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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 9 Comments

I got in my car, which was parked next to my house, and drove off.  The radio came on, with a commercial attacking state attorney general David E. Larkin.  Larkin was running for governor, and the election was two days away.  I changed the channel; I was tired of political advertisements this time of year, and I was planning on voting for Larkin so I did not want to hear what his opponent had to say about him.  Many of the things he was being attacked for were the exact reasons I was voting for him. My candidate of choice, who could not run again because of term limits, won four years ago, but Larkin was expected to lose this election.

I parked outside of the University Bar & Grill and walked inside, by myself.  My roommate Jed sometimes rode with me, but he had told me this morning that he would not be home when I left, and he would get there later.  I looked around the room and saw some vaguely familiar faces, people I had seen here before, but no one I actually knew well enough to talk to. Matthew was about to begin teaching the beginner lesson, as he always did.  I walked out to the floor with the others, where Matthew was directing us to assemble into two concentric circles, those dancing the lead part on the inside and those following on the outside.  Traditionally men led and women followed, although I had seen a few people switch gender roles occasionally.  I stood on the inside, and a girl I had never seen at the U-Bar stood across from me.  This girl was very attractive, slim with reddish-brown hair pulled back into a pony tail, and blue eyes.   She wore a light blue dress.  “Hi,” I said.

“Hi!” the girl replied, smiling.  “I’m Brooke.”

“I’m Greg.  Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” Brooke replied.  “I’ve never been here before. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“That’s okay,” I replied.  “That’s why you’re taking the lesson before the dance starts, right?”

“Exactly!  So how long have you been dancing?”

“About four months.  I’m not that good.”

“I’m sure you’re better than me.”

“Give yourself more credit,” I said.  “Just have fun with it.”

“That’s a good way to look at it.”

We stopped talking as Matthew demonstrated the basic step.  I knew the basic step pretty well, but if Brooke was here for the first time, I wanted to make sure she saw what he was doing.  I practiced the basic step with Brooke a few times.  “I think you got it,” I said.

“Was that good?”

“Yes.  Looked good to me.”

“Thank you!”

Matthew called for us to switch partners.  “It was nice meeting you,” I said to Brooke.

“You too!” she replied as she moved on to the next partner.

Matthew had us practice the basic step again with our new partners; my next partner had not yet figured out the basic step the way Brooke had.  Next, he taught the outside and inside turns, as he always did, as we tried each one with a few new partners.  The second half of the lesson changed from week to week, and this week he was teaching the basic step of a different dance, the Charleston.  The last thing we learned was how to switch between East Coast Swing and the Charleston, something I had never learned before but wanted to, since I did not know enough Charleston to dance it for an entire song.  At this point, the circle of partners had gone completely around, and I got Brooke as my partner again.

“Hello again,” I said.

“Hi!” she replied.

“How are you doing so far?”

“I think I get it!  I just need to practice.”

Brooke and I worked through the basic step of the Charleston, and then transitioned into the basic step of East Coast Swing, just as Matthew had shown us.  “You’re doing really well,” I said.

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks!  So do you go to UJ?”

“Yes.  I graduated last year, and now I’m in the student teaching program.”

“You’re gonna be a teacher!  That’s exciting!  What grade level?”

“High school math.”

“Nice!  I always liked my math teachers, but it wasn’t my best subject.”

“I get that a lot.”

“I’m a freshman, majoring in psych for now but I might change that.”

“Do you know what you want to do?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she said.

We tried the steps again, then Matthew called for us to switch partners. I asked Brooke, “Save me a dance later?”

“Yeah!” she replied.

After practicing Charleston, and switching from East Coast Swing to Charleston and back, with two more partners, the beginner lesson ended.  Brooke walked off the dance floor with her friends, and I would have done the same except that none of my usual group of friends was there tonight.

I stood to the side of the dance floor watching people dance the first song.  When the second song started, I looked around for someone to dance with.  Brooke was dancing with a guy from her group of friends that she came with, and I did not know any of the other girls there that night.  A girl I did not know stood next to me, not dancing, so I walked up to her and asked, “Would you like to dance?”

“No, thank you,” she said, with no other explanation or excuse offered.

I slowly walked around the room, in the general direction of the bar, but I did not attempt to ask anyone else to dance.  None of the people I felt safe asking to dance were here.  No Courtney, Cambria, or Erica.  No Bethany Bradshaw. No Michelle Parker; she was only sixteen, but I knew her family from church, and her older brother Brody was one of mine and Jed’s other roommates, so I was comfortable dancing with her, and she understood that I was not a creepy older man.  I would have even danced with Sasha if she were here, despite the awkward situation I created a few weeks ago when I confessed my unrequited feelings for her.  After having just been rejected asking someone I did not know, I was not sure that I felt comfortable asking another stranger.  I looked back to the bar and saw the bartender say, “Here you go,” pushing a reddish-brown drink with ice and a straw forward to a spot where no one was sitting.  No one claimed this drink.  After several seconds, the bartender was still looking at me.  I asked, “Is that drink mine?”

“Yeah,” she replied.  “I saw you coming over here, I remember you always order a Roy Rogers, so I just figured I’d get it for you.”

“Thank you,” I said, smiling.  I took a sip of my drink, feeling pretty important that the bartender knew my usual drink.

I continued walking around the room, walking past a girl who was sitting alone, not dancing.  “Would you like to dance?” I asked as I walked up to her.

“No,” she replied, shaking her head in the negative.  Just a few seconds ago, I felt important, but apparently I was not that important after all.

I looked back toward the entrance and saw Candace Walker arriving.  I knew her from when I used to be in University Chorus, and I had seen her here relatively regularly since school started back up again.  “Hey,” I said to Candace.

“Hey, Greg,” she answered.  “What’s up?”

“Not much.”  I heard a new song start to play, so I asked her, “Would you like to dance?”

“Sure!” she said.  “Just give me a minute to put my stuff down.”

When Candace returned, I led her to the dance floor and started doing the basic step and turns.  “Is Jed coming tonight?” she asked me.  I had introduced Candace to Jed in September, the first night of dancing after he moved back up here for the school year, and the two of them seemed to hit it off well.  They had talked and danced together for most of the rest of that night, as well as most of the other times I had seen both of them at the U-Bar on the same night.

“Yeah,” I replied.  “He said he’d be here later.”

By the time we finished our dance, as I walked over to where I left my drink, I could see Jed walking in the door.  “There he is,” I said.  The two of us walked to Jed, saying hello.

“Hey,” Jed said to both of us, then turned to Candace and asked, “Are you sure you’re supposed to be here?  You have a midterm tomorrow you should be studying for.”

“I know,” she said