly colored T-shirt, as if tie-dyed, then began doing something with his legs that I did not understand at first.  “Did you make his pants short on one leg and long on the other?” I asked as I watched the drawing of his legs emerge, amused and puzzled at the same time.

“Yeah!”

“Why?

“Why not?  Because this guy is weird.  So weird, he’s awesome.”

“That works,” I replied.  After Mark drew sandals on the character’s feet, I asked if he had a name for him.

“The sandals I pictured him wearing remind me of old Greek and Roman gods.  So I was thinking of calling him something like ‘Apollo.’”

“That works,” I said.  “What does Apollo’s voice sound like?”

“Hi.  I’m Apollo.  Welcome to my store,” Mark said in a sarcastic deadpan voice, a bit more nasal than his normal voice.  Returning to his normal voice, he explained, “I’m basing his voice on that sarcastic guy with the mustache from The Simpsons.”

“I think it’s perfect.”

Mark and I stayed up well past midnight coming up with ideas for Apollo.  After Mark finished recording all the things Apollo needed to say in order to advance the plot, we discussed and came up with many other funny things to say in response to various ways that the player could interact with him.  Apollo was becoming an unexpected highlight of my game.


Tuesday morning and afternoon were fairly relaxed.  I had the Super Nintendo from my teen years here at my house, so we played Super Mario World, Street Fighter II, and NCAA Basketball for a while.  We also watched the rest of Sean’s borrowed VHS tape of South Park, and the Dog Crap and Vince movie that I had made a couple years ago with the kids from church.  Mark was not involved in that production, and he had only seen it once before, when I brought it home.

Over the last few weeks, I had tried to think of things that I could do with Mark during his visit to Jeromeville, and the one I had planned for Tuesday night was the one I was most nervous about.  “Where are we going?” Mark asked as I drove north on Andrews Road.  “Is it at the church?  Because I thought your church was right near your house.”

“It’s at the house of a family from church.  During the summer, they have youth group events at houses with pools, so kids can go swimming.  I’ve been to this house once before.  They also have a huge trampoline.”

When I got there, I walked through the side gate instead of going inside the house.  “Shouldn’t we knock on the door?” Mark asked.

“I’ve been to this house before.  They’ll all be out back.”

I saw Brad Solomon, the high school pastor from church, and walked toward him.  “Hey, Greg,” he said.  “What are you doing here?  Checking out high school group?”

“I’m staying with junior high next year.  But my brother is in high school, and he’s visiting me today.  This is Mark.”

“Hi, Mark!  I’m Brad.”  Brad shook Mark’s hand.  “Where are you visiting from?”

“Plumdale,” Mark replied.

“Where is that again?”

“By Gabilan, and Santa Lucia.”

“Oh, okay.  I know Santa Lucia.  There’s chips and salsa and other snacks over there, you can get in the pool or jump on the trampoline, then we’ll have some music and a short Bible study later.  I have some flyers to hand out too.  I’ll give you those on your way out,” Brad said.

“Greg!” a loud voice called out from near the trampoline. I looked to see Ted Hunter sitting with Zac Santoro and Danny Foster, all of whom had been in the junior high school youth group when I started volunteering a couple years ago.  “Welcome to high school group!”

“This is my brother Mark,” I said.  “He’s visiting me today.  Mark, you remember Ted, Zac, and Danny from the Dog Crap and Vince movie.” I explained to the three boys that we had just watched that again today.

“Oh yeah,” Mark said.

“Dog Crap and Vince!” Ted exclaimed.  “We need to do another movie someday.”

“What year are you?” Zac asked.

“I’m gonna be a senior,” Mark replied.

“Nice!  One year left until you graduate!  Older than us.”

Mark just stood there quietly watching as other high school students jumped on the trampoline and tossed a beach ball around in the pool.  I walked over to eat chips, and Mark followed me disinterestedly.  After a couple minutes of awkward silence, I noticed Zac and Ted start jumping on the trampoline, and I suggested to Mark, “Want to jump on the trampoline with Zac and Ted?”

“Okay,” he replied.  Mark and I walked toward the trampoline and began jumping.  Zac and Ted excitedly started jumping near us, trying to catapult each other higher.  After one particularly big jump, I clearly felt the trampoline moving under me, so I carefully jumped off.  “I don’t know if this trampoline is big enough for all four of us,” I said.  I stood nearby, watching and interacting with the three boys as they jumped.

“Hey, Greg,” I heard a familiar voice behind me.  Barefoot James, one of the leaders whom I also knew from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, asked, “Decided to join us for high school group tonight?”

“Yeah.  My seventeen-year-old brother is visiting, so I brought him to high school group.”  I pointed out Mark, now sitting on the trampoline as Zac and Ted jumped around him, and said quietly, so that Mark would not hear, “I don’t think he’s into it.”

“Witnessing to your family is hard,” James said.  “Does he have a Christian background?”

“He’s a Christmas and Easter Catholic, I guess you’d say.  He went to catechism and all that, but Mom doesn’t make him go to church with her very often.  I don’t think he really knows Jesus on a personal level.”

“All you can do is plant seeds.  God waters the seeds.  You brought him here, and you never know what will happen.”

“That’s a good way to look at it.”


Mark did not get any more into youth group as the night went on, although he politely stuck it out and did not complain.  I was not consciously planning to use this visit to “witness” to Mark, as Barefoot James had said. If I had planned this whole trip solely to witness to Mark, I probably would not have watched South Park with him.  Nor would I have gone along Wednesday morning when he got the idea for us to go see the South Park movie.  Watching Sean’s friend’s tape made Mark want to see it again, and knowing that I had never seen it, he wanted to share the fun with me.  We went to the earliest showing at eleven the next morning, and movie theaters in university towns on Wednesday mornings in the summer were not exactly crowded, so we laughed loudly and talked quietly to each other through most of the movie.  Hopefully, the five other people in the theater did not mind our commentary as the four boys learned vulgar humor from a Canadian television show and sent their parents into a panic.  I appreciated the satirical self-awareness of the movie’s plot, since the movie itself was based on a vulgar television show that was popular with children.

Over the last few years, many small cable television providers, including the one covering northern Santa Lucia County, had been bought by a large television provider called TCI, and TCI had recently been acquired by AT&T, an even larger company.  In the middle of all this, AT&T began standardizing what channels were offered in the various areas where they now provided cable television, so soon after the trip, Mark was able to watch the channel that aired South Park.  I occasionally watched it with him when I went home, and although I grew up with dirty jokes, some of the humor in South Park made me a little uncomfortable, so I only watched in small doses when I went home to see my family.

The most life-changing thing that happened during those three days with Mark was the creation of Apollo. He became a regular recurring character in many of my future Dog Crap and Vince projects, with Mark always doing the voice acting in the same deadpan voice.

Mom drove up to Jeromeville and met Mark and me for dinner at Dos Amigos a few hours after the movie got out, then she took him back home to Plumdale after that.  Mark, ever the picky eater, did not like Dos Amigos.  Mark’s one time attending high school group probably did not plant a significant spiritual seed in his mind, but he did find his way back to church many years later, when he met and eventually married a woman who attended traditional Latin Catholic Masses.  I did not like the idea of treating my friends and family as projects to convert to Christianity.  To me, a more natural form of sharing the Gospel seemed better, sharing the good news of Jesus through actions and  the way I lived my life.  I did still need to watch, however, that I did not let inappropriate humor control my life and my mind too much.

Readers: Have you ever brought a friend or relative to something that they weren’t into at all? What ended up happening? Tell me about it in the comments.

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[South Park – Blame Canada] (warning, contains vulgar language)

July 26, 1999.  One more week of this. (#227)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 3 Comments

One more week, I told myself as I walked across the Jorgensen High School courtyard, dragging myself on that Monday morning.  I was tired.  I stayed up past 2am on Saturday working on the Dog Crap and Vince video game that I was attempting to write.  Jed was away for the weekend, on an overnight trip to the beach with Candace and some of her friends, so he was not asleep in our shared bedroom and I did not need to worry about keeping him awake with the computer on and making noise.  I had finished outlining a story for the game, including the items that the player needed to find and the puzzles to be solved.  I had sketched a map of the game’s world on paper, and over the weekend I worked on drawing the backgrounds for the game’s different locations.  Last night I was up late again, swing dancing at the U-Bar; I had gotten to bed a little after midnight, but it took about an hour for me to wind down and fall asleep, and my alarm was set for six.  But I only had one more week of this, then a few weeks off before the regular school year started for the fall.

I put my tote bag on my desk and took a deep breath of the warm, stuffy classroom air, knowing that it would only get hotter as the day went on.  Yesterday afternoon, at some point between church and swing dancing, I graded the tests I gave on Friday about solving quadratic equations.  Stefany, one of the students who had been doing very well in the class up to this point, misunderstood a key point about the quadratic formula.  She had the quadratic formula memorized, as I had instructed the class to do after we derived the formula by completing the square.  She was applying the steps correctly.  But after she got the two solutions given by the quadratic formula, if either of them was a negative number, she would cross it out and write “because it’s negative.”  One step in the quadratic formula involved finding a square root, and I reminded students that negative numbers do not have square roots, so if the particular equation being solved requires finding the square root of a negative number, then this equation has no solution.  Stefany had apparently misinterpreted this, believing that quadratic equations could not have solutions that were negative numbers.  I made a mental note to point this out to her before the upcoming final exam.

Of course, anyone who has taken more advanced mathematics knows that the square root of a negative number is a complex number. But this was an Algebra I class, and these students had not yet learned complex numbers. Many of them would not go that far in mathematics, since they only needed two years of math to graduate from high school.

I wrote today’s date and assignment on the board and got my things organized.  Students began trickling in a few minutes later, with most of them showing up just before the bell rang.  Jazzmyn, a friendly and well-behaved student whose strong point was just not math, walked in and announced, “Mr. Dennison!  I learned a magic trick!  Wanna see it?”  To this day, as a teacher, any time I see students with names like Jazzmyn, Stefany, Deziray, Tieler, or Mykle, I wonder whether their parents intentionally wanted to spell their children’s names creatively, or if they had heard a name out loud and made up their own spelling without researching the meaning or correct spelling of the name.

“It’s about time for class to get started,” I told Jazzmyn.  “Can you show it to me at the end of the period?”

“Sure.  Hey, that’s not true!”

“What’s not true?” I asked.  Jazzmyn seemed to be changing the subject, but to what, I was not sure.

“That,” she said, pointing to a poster that had been left on the bulletin board by a previous teacher in this room.  The poster, part of a series I had seen around campus discouraging students from smoking, said, “Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray,” with a close-up photograph of someone’s tongue licking a transparent glass ashtray.

“So which one have you done?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“You said it’s not true that kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.  Do you know about this because you’ve kissed a smoker, or because you’ve licked an ashtray?”

“Umm,” Jazzmyn replied.  “Never mind.”  She quietly walked to her seat.  I sat back down at my desk and filled out today’s attendance, satisfied that I had caught Jazzmyn in a moment where she might need to rethink her life choices.

I got the class as quiet as I could and went over a few frequently missed problems from the test.  I worked my way through the next lesson, showing students how to simplify fractions with polynomials in the numerator and denominator.  I always thought this was much more straightforward than it looked, combining what students learned in fifth and sixth grade about multiplying and dividing fractions with what I taught a few weeks earlier about polynomials.  Of course, many students had not mastered either, or both, of these prerequisite skills, which is why most found this challenging.

“Jared,” I said. Jared had done very little work for all of summer school, and he was now playing with one of those little finger-operated skateboards, a trendy toy that I had no idea existed until a month ago.  “Put that away or I take it away.”  Jared put the finger skateboard away, his desk now empty with no math book, paper, or pencil on it.  I made a mental note to try calling his mother again, even though I had gotten no answer two weeks ago and my message was not returned.

When I finished teaching the lesson, I gave the students time to work.  As I was walking around, I noticed Jared playing with the finger skateboard again.  “Give it to me,” I told him.  He continued  to play with it, ignoring me.  I moved my hand close to his, trying to take the skateboard without actually touching him, and he picked it up and clenched his fist around it.

“You can’t steal my stuff,” Jared said aggressively.

“I asked you to put it away, you didn’t, so now it’s getting confiscated.  That’s the rule.”

“Shut up, faggot.”

“Go to the office,” I replied, walking to my desk and filling out a referral form.  Jared sat at his desk playing with the skateboard the whole time I filled out the form.  I walked to the telephone on the wall, now seething with anger, glad that I was not at Nueces High anymore where there were no telephones in the classrooms.  “I have a student who is being defiant,” I explained to Kathy in the office.  “He’s playing with a toy skateboard, I told him to put it away, and he called me an inappropriate name.”

“We’ll send James to come get him,” Kathy replied.  I walked around, trying to carry on with class, but most of the students had gotten off task by then.  James, the campus security guard, came to pick up Jared a few minutes later.  I handed James the referral form, and as he took Jared to the office, Jared shouted, “Dennison is gay!”  I continued teaching, trying to stay calm, but after one lap around the classroom answering student questions, I needed to sit at my desk for a few minutes before I continued.

No more major incidents arose the rest of that period.  After the bell rang, Jazzmyn came to my desk and asked, “Can I show you the magic trick now?”

“Sure,” I replied, having completely forgotten about the magic trick.

“Can I use three of these?” she asked, pointing at a pad of sticky notes on my desk.

“Yes.”

“Think of your favorite food, but don’t say it out loud.”

“Okay,” I replied.

“You got it?”

“Yeah.”

Jazzmyn wrote something on the first sticky note, then folded it in half so the writing was not visible.  “What food were you thinking of?”

“A cheeseburger.”

“Now think of one of your friends.”

“Okay,” I said as Jazzmyn wrote on the second sticky note and folded it.

“Who did you think of?”

“Jed.”

“Jed?”

“Yeah.”

“Now pick a number, either six or nine.”

“Got it.”

Jazzmyn wrote on the third sticky note, folded it, and put it aside with the others.  “Which number did you pick?”

“Nine,” I answered.

Jazzmyn picked up the three folded sticky notes, unfolded them, and put them in front of me with the writing facing me, one at a time.  I read, on the notes in Jazzmyn’s handwriting, “CHEESEBURGER,” “JED,” and “9.”

“Wow,” I replied, trying not to let on that I had seen this trick before and knew exactly how she had done it.

“Pretty neat, huh.”

“Yes.”

“Have a good day, Mr. Dennison!”

“I will,” I replied.  “Thank you.”


I locked the classroom and walked to the staff bathroom, with ten minutes left until second period started.  On the way back to my room, Milo, a very studious fourteen year old who was just starting high school this year and was taking my class to get ahead on math credits for high school, saw me and called out, “Mr. Dennison!”

“Yes?” I asked, walking over to the table where Milo was sitting.

“I was just reading this book,” he explained, showing me the cover.  I was not familiar with the title or author, but it appeared to be a science fiction novel.  “Here, one of the characters is explaining something about parallel universes, and he mentioned, let me see, here it is.”  Milo pointed to a passage in the book and read aloud, “Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem.”  I had heard of the early twentieth century mathematician Kurt Gödel, and while I did not claim to know German, I was pretty sure that Milo, who stressed the second syllable in Gödel, was mispronouncing his name.  I had heard it correctly pronounced almost like “girdle.”  But I did not want to be pedantic and correct Milo; he was reading, he was curious about advanced math, and I did not want to discourage this.  He asked me, “Do you know what that is?”

“I haven’t studied the incompleteness theorems in detail, but I know a little bit,” I explained.  “So advanced math is built on basic assumptions about simple mathematical structures.  A plus B is the same as B plus A.  Exactly one line can be drawn through any two points.  Things like that.  Everything else is proven from those basic assumptions.  The incompleteness theorems say that, no matter how many assumptions your mathematical system starts with, there will always be statements that can never be proven true or false with just those assumptions.”

Milo thought for a few seconds, then replied, “Interesting!  Thank you!  This part of the story makes more sense now.”

“Glad I could help,” I said.  “Enjoy the rest of the story.”

Second period went more smoothly than first period, but it was not uneventful.  While I was walking around helping students simplify rational expressions, I saw out of the corner of my eye two girls, Kelly Knott and Lauren Cartwright, passing notes and not doing their work.  Kelly was not usually a problem, she tried harder now that her lack of effort during the year had landed her in summer school, but Lauren could be sassy and argumentative at times.  Lauren had just finished writing with the note still unfolded on her desk as I approached, but she had not passed it to Kelly yet. I quietly walked up behind her and snatched the note off of her desk before she could react.  She glared at me angrily, and I ignored her as I walked back to my desk and read the note.  They had been writing back and forth, with the top of the page in Lauren’s handwriting.

Hi Kelly! Are you as bored as I am?

I’m ready to go home! What happened last night? I heard your dad caught you sneaking out?

Ya I tried to go to a party with Matt but Dad wasn’t asleep yet and he caught me and now Matt is mad at me because he was waiting outside and he thinks I ditched him even tho I told him what happened! Don’t you hate this class?

It’s math but it’s not the worst class ever.

Look at Mr. Denison up there with his ugly clothes and his man boobs talking about whatever this shit is! This class is so dumb!

Mr. Dennison is still a better teacher than Mr. Novak though.

I never had Novak but yeah I’ve heard! Jen told me she learned nothing in his class last year.

I did not know Jen or Mr. Novak, and I did not care at this point.  I was just frustrated with everything that I had had to deal with that day, not to mention the fact that after all of this disrespectful behavior by students today, Lauren also had the nerve to spell my name wrong.

After the students went home, I stood in the hallway for a minute and took a deep breath.  Mr. Raymond in the room across the hall saw me and said, “Looks like you had an eventful day.  I saw Jared Silva being escorted to the office earlier.”

“Yeah.  He was playing with a toy skateboard, and when I asked him to put it away, he called me a faggot.”  I lowered my voice when I said that last word.

“That sounds like Jared.  He did nothing for me all year; that’s why he’s in summer school.  And get this.  His mom told me last year that she wanted me to call her every day that he didn’t do his work, every day that his overall grade wasn’t passing.  How am I going to do that?  He doesn’t ever do his work.  It would be easier for me to call his mom on days when he actually does his work, because there are hardly any of those.”

I laughed and said, “Is there anything I should know before I call his mom?”

“She probably won’t answer, and if you leave a message, it’s about fifty-fifty whether or not she’ll call you back.”

“Good to know.  I better get on those phone calls.  I have a few others to make too,” I said.  I walked back into the classroom and closed the door behind me, mentally preparing myself for my least favorite part of teaching, calling parents on the phone.

Jared’s mom did not answer, and she never called me back.  Kelly’s mom did answer, and we actually had a pleasant conversation.  I pointed out that Kelly had gotten back to work with no problems after I confiscated the note that she and Lauren had been passing.

“Kelly usually isn’t a troublemaker,” her mom explained, “but sometimes she lets her friends influence her too much.  And math has always been hard for her, but she tries.”

“Yes.  She’s done most of her homework.”

“She just had a really bad teacher last year, at least that’s what we think, and once she got behind, she never really caught up.”

“I get that,” I replied, remembering what Kelly and Lauren had written about Mr. Novak.

“Thank you so much for calling.  We’ll have a talk with Kelly about focusing on her work and not getting involved in what her friends are doing.”

“Sounds good.  Have a good afternoon.”

“You too!” Kelly’s mom said as we exchanged good-byes and hung up.  Next I called Lauren’s house, where I explained to her dad what happened in class.

“We’ve really been having a lot of problems with Lauren the last several months,” Mr. Cartwright explained.  “She has a boyfriend, and he hasn’t been a good influence on her.  She stopped doing her work, she started lying to us about where she’s been, stuff like that.  We’re usually on top of her with her work. She’s never had summer school before, and we know she can do well when she tries, but she’s not even trying.  And the disrespectful things she wrote about you, that’s new from her.  We won’t tolerate that.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s four days left, Friday is the last day of summer school, right?”

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow she’s going to be completely changed.  You’ll be able to see my handprint on her ass.”  Even though the classroom was empty, I made a shocked face at Mr. Cartwright’s comment as he continued, “Please let me know if she gives you any more trouble this week.”

“I will.  Thank you for your support.”


The magic trick that Jazzmyn showed me was actually simple.  When she supposedly predicted my favorite food, she actually wrote “6.”  When she predicted my friend’s name, she wrote “CHEESEBURGER,” since by then I had named the food I was thinking of, and when she predicted my number, she wrote “JED,” because I had said my friend’s name at that point.  She showed me what she wrote all at once, not in order, so I could not tell which note was written when, and since I chose nine instead of six, she just turned her initial “6” upside down to make a “9.”  Clever.

As a middle-aged adult in the 2020s, Mr. Cartwright’s comment about his handprint on Lauren’s ass might raise red flags, but I grew up in an environment where spanking was a normal consequence for misbehavior, so in 1999 I just figured he was making a point about discipline.  Lauren did not give me any problems for the rest of summer school, and I saw no visible signs that she was being physically abused at home.  Jared’s mother never called me back, and Jared did no work those last four days and failed the final exam.  I gave the final Friday, and over half of the students got a D or F in the class, but every one of them earned their grade by doing little to no work.  Students who made an effort got passing grades.

Summer school had only been six weeks of half days, but I still felt accomplished as it ended.  I may not have made a difference to many of those students, especially the ones who made little effort, but I certainly was not completely forgotten.  Some of those students would have me again in the fall for geometry.  Many of them would say hi to me as we passed each other on campus.  None of that summer school class stayed in touch after I left Jorgensen High a couple years later, but a few students I met later during my time at Jorgensen did stay in touch consistently, and through them I eventually got reacquainted with Kelly and Milo as adults.  Both are now in their early forties, still living in the same area.

I was starting to feel like a real teacher now.  I still had a lot to learn, and I was still probably one of the youngest teachers in the state, at the age of only twenty-two years, eleven months.  But these six weeks of summer school at least gave me experience in the classroom, which would make me slightly more ready to be a teacher in the fall.

Author’s Note: In March of this year, I wrote an episode set in March of 1999, and since then I have tried to keep the episodes set in the same time of year as real life. But, for what I believe is the first time in 227 episodes, this episode takes place on the same calendar day as the day I posted the episode. This was not planned. I post on Sundays, Sundays in 2026 are the same calendar days as Mondays in 1999, and I needed this episode to be set on the last Monday of the summer school term. I looked at a 1999 calendar, and that happened to be July 26, the same day in 2026 that this episode posted.

Were you a troublemaker in school? Did you have friends who were? 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.

[New Radicals – You Get What You Give]

July 11-17, 1999.  Swing dancing at a new place. (#226)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 1 Comment

“Greg!” Bethany exclaimed, running up to me and giving me a big hug.  “It’s good to see you back here!”

“I’ve been here a couple of times this summer,” I replied.  “Now that the X-Files watch parties aren’t happening because of reruns for the summer, I figured it was time to give swing dancing another try on Sunday nights.  Are you still coming often?  I haven’t seen you the last couple of times I’ve been.”

“I was so busy with school spring quarter, and then I went to stay with my family for a week.  But I still come sometimes, especially if Ben and Lisa and my church friends are here.  There’s also this new place they’ve been going for swing dancing.  I went with them once.”

“A new place, like swing dancing at another place in Jeromeville?  Not the U-Bar?”

“Not in Jeromeville.  It’s in Cap City, called The Hop.  On… I don’t remember the name of the street.  It starts with an F… What’s it called?”

“F Street?” I asked sarcastically.

Bethany stuck her tongue out at me.  “Dude.  It’s not F Street.  Seriously, where is it?  I can’t remember.”

“Fallon Avenue?  That’s the only other main street with F that I can think of.”

“It’s not Fallon, but it’s somewhere over there.  Anyway, I guess The Hop is where all the swing dancers on the other side of the Drawbridge are going these days.”

“Interesting.”

“We should hang out again sometime, now that school has settled down for me.  I know you’re busy teaching summer school, though.  I still read your emails.”

“It’s not that bad.  It’s not a full day, so I usually get home around 1:30.  We’ll hang out soon.  Would you like to dance?”

“Yes!” Bethany answered.  I took her hand and led her to the dance floor.

That night was the first time I had ever heard of The Hop.  The second time was two days later, when my roommate Jed, an avid swing dancer, told me that he and Candace and Ben and maybe some of Ben’s friends were going to The Hop on Saturday, and asked if I wanted to come.  “They’re having live music this week from Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums.”

“I’m not sure who that is, but sure.  I don’t have any plans Saturday.”

“They’re a six-piece swing band from California that tours around the West playing live music at swing dances.  They play a couple of their songs at the U-Bar.  Like, you know that slow one that goes ‘down boy, down boy, that ain’t right?’  That’s by Steve Lucky.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.  “I know that song.  That’ll be fun!”


Ben Lawton and his friend Lisa, the same people who had been with Bethany Bradshaw at the U-Bar on Sunday, showed up at our house Saturday evening.  Candace, the girl whom Jed had spent a lot of time with over the last nine months or so, was finally officially his girlfriend as of a month ago, and she was already at our house.  The five of us got into Jed’s car and headed east across the Drawbridge into Capital City.  I mostly sat quietly while the others talked about dancing-related stuff, occasionally fielding questions from the others when they asked me how teaching was going.

The Hop was not at all where I expected.  I was somewhat familiar with downtown Capital City and the area around Capital East Mall.  On Sunday, when Bethany was trying to remember the name of the street where The Hop was, I had guessed Fallon Avenue, so my mind was expecting it to be in that direction, past Capital East Mall, even though Bethany had said that Fallon Avenue was not right.  So when Jed moved to the right lane to take Highway 9 southbound, toward Ralstonville and Ashwood, I almost spoke up and told him that he was in the wrong lane, until I realized that I did not know where we were going.  This area was mostly residential, and somewhat sketchy, not exactly the kind of neighborhood where I expected to find a swing dancing club.  Seven miles later, Jed turned onto Floral Valley Road, a street that started with F just as Bethany had said.  I definitely was not expecting to find swing dancing on Floral Valley Road.

Floral Valley was a distinct community founded by farmers in the late nineteenth century, with a substantial number of immigrants from Japan arriving in the early twentieth century.  During World War II, when the United States was at war with Japan, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans to abandon their lives and live in war relocation camps, because of uncorroborated fears that they would turn against the United States during the war.  Those who believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the greatest U.S. Presidents conveniently seem to forget about this part of his presidency, but that is a discussion for another time.  The camps closed after the war, but many of the Japanese Americans from Floral Valley settled elsewhere, and the area evolved into a less distinct middle-class suburb with a shopping mall.  In recent years, shoppers began flocking to other, larger malls in more affluent communities, and Floral Valley was entering into a period of decline.  Most people around here had no idea that Floral Valley as a distinct community ever existed.  For example, everyone told me that The Hop was in Capital City, not Floral Valley, and mailing addresses in Floral Valley said “Capital City” instead of “Floral Valley” under current Postal Service addressing conventions.  But, Floral Valley was, and remains to this day, outside of the city limits of Capital City, which I knew because I enjoyed looking at maps.

And right there, in a small strip mall on Floral Valley Road across the street from the main mall buildings, was a sign featuring a silhouette of two dancers in old-fashioned clothing next to the words, “The Hop – Swing Dancing & Lessons.”  Jed parked the car, and the four of us got out and walked inside.

Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums were already playing, since we got there about ten minutes after the show started.  The band played on the far side of the room, from my perspective at the entrance, with dancers on a wooden floor in between.  Much like the regulars at the U-Bar, these dancers were dressed in costumes from the swing dancing era, and I recognized a few familiar faces from the U-Bar, but mostly just the really good people, serious dancers whom I did not usually dance with.  The band, also dressed in vintage clothing, consisted of a middle-aged man on vocals, a woman with an old-fashioned looking guitar singing co-lead vocals on some songs, and a four-piece backup band.  I recognized the song they were playing; the DJs at the U-Bar had played it before.

Jed and Candace walked out to the dance floor, and Ben and Lisa followed them soon after, leaving me alone.  I saw a girl around my age standing not too far from me; I walked up to her and asked, “Would you like to dance?”

“No thanks,” she replied, smiling, as if that would lessen the blow of being turned down.  I simply walked away without saying anything.  I watched people dance to the rest of the song, not wanting to try to ask someone again because it kind of looked weird and desperate, and I danced with Lisa to the next song after she finished dancing with Ben.

Lisa wanted to sit out the next song, since she had danced twice in a row, so I sat out too.  Jed and Candace were still dancing.  Jed had told me a few weeks ago that they were officially a couple now, but I had seen this coming months ago.  To my knowledge, this was the first time I had ever introduced a couple to each other, although I did not intend to set them up the night I introduced them.  I just happened to know both of them, and they were both swing dancing at the U-Bar on the same night.

I tried again a few songs later.  The band was playing another song I recognized; the lyrics were ostensibly about gravy, but filled with sexual innuendo.  I walked up to a thin dark-haired girl who was not dancing and asked her, “Would you like to dance?”

“Not right now,” she replied.  “Maybe later.”

This time, I did not want to give up.  I saw another girl around my age on the other side of the dance floor who was not dancing, but by the time I walked around the edge of the dance floor to where she was, someone had grabbed her and walked out to the dance floor with her.  But there was another girl next to her who was not dancing.  “Would you like to dance?” I asked.

“Sure!” she said, smiling.  I took her hand and led her to the dance floor, dancing all of the same moves that I did every week at the U-Bar.  This girl seemed to know what she was doing.  She was shorter than average but not excessively short, with wavy brown hair in a shoulder-length pony tail.  She wore a black dress and shoes with a little bit of a heel.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Erin,” she replied.  “What’s yours?”

“I’m Greg. Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too!  Have you been here before?”

“No, this is my first time here, but I have been swing dancing before.  Some of my friends came here to see this band.”

“Where’s your usual swing dancing place?”

“The University Bar & Grill, in Jeromeville.  Is this your usual place?”

“I come here off and on.  I go to University of the Valley, and we have a swing dance club there that has dance lessons and social dancing weekly in a classroom on campus.  But some of us carpool up here sometimes too.  There isn’t any swing dancing in Stockdale other than our club.”

“I see.  That’s good that you have the club on campus.”

“Yeah.  Are you a student at Jeromeville?  Do you have a campus club?”

“I was, but I graduated.  And there’s not a campus club.  Most swing dancing in Jeromeville happens at the U-Bar.”

“You just graduated this year?”

“Last year with a bachelor’s degree, and this year with a teaching credential.”

“You’re a teacher?  That’s so cool!  What do you teach?”

“High school math.  I got a job for the fall, and they asked if I could teach summer school too.  The last few weeks have been a trial by fire.”

“I’m sure they have!  Summer school kids can be rough.  I can do math, but it’s never been my favorite.  The world needs good math teachers.”

“What are you studying?” I asked.

“Nursing.”

“That’s cool.  How long until you graduate?”

“One more year!  I’m ready to be done!”

“Good luck!  I thought about going to grad school in math, but the more I looked into what math research was like, I realized I didn’t really want to do that.  By senior year, I was ready to just be done with school and start working.”  The song that the band played ended, so I asked Erin, “Would you like to dance again?”

“Sure!”

I led Erin back out on the dance floor, and about halfway through the song I attempted to lead her in a turn that I felt I needed more practice with.  This time, though, it worked perfectly.  “That was fun!” she said.

“Thanks!  I’m still learning that one,” I explained.

After the song ended, we walked back to the side of the room together.  She asked me, “Is it weird teaching high school when you’re not that much older than them?”

“I mean, I’ve only been teaching for less than a month, so everything is weird.  But yeah.  I’m about as young as a teacher can possibly be.  I don’t even turn twenty-three for another month, and these kids are fifteen and sixteen.  It’s hard to feel like an authority figure.”

“When I was in high school, I had a teacher who was really young.  I loved him, he was one of my favorite teachers, but some of the other kids were so mean to him.  I felt bad for him.”

“That sounds kind of like what my experience has been this summer.  Some kids are really nice to me, others are really mean.  And I had a fight break out in my room the first week.”

“What?” Erin asked incredulously.

“Yeah.  Most of the school doesn’t have air conditioning, and two boys started fighting over which way to point the fan.”

“Wow.  That’s messed up.”

“Yeah.  It was kind of scary.”

“Hey, I’m going to go back over with my friends who I came with, but it was good talking to you!”

“You too!  Want to dance again later?” I asked.

“Sure!  Come find me!”


Later, the band took a break, and a DJ started playing prerecorded music.  I was standing with my friends from Jeromeville, and I asked Candace to dance since I had not danced with her yet.  She was my roommate’s girlfriend, yes, but it did not seem any sort of breach of etiquette for her to dance with other people at a social dance, and besides, I had known her longer than Jed had.

We walked back off the dance floor after that song, and she asked me, “Are you having fun here?”

“More or less.”

“Is this your first time here?”

“Yeah, and I feel like I don’t really know anyone except you guys.  I’ve asked people to dance who I don’t know, and only one of them said yes.”

“Keep trying.  I’ve found people here are pretty friendly about dancing with strangers.”

“I hope so,” I said.

A few songs into their second set, the band played “Down Boy,” the song that I said I knew from the U-Bar when Jed was first telling me about this band.  The female vocalist, whom I would learn later went by the pun stage name Carmen Getit, kept repeating the line “down boy, down boy,” in response to a romantic interest who wants to rush the relationship.  I danced a slow lindy hop with Lisa, because I knew from the U-Bar that she knew how to dance Lindy Hop. I observed on the dance floor that Erin was also dancing Lindy Hop with someone else, which was important to me because now I knew that I could dance Lindy Hop with her later.

Next, the band played something faster again.  I walked up to a girl who was not dancing and asked if she wanted to dance; she replied politely, “No, thank you.”  I asked another girl a little bit later, and she just walked away without saying anything.  I walked back to where the people I came with were standing.  I waited until the end of that song, and danced with Lisa again for the next one.  Then I sat on a chair by myself for the next four or five songs, wishing that I knew more people here.

I got up a while later and asked someone standing near me to dance; she turned me down.  I saw Erin standing by herself, so I asked her to dance, and she said yes.

“You know Lindy Hop?” I asked.  I did not admit that I had been watching her dance earlier.

“Yes!  You do too?”

I nodded in the affirmative as I began leading her in the basic Lindy Hop step.  I did not tell her that I had never had formal Lindy Hop lessons; I was mostly self-taught from watching other dancers, and some of my friends had led me through the basic step up close.  She did not seem to mind, because she told me as we finished, “That was fun!”

The band played two sets of about an hour each with a twenty-minute break in between.  After their second set, the dancing continued with DJ music until the place closed at midnight.  A little bit before midnight, Ben and Lisa walked past me, and Ben said, “Jed told me to tell you we’re leaving in 10 minutes.  So if you want one last dance, now’s the time.”  Ben and Lisa walked out onto the dance floor together.  I spotted Erin, not dancing with anyone, and asked if she wanted to dance one more time, and she said yes.  I thought of something in the middle of the song, knowing that this would be the last time Erin and I would dance that night.

“Hang on,” I told her after the song ended.  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a flyer I had taken on the way in with a list of the band’s upcoming performances.  “Call me next time you’re gonna be here,” I said.  “Or if you and your friends want to try the U-Bar in Jeromeville.”  I wrote my name and phone number on the back of the flyer and handed it to her.

“I’ll let you know!” she said, smiling.  “It’s nice to meet you!”

“You too!” I replied enthusiastically.  I walked toward the entrance and waited for the others in my car to gather, then walked back to the car with them.

As soon as we were all in the car, Jed asked, “So, Greg.  Was that you getting a phone number there at the end?”

No, it was not, I thought as I felt my excitement from the end of the night deflate quickly.  I knew at that moment that I had blown it, I had screwed up.  Normal guys get phone numbers; only weird ones give them.  “Not really,” I explained.  “I gave her my phone number and told her to let me know if she was gonna be here again.”

“Oh, okay,” Jed replied.

Could I have played that differently?  Could I have asked her for her number, instead of imposing my contact information on her?  Possibly, but it was too late to think about that now.  Maybe if another chance came up someday, things would turn out differently.

I never made it back to The Hop after that night.  I did see Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums a few more times, though, several years later.  I got back into swing dancing for most of my thirties, and the band was still around, still touring, and still playing live music at swing dances.  I stopped following them when they released a video on social media of a performance where, in a horribly cringeworthy effort, they changed the lyrics to a familiar song to praise a certain well-known politician whose views I sharply disagreed with.  By that time I was also beginning to step away from swing dancing in general.  But they were fun when I saw them in 1999, not political at all.

I never saw or heard from Erin again.  I knew from the moment that Jed asked the question about phone numbers that it would be that way.  I was so painfully naive and ignorant when it came to the world of dating and relationships, and I still had a lot to learn.

Readers: Have you ever met someone who seemed happy to meet you, but then you never saw that person again? Tell me about it in the comments.

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July 1999.  Rediscovering an old hobby and an old favorite singer. (#225)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 14 Comments

Back when I was a child, having a home computer was first becoming mainstream.  Our family got our first computer when I was nine years old, a Commodore 64.  Its one-megahertz processor, 320×200 resolution, and namesake 64 kilobytes of memory were already painfully quaint and antiquated even by 1999 standards, let alone 2020s standards as I write this.  But in light of that, it was pretty amazing what programmers were able to do with that level of technology.  I wrote papers on that computer, I played around with drawing software, and of course I spent nearly countless hours playing some of the most entertaining video games of my life.

The Commodore 64 became extremely popular in the mid-1980s because of its low price, compared to other similar computers.  What doomed the Commodore 64 a few years later was its lack of expandability.  The last Commodore 64 that was manufactured in 1990 had the exact same specifications, including speed and memory, as the very first one manufactured in 1982, while technological capabilities had advanced significantly and other computer manufacturers were taking full advantage of it.  The Commodore processor and operating system were not equipped to handle machines with more memory or advanced graphics, and Commodore’s more advanced computers were incompatible with the vast library of games and productivity software available for the 64.

For part of my teens, I entertained thoughts of making video games as a career.  I gave up on that at some point in high school, when I realized that my computer knowledge was stuck in the mid-1980s while the industry had left everything I knew far behind.  In 1994, I got a Windows-based PC as a graduation present with mid-range specifications and brought it to Jeromeville with me as a freshman, but I never seriously entertained computer science or computer engineering as a major.  San Tomas, Willow Grove, and Sunnyglen, three cities where technology had become the dominant industry, were just a couple hours away from Jeromeville.  I knew that I would be competing in classes with children of actual software engineers, and children who had grown up wealthier than me, both of whom would be much more on top of the latest in computer technology.

A few months ago, I got a new computer, to replace the one I got as a graduation present.  Soon I would have paychecks coming in, now that I was actually getting paid to work as a teacher. Summer school was not taking up all of my time, since classes only went for half days, so all of this made it seem like the perfect time to rekindle this creative hobby from the past.  Of course, I would not start getting paid until the end of July, but spending over a hundred dollars on a hobby seemed a bit more justifiable knowing that I would soon have a steady income.

Back in 1999, things like app stores and Steam did not exist yet.  People bought computer games and productivity software at physical stores; they came in little boxes with a disc inside and usually some kind of instruction manual.  CompUSA was a national chain of computer stores, selling computers, peripherals, and software.  During the second week of working summer school, I stopped at the CompUSA store in Nueces and began searching the productivity section for something specific, something I needed to rekindle this creative hobby.  Eventually, after not too much searching, I found exactly what I was looking for: Borland C++ Builder.

Borland C++ Builder was for coding one’s own computer programs to run within Windows.  I had taken three classes on computer programming: one that was required for the mathematics degree, one that counted in place of a math class, and one that was a prerequisite for the one that counted in place of a math class.  I had a working knowledge of the basics of the C++ programming language from these classes, and I wanted to use it to create a video game based on my Dog Crap and Vince illustrated stories.

Some of the earliest computer games from the 1970s were text adventures, in which the computer would tell part of a story, and the player had to type commands like “open door” or “pick up sword” to control the character.  I had a few of these growing up, and I always found them frustrating and confusing.  One of my favorite games I had growing up on the Commodore was called Maniac Mansion, released in 1987 by the video game division of Lucasfilm, the same company that produced the Star Wars movies.  It worked like the old text adventures, but with graphics and sound. I controlled the character by clicking on a verb from a list of eighteen possible verbs, then clicking on an object on the screen or in my inventory.  So to open a door, I would click on the word “open” in the verb list, then click on the door on the screen.  The story of Maniac Mansion was done in the style of an intentionally bad horror movie: a cute college cheerleader gets kidnapped and experimented on by a mad scientist, and her friends sneak into the scientist’s mansion to save her, sneaking around the house and avoiding the scientist’s family members and monsters while solving puzzles to find and rescue the damsel in distress.

Maniac Mansion was my inspiration for the Dog Crap and Vince game that I was now formulating in my mind.  I had occasionally depicted Vince wearing a jersey of the Ice Monkeys, the team that my brother Mark and his friend Eric played as when we used to have the Moport tournament back home.  I had a silly story idea, in which Vince loses his Ice Monkeys jersey, and he and Dog Crap have to travel their town, interacting with all the usual weird characters from the Dog Crap and Vince stories, and a few new ones, trying to find what happened to the jersey.  I wanted to give the story a surprise ending; when the characters confronted and defeated the final boss type character, instead of getting the jersey back, the final boss character would not have the jersey, and then, after getting home after all that, Vince would find it just sitting on a table and say, “Oh, here it is.”  Something like that, at least.

Before I worked out all of the details of the story, though, I wanted to make sure that this would be possible for me to do.  Most of the games I thought up as a kid, and tried to make for the Commodore, I could not because the technology had not caught up with my vision.  The Commodore out of the box had the capability for any user to write simple code for it, but approaching the complexity of the popular video games of the area required the very difficult skills of writing machine code and carefully manipulating the machine’s graphics and sound capabilities.  I never learned to do this, and while there were commercially available tools to help with this, I never had any of them.

But Borland C++ Builder was exactly such a tool for writing Windows-based software, so now there was a chance that I might be able to develop such a game in my spare time.  My first task was to develop the interface.  Similarly to Maniac Mansion, the game window would show a room in Dog Crap and Vince’s house with items in it.  I wanted to make it so that the player could click on the room and walk around.  I would make things simple on myself and make everything two-dimensional, the same way I drew the stories for the website, so that characters could only move left or right.  But the map for the game would have some aspects of a third dimension, because in addition to moving off screen to enter a new room, some rooms would have doors that would lead to new rooms.  The map for Maniac Mansion worked very similarly.  Below the image, I would have verbs in a list, much like in Maniac Mansion, and a box listing the player’s inventory.

My immediate plan was to write the code so that the character could walk around, with his arms and legs moving, and pick up items, with the item disappearing from the picture and the name of the item appearing in the character’s inventory.  I also wanted the characters to be able to talk.  I would record short sound files of myself speaking in Dog Crap and Vince’s voices, and if the player spoke to another character or requested a description of an item, one of the characters would say this out loud, with his mouth moving.  This would be an improvement over Maniac Mansion, since the Commodore’s technology in the 1980s did not include playing back recorded speech.  I wanted to wait until I could successfully do this muchn before outlining the rest of the story; I did not want to put a lot of work into the game unless I knew that it would be possible for me to make.

So I got to work.  I read the help files that came with Borland C++ Builder until I had figured out how to make my program open a window and display an image.  I drew an image of the inside of Dog Crap and Vince’s house on the MS Paint program that came with Windows.  I copied and pasted some things that I had used for the illustrations of the Dog Crap and Vince stories I had made for the website, but I had to make some modifications in order to make the images the right size.  I made a separate drawing of Dog Crap; I figured I would just start with one of the characters until I knew how all of this worked.  It was not too difficult to place the image on top of the background at whatever coordinates I wanted to use, or to make it move by successively changing its position a few pixels at a time, several times per second.

It also did not take a lot of work to learn how to place buttons on the window.  Borland C++ Builder easily allowed me to place buttons, drop-down menus, and other features that were an integral part of Windows on my game window, and then write code for what was to happen when I pressed each button.  I added buttons to exit the screen to the left and to the right, which in the game I would use for the characters to walk to the next room in each direction, but for now I just wanted to use the buttons to make Dog Crap move across the screen.  In less than a week of fiddling with this code in my spare time, I had my Dog Crap image sliding across the screen when I pressed the buttons.

Making Dog Crap’s arms and legs move, though, were a bit more of a challenge.  My plan was to draw a still frame of Dog Crap with his right foot forward, and another one with his left foot forward.  I would then cycle through four images: the one with both feet together, the one with the right foot forward, the one with both feet forward again, and the one with the left foot forward.  What I had been doing so far, though, did not give me an easy way to change the image on the screen.  I clicked Help to open the help files and started scrolling through things that might be relevant.  This would clearly require a lot of reading, though, and I had music playing in the background, so I paused the CD player to help me concentrate.


While I had been drawing the backgrounds and writing code, I had been playing a lot of music, and the CD in the stereo right now was a new purchase of mine, a new album from one of the favorite singers of my childhood: Running With Scissors, by Weird Al Yankovic.  Weird Al Yankovic was one of the best known comedy musicians in the 1980s and 1990s, most well known for song parodies, in which he would take the tune of a familiar popular song and sing his own silly, nonsensical lyrics.  His albums also contained silly songs that were not explicit parodies of existing songs, but done in the style of well-known musicians.  For other popular songs, he would keep the lyrics unchanged and blend them all into a medley of polka music, because not only was this inherently funny, but also because Al’s first instrument that he learned as a child was the accordion.

I had not followed Weird Al’s career in several years.  The last songs I remembered of his were from when I was in high school, when he sang to the tune of Nirvana about how hard it was to understand Nirvana’s lyrics, and to the tune of the Red Hot Chili Peppers about the Flintstones.  I was vaguely aware that he was still around, and I had a vague memory of a more recent song about the Amish to the tune of Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise.  But the only Weird Al Yankovic album I ever had was a gift for my 12th birthday, a cassette called Even Worse, in which Al on the cover photo reenacted the cover of Michael Jackson’s Bad.  

A couple months ago, my roommate Jed told me that Weird Al was working on a new album, with a song about Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace to the tune of Don McLean’s American Pie.  I looked up the release date of the album and bought the CD at Tower Records the day it went on sale, and I had a lot of good belly laughs listening to the lyrics while grading homework for summer school.  The biggest laugh at all was not even directly related to the song in question, though.

Jed loved swing dancing.  He got heavily involved in the swing dance community around Jeromeville as swing dancing enjoyed a resurgence in popularity over the last couple years.  Some newly recorded swing music was even becoming popular in the mainstream, most notably the song “Zoot Suit Riot” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.  One night, a while back, we were talking about how, if swing dancing could make a comeback, maybe other things may make similar comebacks in the future.  “Oh, no!” Jed shouted, in his characteristically overdramatic style.

“What?” I asked.

“That means someday disco might make a comeback!”  I laughed as he continued, “People will go to bars to dance disco, and they’ll dress up in leisure suits!”

“And then,” I added, “someone will make a neo-disco song called ‘Leisure Suit Riot.’”

“Oh, man, that’s a good one.”  Jed started doing disco moves while singing “Leisure Suit Riot,” to the tune of Zoot Suit Riot but with a disco beat.  “I could see Weird Al Yankovic doing that.”

“Not really,” I suggested.  “Usually Weird Al lyrics have nothing to do with the original song, except for ‘Smells Like Nirvana.’  If Weird Al is going to do a song to the tune of Zoot Suit Riot, it won’t be about dancing.  It’ll probably be about food or something.”

That statement I made was oddly prophetic.  Several months later, I was listening to Weird Al’s new CD for the first time, and I heard the music for Zoot Suit Riot.  I grabbed the liner notes to see what this song was called, and I found the title: “Grapefruit Diet.”  I was right.  It was about food.


Tonight, though, I needed to read these help files and figure out how I could use Borland C++ Builder to animate the image of Dog Crap walking across the screen.  I paused the Weird Al CD on a song called “It’s All About the Pentiums,” a parody of a rap song unfamiliar to me in which the narrator bragged about how great his computer was and teased someone else about his underpowered computer.  An appropriate song for what I was working on tonight.

I spent a long time digging through those help files, learning the difference between an image and a glyph, or at least sort of learning the difference enough to give me an idea for how to animate Dog Crap’s arms and legs.  I went back to my code and made some revisions, changing the image displayed every one-fourth of a second to give a low-quality but noticeable illusion of Dog Crap walking across the screen instead of just sliding.  I clicked the button to run my code, then clicked the button on my window to have Dog Crap walk all the way to the right side of the screen.  Dog Crap did just that, his arms and legs moving four times per second just as I had written in the code.

Talking came next.  I recorded a sound file, saying “Hi, my name is Dog Crap” in Dog Crap’s voice.  I placed a temporary button in the window, labeled “Talk.”  I drew a shape of an open mouth, in black.  I wrote code for the mouth to appear for one-fourth of a second and then disappear for one-fourth of a second, as a separate image on top of Dog Crap’s face.  With the open mouth blinking, and the closed mouth underneath, this would give the appearance of the mouth opening and closing as I played the sound file.  I calculated, based on the length of the sound file, how many times to open and close his mouth as the sound played.  I ran the code and pressed the Talk button; the blinking mouth appeared above and behind Dog Crap’s head, instead of on his mouth.  Of course.  Dog Crap’s location on the screen was determined by the upper left corner of the image file, and I was placing the mouth in the same location.  I counted the number of pixels to shift the mouth image and tried running the code again; it worked this time.  Next I tried using a mirror image of the mouth to get Dog Crap to talk while he was facing left; I had to use some trial and error to figure out exactly where to place the image, so that it would not appear above his head like the last time, but eventually I got it to work.

I stepped out to the kitchen to make dinner.  Brody was sitting on the living room couch watching TV.  “Hey, Greg,” he said.  “What’s up?”

“I made a breakthrough on the project I’ve been working on for the last couple weeks.”

“What have you been working on?  You’ve been in your room the whole time.  I was wondering if summer school just had you really busy.”

“I’ll show you.  Come on.”  I motioned for Brody to follow me, and I ran the code.  I made Dog Crap walk across the screen and say the line I had prerecorded for him.

“Wait, you can control him?” Brody asked.  “Are you making a Dog Crap and Vince video game or something?”

“Yes!”

“How long have you been able to do this?”

“I bought this two weeks ago,” I said, motioning to the Borland C++ Builder box.  “And I’ve been fiddling with it pretty much the entire time I’m not working.”

“You learned to do this in two weeks.  Please tell me you at least took CS 30 and 40.  Otherwise, you’re some kind of programming super genius, and you should be making a lot more money doing this for a living instead of teaching.”

“Yes, I took CS 30, 40, and 110.”

“Whew.  Still, though, this is pretty impressive.”

“Well, it’s not that good, compared to what modern video games look like.”

“You built this from scratch!” Brody exclaimed. “That’s impressive! What’s the game gonna be like?”

“An interactive story, where you tell the characters what to do, and you have to help them find something that was stolen from them.  You can do voices for me.”

“Sure!  Just let me know my lines.”

“I don’t have them yet.  I wanted to make sure I could make these controls before I started going into detail on the story.”

“Smart.  I’ve seen enough of your Dog Crap and Vince stuff to know that this is gonna be hilarious.”

“Thank you!”


The Dog Crap and Vince game was shaping up to be a long project.  Not only would I have to write out a story, and a map of rooms and locations to explore, I would have to account for all possible responses when the player interacted with every item in the game.  I would also need to set an array of variables to keep track of things like whether or not the player had performed certain actions.  And I would need to take careful notes to keep all of this organized.

But the fact that I could make Dog Crap move and talk gave me hope and a sense of accomplishment.  After all of the times when I tried to make video games as a kid, the technology had finally changed in a way that made it much easier to make my vision a reality.  And since it was possible to use recorded voice files, I could get my friends to record voices for the different characters.  I did not expect to make money off of this game, it was just for fun, but I could share it with others and have them play it too.  This project would take over much of my spare time for the next few months, and that will be a story for another time, but the end result was worth it.

Readers: Tell me in the comments about a long creative project that left you feeling particularly accomplished.

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.

July 4, 1999.  I don’t wear a hat. (#224)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 2 Comments

Until today, I had not worn a baseball cap in almost ten years.

In the fall of 1989, I was in eighth grade, and my favorite team, the Bay City Titans, was playing in the national championship for baseball.  My family had been to three or four Titans games that year, a two-hour road trip in good traffic.  Mrs. Allen, the yearbook advisor and my English teacher that year, was also a Titans fan.  During the baseball championship games, she set up a school spirit day encouraging Titans fans to dress in Titans gear.  I wore a Titans cap, and I hated the way it looked so much that I stopped wearing baseball caps in public entirely.  I stopped wearing hats altogether, for that matter, except for a few times I wore a hat as part of a costume.  I was becoming more open to the idea of wearing a hat again, though. Last year I bought a driver cap for swing dancing, since a lot of the regulars there dressed in old-timey clothes, and after I quit swing dancing, I occasionally started wearing it to class during the winter, because it kept my head warm.

The Titans had a new stadium under construction, right in the middle of the city with a great view of the water and one of the bridges.  That made this season, 1999, the final year in Bay Vista Park on the south edge of the city.  In order to be guaranteed tickets to the last game at Bay Vista, coming up on September 30, fans had to buy season tickets or a multi-game package.  My parents had splurged for the least expensive package, seventeen games sitting near the front of the upper level, in order to be able to see that game.  I had been to two games with my parents so far that year.

In June, a few days before I started teaching summer school, I visited my parents.  I noticed two Titans hats sitting on a table.  I picked one up and saw a logo for a Bay City-based accident lawyer firm, who ran ubiquitous commercials on Titans radio broadcasts, stitched into the side.  “Was this a free giveaway item?” I asked.  I had been to enough sporting events with free giveaway items to know that usually they featured some sort of sponsor’s logo.

“Yes,” Mom replied.  “From the game against San Diego last week, on June 9.  We brought the binoculars that night, and we saw Noah and Cambria.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yes.  You’ve pointed out before where Noah always sits, and I recognized him because I remember he has those skinny little legs.  And there was a girl next to him who looked part Asian.  Isn’t Cambria part Asian?”

“Yeah.  Her mom is Chinese.  I’ll tell them you saw them.”

“Do you want to keep the hat?” Mom asked.  “I’m not going to wear mine.”

I held the hat in my hand.  Other than the sponsor’s logo, it was pretty standard, black with the interlocking letters BC, for Bay City, stitched in orange in the front.  “I always hated the way I looked in a hat,” I told Mom.

“Put it on.  Let’s see.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Oh, come on.  Please?”

“All right,” I said, reluctantly placing the hat on my head.  It was too tight for my big head, so I adjusted it in the back and put it on again.

“It looks good on you!” Mom exclaimed.

“You think everything looks good on me.”

“Well, it does!”

I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror.  I pulled the hat a little bit farther down in the back.  It did not look as bad as the picture I remembered from 1989.  Maybe I would keep the hat and start wearing it.  “It’s not that bad, I guess,” I said to Mom as I came back out from the bathroom.  I kept the hat on for the rest of the night.

When I got back to Jeromeville, I got a push pin and attempted to tear out the stitching of the law firm logo on the side.  I was not aware at the time that there existed seam ripper tools to serve this exact purpose.  It took about two hours of work trying to tear all those threads using a push pin, scissors, and tweezers, although I had Internet Relay Chat open on my computer while I was working.  I alternated back and forth between trying to tear and pry out the stitches and looking for nice girls to talk to on the chat channel.  Eventually, the hat looked good enough to wear without having to be a walking billboard for an injury law firm.


Now, a few weeks later, I was back in Jeromeville, getting ready to go back to church for the second time that day.  It was Sunday, July 4, Independence Day here in the United States.  As had been the case last year, for Independence Day Jeromeville Covenant Church hosted a picnic on the church grounds, followed by a group walk to Community Park about a mile away to watch the public fireworks display.  People with last names starting with A through F were assigned to bring an appetizer; I had bought chips and salsa at the store earlier.  Since church was just a five minute walk from my house, I was planning on walking.

I went to the bathroom that was attached to my bedroom.  As I walked across the bedroom, headed toward the kitchen to grab the chips and salsa, I spotted the Titans hat that I had brought back from my parents’ house.  There were a few rough spots where the law firm logo used to be, but it looked good enough.  I took the hat, walked back to the bathroom mirror, and put it on my head.

Maybe Mom was right.  Maybe I did not look that bad in a hat.

No, I thought to myself, taking the hat off.  I never wore a hat.  People were not used to seeing me with a hat, and it might be weird.  I did not need to dress differently from how I usually did.

Wait a minute, I told myself.  I was second-guessing myself for no good reason.  I needed to step out of my comfort zone and stop being so self-conscious.  I put the hat back on, looked in the mirror and smiled.  I was going to show up to church tonight looking different from usual, wearing a Titans hat.

No, I was not.  I took the hat off and ran a comb through my hair, to erase all evidence that I had been wearing a hat.  I only had it on for a few minutes, so I did not have hat hair yet.  If I wore a Titans hat, people were going to ask me about the Titans, and I did not get to see today’s game.  Noah and Cambria were probably going to be there, and they went to games so often that my mom knew where to look for them with the binoculars, but I did not even see today’s game, so I would look like a poser.  I took a deep breath and tossed the hat on top of my dresser, and took a step toward the hallway.

Then I turned around, walked back to the dresser, and put the hat back on.  I was going to stop overthinking, stop being anxious and self-conscious, and just wear the darn hat.  I walked out of the house and locked the door behind me before I had a chance to talk myself out of wearing the hat a third time.

I walked outside, carrying the bags of chips and salsa, and cut across the parking lot of the apartments across the street, which connected to the parking lot of another apartment complex behind it on Andrews Road.  I turned right on Andrews, passing another apartment complex; the church was just beyond this.  The church grounds had four small buildings: the office, a building of Sunday school classrooms, the main sanctuary, and the youth room.  In the grassy quad between the four buildings, someone had set up folding tables and chairs with disposable tablecloths.  I put my chips and salsa on a table that had other food on it.  A man named Ralph, whom I did not know well but I recognized because he played music and sang at church, was grilling hamburgers and hot dogs.  Dan Keenan, the college pastor, spotted me and waved.

“Hey, Greg,” Dan said.  “What did you bring?”

“Just chips and salsa.”

“Sounds good!  How’s your summer going?”

“I’m teaching summer school.”

“Oh, wow!  Teaching summer school?  Here in Jeromeville?”

“At Jorgensen High, the same school where I got hired for the fall.  It’s next to Tyler Air Force Base, between Nueces and Fairview.”

“Oh, ok.  So you get to learn your way around the school before the fall.”

“Yes.  It’s my first time having my own classroom.”

“What are the students like?”

“A lot of them are exactly the kind of kids you expect to have to take summer school.  I had a fight break out in my classroom a few days in.”

“Really?  Wow.”

“Yeah.  Much of the school, including the math building, doesn’t have air conditioning, and they got into it over where to point the fan.”

“That’s crazy.  No air conditioning, around here?”

“I know.  I didn’t even think to ask at the interview because I assumed that all schools around here would have air conditioning.  But not all the students are difficult.  There are some really nice ones.”

“Will you be doing that all summer?”

“Until July 30.  Then three weeks off before I have to be there for the regular school year.”

“Well, it’s good to see you tonight!  I hope you enjoy the food and the fireworks!”

“Thanks!” I said.  Dan wandered off to say hi to some other people, and I went to find a seat.  So far, no one had said anything about my Titans hat, so I supposed that all of the overthinking in the bathroom was just me being unnecessarily anxious.  Noah and Cambria had arrived as I was talking to Dan, and I saw Noah motion for me to come.

“Come sit with us,” Noah said as I approached.

“Okay,” I replied, sitting next to Noah.

“How’s your summer going?”

“Good.”  I told him about summer school, and the fight breaking out in my classroom.

“Sounds like a trial by fire for a new teacher.”

“Yeah.”

“Nice hat,” Cambria said.

Here we go, I thought.  Of course I would not be able to go the entire night without someone commenting on my hat.  I should have just left it home.  No, everything was fine.  Just because Cambria noticed my hat did not mean I had anything to worry about.  Noah and Cambria were my friends, and they were not about to shun me for not having seen today’s game.  “Thanks,” I replied.  “I went to see Mom and Dad for a few days before summer school started, and they had just been to a game with a free hat giveaway.  Mom said I could have one of the free hats.  She says she saw you two there too.  She brought binoculars, and she saw you across the stadium in your usual seats.”

Cambria and Noah looked confused.  “We didn’t go to a game with a free hat giveaway,” Noah said.

“You didn’t?  June 9 against San Diego?”

“No, we didn’t go to that game.”

“That’s funny.  Apparently two people who looked like you were sitting together in your section,” I said, skipping the awkward and embarrassing part about how Mom supposedly knew that it was Noah.

“Weird,” Cambria said.

The senior pastor announced that it was time to line up for food.  When I got to the front of the line, Ralph saw me and said, “Hi, Greg.  Go Titans.  I like your hat.”

“Yes,” I replied.

I hoped that this conversation would end quickly so that I would not be exposed for not knowing enough about the Titans, but to my dismay, Ralph asked, “Did you see today’s game?  It was disappointing.”

“I didn’t see today’s, no.”

“You didn’t miss much.”

“I’ll be going to one again with my parents later this summer.  Hopefully that one will be better.  Can I get both a hamburger and a hot dog, or do I just have to pick one?”

“I think we have enough for both,” Ralph answered.

“Thanks!”  I put one of each on my plate and moved down the table, adding potato salad and a slice of watermelon to my plate.  I saw more food that I could not fit on my plate; I would have to come back for seconds later.  I walked back to my seat next to Noah and Cambria; Martin Rhodes and Mike Mueller joined us shortly.

“Hey, Greg,” Martin said.  “How’s your summer going?  Just relaxing?  No, wait, you said you’re teaching summer school?”

“Yeah.  It’s been intense, but I’m learning my way around Jorgensen before the regular school year starts.” I told him about the two boys who fought over the fan.

“A fight in your room?” Mike repeated incredulously.  “About where to point the fan?”

“I know!  It was crazy.  I was kind of scared.  And then one kid’s mom showed up and rambled for about fifteen minutes trying to tell me why her kid shouldn’t be kicked out of summer school, after I kept telling her I had no say in the situation.”

“Wow.  And this is your first time being, like, the actual teacher, not a student teacher?”

“Yes.”

“What a way to start your teaching career.”

“I know,” I said.  “Definitely memorable.”

Darius Curtis walked to our table and put his things down across from me.  I waved and said hi.  “Hey,” Darius replied.  He then started talking to Martin and Mike.

I could tell that something was off with Darius tonight.  Darius normally exuded the kind of joy that pastors preach about.  He grew up in California, in a Christian family, but found the wrong crowd in his teens.  After he rededicated his life to Jesus a year and a half ago, he wanted a fresh start to get away from the bad influences in his life.  He moved to Jeromeville, where his sister Krista, one of the first friends I made in Jeromeville, was attending school and was active in this church.  When Krista graduated a year ago and moved back to California, Darius stayed in Jeromeville, having built a community of Christians for himself here.  But something was clearly different with Darius tonight.  Usually he was one of the most friendly, enthusiastic, and outgoing people I knew, but tonight there was none of this usual friendly greeting.  I continued eating, not dwelling for very long on Darius’ change in behavior.

After I had listened to about ten minutes of small talk, occasionally chiming in, I got up and filled my plate with seconds.  When I returned to my seat, Noah asked me, “Do you have anything planned the rest of the summer?”

“Just work and hang out,” I answered.  “And I know my parents and I are going to at least one Titans game in August.  Remember, they got a seventeen-game package in order for us to be at the last game at Bay Vista Stadium on September 30.”

“That game is on a Thursday afternoon.  Won’t you have to work?”

“Yeah.  I’ll have to figure out how to call for a substitute.  And hopefully none of the students will ask why I was gone.  I don’t want to give the impression that skipping school for a baseball game is okay.”

“You’ll be fine,” Noah said.  “Just don’t tell them.”

“Right,” I replied.

“You don’t wear a hat,” Darius remarked from across the table.

“Huh?” I asked.  Great, now someone else was talking about my hat.  Why could I not just wear a hat without everyone having to notice?

“Greg.  You don’t wear a hat.  I’ve never seen you in a hat before.”

“I know.  I wanted to try something different.”

“This whole time I’ve been sitting here, I kept thinking, who’s that new guy sitting with my friends?”

I laughed loudly.  “New guy?  You didn’t recognize me?”

“No!  You’re not a hat guy!”

“Maybe I should be a hat guy.”

“Sure!  Go for it!  I just wasn’t used to seeing you in a hat.”

“I wonder if anyone else won’t recognize me in a hat?” I laughed, and Darius did too.


The walk to the park for fireworks was pleasant, a mile through quiet neighborhoods all together as a big group.  I had not grown up watching Independence Day fireworks; it often got cloudy at night where I grew up, even in July, and it was just not something that we ever did as a family.  Occasionally we would take a trip up north to visit Dad’s relatives in Bidwell, where two public fireworks displays were visible in the distance from the foothills where Dad’s grandmother lived, but the last few years since moving to Jeromeville were the first times I had ever seen fireworks shows up close.  The novelty had not worn off yet; every loud boom and flash of light still gave me a thrill as I remembered how fortunate I was to live in this country, where so many had died to protect our freedoms.

As I got older, I grew to become more and more of a Hat Guy.  By the middle of August, I had worn my Titans hat around town several more times, and I was really starting to like the way I looked in a hat.  One morning during my time off, I went for a bike ride around town and stopped at the campus store to buy a University of Jeromeville Colts hat.  And in the fall, after I started going to Jorgensen High football games to satisfy my work requirement of helping out at a certain number of afterschool activities per year, I bought a Jorgensen Vikings hat, which I wore both to games and around friends who knew that I worked there.

By my mid-30s, I had become a true Hat Guy, someone whose friends would say usually wears a hat.  I was developing a bald spot in the back of my head that I wanted to hide, I liked representing my favorite teams, and I liked the idea of having a thing that people associated with me.  Today I almost always wear a hat in public, unless I am at work or in a Sunday morning church service.  Recently, someone whom I have only known for a couple years saw me without a hat, and she commented that something looked different about me, wondering if I had gotten a haircut.  I have not yet had anyone not recognize me hatless, the way that Darius had not recognized me with a hat, but it could happen someday.

Readers: Are you a Hat Guy (or a Hat Girl, etc.)? What are your thoughts on hats? Let me know 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.

[The Offspring – Pretty Fly For A White Guy]

June 18-23, 1999.  A rough beginning. (#223)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 8 Comments

The moment I set foot inside the library at Jorgensen High School, something felt off, in a tangible way. By the time I set foot inside my classroom an hour or so later, I knew that I had made a grave mistake in accepting this job.

It was a Friday morning, and the area had been undergoing a massive heat wave.  This was not uncommon for the time of year, but what was uncommon was that it was not cooling off at night.  Typically, at night, cooler air would blow in from the ocean and make it at least as far inland as Jeromeville, almost certainly as far as Nueces and Fairview, leading to a nightly reprieve from the hot sunshine that would take over again by the middle of the following morning.  But the weather conditions currently prohibited that cool air from arriving last night.  I left the house at 7:15, and it was already 79 degrees outside, with a projected high of 105.

We had one extra day of work for summer school, today, the Friday before students started.  We would begin today with a short staff meeting, and then have time to set up our classrooms.  This room I would be using for summer school would likely not be my permanent classroom, so hopefully I would not need to do much setup, just put my stuff away and make a plan for the first few days.  Yet still I drove all the way to Jorgensen High with a feeling of foreboding, as if summer school would be a trial by fire.

I walked apprehensively into the library and sat at a table by myself.  The first thing that I noticed was that the air in the room was hot and stuffy.  It had been hot all week, and it was warm last night; maybe the air conditioning had not been turned on yet.  Another teacher sat next to me and introduced herself as Mrs. Johnson, an English teacher here at Jorgensen.

“I’m Greg Dennison,” I said.  “I’ll be teaching math here in the fall.”

“Welcome!” she replied.  “I heard there were three new math teachers?”

“I know of one other one besides me.  I don’t know who the third one is.”

“You’ll want to talk to Derek Raymond later,” she said, pointing at a man in his thirties with a shaved head and a goatee.  “He teaches math here at Jorgensen. I don’t know the other summer school math teacher.”  I saw on the master schedule that there were three math teachers for summer school, and I wondered who the third one was if Mrs. Johnson did not know him.  I would learn later that he was from Golden Valley Middle School, the school that sends its students to Jorgensen.

The principal for summer school was a man named John Holden, definitely not the same principal who had hired me for this job.  He explained procedures for the summer and passed out a master schedule to each of us.  Summer school started at 8:00 and got out at 12:15 each day.  I was in room C-1, teaching two periods of “Algebra 1/Algebra,” each two hours long with a fifteen-minute break in between.  I was unsure what purpose the slash in the class name served.  I was even more confused when I saw my attendance sheets, because I had four of them, not two.  I had twenty-eight students in first period Algebra 1 and twenty-six in second period Algebra 1, but then there was another attendance sheet with two students in first period “Algebra,” without a number, and another one with one student in second period “Algebra.”  I walked up to Mr. Holden after the meeting and asked, “I was told on the phone that I would be teaching Algebra 1 and Algebra 2, but this just says ‘Algebra 1, slash, Algebra,’ and this master schedule says that Mr. Raymond is teaching Algebra 2.”  I also explained my confusion about having four class rosters instead of two.

Mr. Holden looked at my schedule and class rosters and answered, “For first period, you have two classes, these students in Algebra 1, and these in Algebra.  For second period you also have two classes.”

“So this is just Algebra 1?  Not Algebra 2?”

“Algebra 1 and Algebra.  No Algebra 2.”

Already this was not looking good. I was under the impression that part of my schedule would include Algebra 2, a more advanced class as far as high school mathematics is concerned, but apparently whoever called me asking if I wanted to teach summer school was misinformed. And Mr. Holden made it sound like I would be teaching combination classes, with students in the same room taking two different classes. I continued, “What’s the difference between Algebra 1 and Algebra?”

Mr. Holden looked at my schedule and rosters again, looking just as confused as I was.  “You’ll have to ask your department chair,” he told me. “I’m not too familiar with the math curriculum.”

“Who is the department chair for summer school?  Mr. DeBoer isn’t teaching summer school, as far as I know.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Mr. Holden replied. “See if any of the other math teachers for summer school know.  Mr. Raymond can probably help you.”

I nodded and walked toward my classroom, frustrated at the lack of straight answers from Mr. Holden.  He was not the regular principal at Jorgensen, so it was understandable that he might not know everything about the school, but I still expected that he would be more prepared.  I did not understand at that time that people who take summer school positions are not always the same people who hold the same positions during the school year.  Many full-time school employees want summers off, and some teachers want or need extra work in the summer, even if that means teaching at a different school.  I would learn later that Mr. Holden was new to the district, like me, and that during the year he was a vice principal at the middle school.

I found building C and unlocked the door to room C-1 with one hand as I carefully attempted to balance the book and supplies I was carrying in the other hand.  I put everything down on the desk and took a deep breath of the same warm, stuffy air that had never cooled off for the whole hour that we had been in the library.  I flipped the light switch on and looked for something that looked like a thermostat or temperature control, but I found nothing.  I did see a telephone, though, which was good, because I could contact the office or call parents directly from my room. Last year, I did my student teaching at Nueces High, where there were no phones in the classroom, so I had to go to the office if I wanted to call a parent.

I sat at my desk, trying to organize the supplies I had been given, making a list of things I needed.  After about a minute, I heard a knock and the soft creak of the door, which I had left unlocked, slowly opening. Derek Raymond poked his head in the door.

“Hi,” he said.  “You’re Gregory Dennison?  One of the new math teachers for next year?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Derek Raymond. I was in this classroom last year. Well, for four periods at least; I had one class in a different room.” He stepped into the room and said, “It’s nice to meet you.  What are you teaching this summer?”

“I don’t exactly know.  I have so many questions.  First of all, is the air conditioning broken?  It was hot in the library, and it’s hot in here too.”

Derek’s face made the familiar expression one makes when one is about to drop a difficult truth on someone.  “Yeah, Jorgensen doesn’t have air conditioning. Most of the school doesn’t, at least.  The science building does because it’s newer, and there are a couple of classrooms where people put in their own window units without asking the district.  That’s why I asked for C-2 this summer, because it has one of those, and it kind of works.  But you can use that fan in the corner.  Just leave it here at the end of summer school. Most of the rooms have fans.”

“Oh,” I said, downhearted.  I was going to have to spend six of the hottest weeks of the year in a hot, stuffy classroom with no air conditioning, with students who had failed Algebra 1, and the upcoming school year would be uncomfortably warm at the beginning and end of the year as well. I started berating myself in my mind for signing a contract to work here without even having bothered to ask, or notice, whether or not the school had air conditioning. I suppose I took it for granted that air conditioning would be a given in this climate.  I decided not to dwell on the subject, so I asked Derek about the separate rosters for Algebra 1 and “Algebra” without a number.

“Algebra 1 and Algebra?” he repeated, clearly also unfamiliar with this distinction.  He looked at my class rosters, trying to figure it out.  “All the students in just ‘Algebra’ are 8th graders, or they were last year.  So I guess because they’re still classified as middle school students, their middle school transcript just says ‘Algebra’ instead of ‘Algebra 1.’”

“Is it the same class?  Do I teach the same thing to all of them, or do I have to do something different with the 8th graders?”

“Just teach them all the same thing.  8th grade algebra is the same curriculum as high school Algebra 1.”

“Oh, good,” I said.


The first few days went relatively smoothly.  Some of the students seemed uninterested in doing anything productive, but others really were trying their best.  Some just struggled in math to the point that they got behind during the year, while others were in summer school because they just had not made much effort during the year.  Two of the three who had been 8th graders had not failed math during the year; they were taking this class in order to skip Algebra 1 as freshmen and go straight to geometry. Those two both seemed like excellent students.

The illusion that summer school would go smoothly was shattered on Wednesday of the first week.

I was at the board, about half an hour into period 2, demonstrating how to solve linear equations with variables on both sides.  I gave the students time to work on a few problems on their own.   I had the windows open at the start of the day, when it was cooler outside, but now, at 10:45, it was warming up outside. I walked around while the students were working, and as I passed the windows, I closed them.

“Man, why you doing that?” asked a student named Chris.

“Because when I got here this morning, it was cooler outside than it was inside, but now it’s getting hot outside.”

“But it’s hot in here!”

“It’s just as hot outside too.  This is the best we can do,” I explained.  I continued walking around the classroom, checking students’ work. A girl named Kelly had forgotten to combine like terms first, so I pointed at the expression “2x + 3x” on her paper, and asked, “What’s 2x plus 3x?”

“5x?” Kelly replied.  “Oh, yeah, you have to do that first.”

“There you go.”  I continued walking around when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.  Chris was out of his seat, dragging the fan over next to his desk.  “Chris, please put the fan back where you found it,” I politely requested.

“I can’t feel it!” Chris shouted.  “It’s hot in here!”

“The fan is oscillating, so everyone can feel it.”

“Oscill– man, what’s that mean?”

“See how it’s moving back and forth.  That way the air hits as many people as possible.”

“Well, more of it needs to be hitting me!”

“Chris, please put the fan back where you found it,” I repeated.  I looked at Chris, who just stared back and did nothing.  Another student, DeMario, who was sitting near where I had originally placed the fan, got up and moved it back the way I had it before.  “Thank you, DeMario,” I said.

I continued walking around, looking at students’ work to see how they were doing, when about ten seconds later I heard movement again.  I looked up to see Chris walking toward DeMario’s desk.  Chris gave DeMario a hard shove and began pulling the fan back toward him.  DeMario jumped up, and Chris feigned a punch before pulling his fist back at the last minute.  DeMario raised his hands to block, shouting, “You wanna fight me?”

“Yeah, I wanna fight you,” Chris replied, throwing another fake punch.  The two of them hopped around on their feet, staring each other down, for about another ten seconds.

“Come on!” DeMario shouted.  “Fight me!”  Most of the rest of the class was watching now, with some students cheering on one or the other of the two combatants.  Chris and DeMario continued their small hops, fists raised at each other.  Chris took a swing at DeMario, who ducked out of the way and shoved Chris in response.  I ran to the phone and called the office.

“Office,” Kathy, the secretary, replied.

“This is Mr. Dennison in C-1,” I said.  “A fight broke out in my room.”

“Like, an actual fistfight?”

“Yes!”

“We’ll send someone down as soon as we can.”

About a minute later, while Chris and DeMario were still pushing and shoving but no actual blows had landed, Mr. Holden arrived, along with a large man who looked no older than thirty and, I would have guessed, probably played football when he was in high school.  I would learn later that this was James, the campus security guard.  “Come on, boys,” James said loudly.  Chris and DeMario ignored him, so James and Mr. Holden walked across the room, attempting to break up the fight.  Both boys stopped once they saw James approaching, following him and Mr. Holden to the office and loudly protesting.  I let them leave and then turned to the class, saying, “Let’s get back to work.”  I resumed walking around the room, trying to check if students were correctly solving equations, but I was having a hard time focusing, still feeling a bit shaken by all that had happened.  After a couple minutes of taking deep breaths, I did the best I could to finish class as I had originally planned.

About three minutes after class was dismissed, Mr. Holden walked into the room.  “So both boys went home.  Normally for things like this, we would be kicking both boys out of summer school.  But then DeMario’s mom came to the office, insisting that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, that the other boy must have been the instigator.”

“That’s pretty much how I remember it, to be honest,” I said. “Chris was the instigator.”

“Can you come down to the office for a minute and make a statement, so I can have all the facts on record?”

“Okay.”  I followed Mr. Holden to the administration building, and into his office, where a middle-aged woman was sitting with DeMario.

“You’re DeMario’s teacher?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

“My boy needs this class.  He needs to graduate.  You can’t kick him out.”

“Mr. Dennison is going to tell us exactly what he saw,” Mr. Holden explained, interrupting DeMario’s mother.

I started from the beginning of the story, how I had the windows open at the start of the day, but I closed them when it started to get hot outside.  I continued through every detail, including Chris’ unauthorized attempt to move the fan and DeMario moving it back where I had it initially.  I attempted to recall as accurately as I could that Chris had walked up to DeMario and pushed him out of his desk, and that Chris had thrown the first fake punch and the first real swing.

“Thank you,” Mr. Holden replied, taking notes on a note pad the whole time.  “I need to review all the facts, and we’ll call you later today and let you know whether or not DeMario will be staying in summer school.”

“You can’t kick DeMario out,” his mother protested.  “He needs to graduate.”

“Mr. Dennison, you’re free to go.”

“Thank you,” I said.  Since I was already in the administration building, I checked my mailbox, which was empty except for my class rosters. Back in 1999, class rosters were printed weekly on bubble sheets. Every day, I would fill in bubbles with a No. 2 pencil for students who were absent or tardy. Someone from the office would pick up the papers from everyone’s classrooms every period, scan them, and return them to the teachers’ boxes for the next day.

I walked to the courtyard, preparing to turn back toward my classroom, when a voice behind me shouted, “Hey!”  I turned and saw DeMario’s mother, still standing in the courtyard.  She walked up to me and repeated, “You can’t kick DeMario out of summer school.  He needs this class to graduate.”

“There isn’t much I can do right now,” I explained.  “I told Mr. Holden what I saw, and it’s ultimately his decision.

“He needs this class to graduate.  He needs to graduate to get a good job.  He isn’t too good at school, especially math.  He needs a good job, because you never know what’s gonna happen in this economy.  He wasn’t fighting.  He’s a good boy.  That other boy started everything.  DeMario told me he was just minding his own business, and then that other boy pushed him.  DeMario is a good boy.  He’d never do anything like that.”

I nodded and said, “I’m sure he is.  Like I said, Mr. Holden is going to review the facts and decide what to do.  I can’t do anything more for you.”

“My boy, he’s a good boy.  He doesn’t get in fights.  But he needs to graduate.  He has two more years left here, and he needs this math class to graduate.  He’s not a troublemaker.  You can’t kick him out of summer school.  He’s a good boy.  I raised him right, made sure he did his homework every night.  His daddy was never around, but I raised him right.  He wasn’t fighting.  It was that other boy.  DeMario needs this class to graduate.  I’m not gonna raise a deadbeat like his daddy.  DeMario can go far in the world, but he needs your class to graduate.  He’s more like me, not like his daddy.  He’s a good boy.  He doesn’t fight at school.  He knows how to behave at school.  He’s just a little behind in math, but he’s a good boy.  He does his work.  He tries his best.   He needs to graduate so he can get a good job and be ready for the world.  It’s gonna be the year 2000, and no one knows what’s gonna happen in the year 2000.  Maybe the end of the world.  My boy needs to be ready.  No one knows what’s coming in the year 2000. DeMario needs to stay in your class.  You can’t kick him out.  He wasn’t the one who started the fight.  He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  My boy is a good boy.  He isn’t like that.”  I started tuning out as DeMario’s mother continued to ramble on and on and on and on, repeating the same talking points.

After about fifteen minutes of standing there doing my best to listen to her, finally I said, “I need to go check in at the office.  I’ll tell them your concerns.”

“DeMario is a good boy,” she said.  “He wasn’t fighting.  It was that other boy.”

“I know,” I replied as I walked into the office and approached Kathy’s desk.

“Yes?” Kathy asked.

“The mom I just met with, she’s out there in the courtyard.  She’s been repeating the same things to me for about fifteen minutes.  I told her it’s not my decision whether he stays in summer school or not.  I don’t know what to do; I have things to do in the classroom before I leave.”

“Go ahead and go back to your room.  Take the back door.  We’ll deal with the mom.”

“Thank you so much,” I replied.  I walked back to my room by another route, watching over my shoulder to make sure that DeMario’s mother was not following me.  She was not.


Apparently Mr. Holden sided with DeMario’s mother, that he had not done anything to warrant getting kicked out of summer school, because DeMario was back in class the next morning.  He did not make trouble the rest of the year, although he just barely did enough work to get credit with a D-plus in the class.  Chris never did return to my class, and I was thankful for that, because the way he had acted kind of scared me.

This week had certainly been a wake-up call.  My comfortable bubble of honors students and Christians was starting to deflate during my student teaching year last year, and after this incident, it was completely shattered.  DeMario, and probably Chris, and many of these other students had very different backgrounds from mine.  I had no idea what it would be like to grow up like DeMario, in a house with no father and a mother who communicated the way his mother did.

I do not know whatever happened to DeMario or Chris. I did not have either of them as students in the fall. Teaching students like DeMario and Chris to think mathematically would be a challenge.  Getting them to be quiet in class would itself be a challenge as well, especially in this heat with no air conditioning.  I really wanted the best for these students, but at this point, I was not sure how I was going to get through the summer, let alone the rest of the year.  This is what I had signed up for, though, and I would just have to do the best I can, hopefully with help from the office and other teachers who had been doing this longer.

Readers: Welcome to Year 6! This is the final season of Don’t Let The Days Go By. I did not take the customary break at the end of year 5, because the story timeline is currently near the same time of year as real life, and I think it would be fun to continue telling the story at the same time of year.

Have you ever had a physical confrontation break out in front of you? 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.

[Everclear – Father Of Mine]

(June 2026. Year 5 recap.)

~ Greg Dennison ~ Leave a comment

If this is your first time here on Don’t Let The Days Go By, welcome. DLTDGB is a continuing story set in 1999 (currently), about a university student making his way in life.  This post is a recap of the highlights of year 5.  In case you need it, click here for the recaps of year 1, year 2, year 3, and year 4.

If you are new to DLTDGB and want the complete story, start by clicking here for Episode 1, and then click Next at the end of each episode.

This site has a lot of work that needs to be done.  I want to add a complete episode list, other than just the auto-generated one that appears on the right margin or at the bottom depending on your browser.  I also have not updated the Dramatis Personae in some time.  I’ll work on that soon.

First off, I apologize for having made a minor continuity error.  In episode 203, I introduced a character named Jonathan, a youth group leader at church who has a strong opinion on why he likes to wear a certain brand of clothing.  In episode 221, I introduced a character named Jake, a youth group leader at church who has the same strong opinion on why he likes to wear the same certain brand of clothing.  Obviously, these two characters are based on the same actual acquaintance from my past, and I had forgotten at the writing of episode 221 that I had already introduced a character based on him.  This story is getting so long that I can no longer remember every detail.  I went back at some point and changed Jonathan’s name in episode 203 to Jake (a one-syllable name works best for that character’s brief mention in episode 222).  But I did leave his rant about that brand of clothing in both episodes, to emphasize that he really is annoying enough to say something like that more than once.

Speaking of this story getting so long: year 6 will be the final season of DLTDGB.  Specifically, I will keep the continuing story going until January 1, 2000 in the story timeline, followed by a few final episodes to tie up loose ends.  After that, I will probably start over with episode 1 and post reruns, making occasional corrections where I have discovered errors and inconsistencies in the story.  I might also occasionally post original episodes where I retell stories from other characters’ points of view.

Here are the highlights of what happened in year 5, along with the most important episodes to read for understanding the story, if you don’t have time to read them all:

I had just finished my bachelor’s degree at the end of year 4.  I started my first summer as a college graduate by chaperoning an overnight trip with the youth group at church.

June 22-23, 1998.  The Mystery Trip. (#181)

I had many late nights playing Catan, as well as a board game I wrote based on my Dog Crap and Vince stories, with the other youth leaders.  I got invited to two weddings that summer, the first time I attended weddings as a friend and not a relative.  Also, swing dancing was a huge fad back in 1998, and a lot of my friends got really into swing dancing.  I thought swing dancing was dumb at first, but I tried it and discovered it was not so bad.

June 27-28, 1998. Scott and Amelia’s wedding, and trying something I thought I’d never do. (#182)

While at swing dancing, I started to make friends.  One in particular I was kind of close with.

July 7-12, 1998.  An answer to one of the questions in the debate between science and religion, and more dancing. (#184)

I made some new Internet friends that summer, including one who ended up not to be quite exactly the person I thought she was.  Taylor and Noah went to a lot of Bay City Titans baseball games, and I joined them on a weekend trip to see three games in a row, staying at Noah’s parents house that weekend.

July 24-26, 1998.  The baseball weekend, and a silly claim to fame. (#187)

The summer ended with a trip to my parents’ house, where I got to see my brother’s friends Boz and Cody, and we made another silly movie.  For school that year, I was still attending the University of Jeromeville, but now I was in the teacher certification program.  I did student teaching in math classes at Nueces High School, about twenty miles from my house, while attending education classes at UJ in the afternoons.

August 24-25, 1998.  My first days at my student teaching assignment. (#190)

I lived in the same house where I had lived the previous year, on Acacia Drive about a mile north of campus.  My roommate Sean was still there too; he was my year but had not finished his undergraduate degree yet.  The other two roommates moved out.  Brody from church took one of the spots.   Last year, Sean and I shared the large bedroom; Sean moved into his own room that year, with the spot in the large bedroom taken by a sophomore named Jed.  I knew Jed from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.

September 17-20, 1998.  An eccentric new housemate. (#193)

Classes started in the fall.  I had an unrequited crush on a younger girl at church, and that did not end well.

Mid-October 1998.  I knew what I had to do. (#195)

Much of my social life at JCF was still intact, since I was friends with a lot of younger students.  Swing dancing quickly became less fun as the fad died down, and most of my friends stopped going once classes started again.  Swing dancing was on the same night of the week as the X-Files watch parties at the De Anza house, so I stopped going dancing as soon as new episodes of X-Files started back up.

November 1, 1998. Having an off night at swing dancing. (#197)

My roommate Jed suffered a minor but gruesome injury, and I got to be the one to take him to the doctor.  That led to him making an interesting fashion choice out of necessity which became a personal trademark of sorts.

Late November, 1998.  My eccentric roommate just became more eccentric. (#200)

I was gradually given more responsibilities in my student teaching assignment, which led to some great bonding experiences with the students.  Unfortunately, the whole experience also showed me a different side of the world of education, outside of my bubble of honors classes and a relatively prestigious university.

January 6, 1999. Low expectations, and hiding in plain sight. (#203)

Taylor and Brent actually followed through on their vision from last year about having a group where Christians can talk about male-female relationship issues, both platonic and romantic.  It was an informative discussion, but the world of dating and relationships still felt overwhelming and confusing to me.

January 22-23, 1999.  The BWF Seminar. (#205)

Things continued to go well at my student teaching assignment, until I made a crucial mistake.  My master teacher did not exactly handle the incident with a great deal of kindness, but one of the other teachers at the school did.

February 12, 1999.  My master teacher made me cry. (#208)

I continued attending JCF, where I developed strong feelings for Brianna, a really pretty, friendly sophomore.  We saw each other around campus a lot that year, and as odd at this sounds, she was the reason I gave blood for the first time.  Just to be clear, she was not hurt and I was not giving blood for her specifically.

March 11, 1999.  Not a typical Thursday. (#211)

The goal of the student teaching program was to prepare us to work in schools, so a significant part of winter and spring quarter was spent preparing us for job applications and interviews.  I found all of this terrifying, but I did the best I could.

Late March – Early April, 1999.  Preparing for job interviews. (#212)

I held out for a job close enough to commute to from Jeromeville, since I already had a church and friends in town, but I knew that I could not hold out forever.  I had an interview at Jorgensen High School, about a half hour drive from Jeromeville, and while I was waiting to hear from them I got an offer from a school farther away.  I asked that other school if I could have a few more days to decide.  On the day that school wanted to hear from me, I was offered the job at Jorgensen, which I accepted.  It also worked out that the person who was going to take my spot at the Acacia Drive house backed out, so I had a spot to stay at the same house, in my same bedroom, for the following year.

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

After sixteen years, there was finally a new Star Wars movie in 1999, telling the story of Darth Vader as a young boy, and the Jedi first encountering his remarkable potential in the Force, while a mysterious political incident seems to have darker, more nefarious intentions behind it.  I watched the movie at midnight on opening night with a group of sixty people – yes, sixty – while getting up early the next morning for student teaching.

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

Since there was no social media in 1999, and my friends were all growing up and gradually moving away, I started writing monthly form emails to keep in touch with everyone.  Brianna, who had invited me to her birthday party a couple weeks earlier, left a really sweet reply to my first email.  I finally got brave and told her how I felt about her, and the feeling was not mutual.

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

I got to meet a slightly famous singer toward the end of that year.  We had an epic water fight at youth group, in which I realized that one of the leaders whom I didn’t particularly care for might not be so bad after all.  At the end of the year, we had a small graduation ceremony for the end of the student teaching program.  I was now completely done with classes at the University of Jeromeville, after five years.

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

Here is the complete Year 5 playlist:

I hope you have a wonderful summer!  I will not be taking the customary break after the end of a school year in the story, because I want to keep year 6 lined up with the real-life time of year as much as possible. Let me know how you’re doing, and share this site with a friend who might like it!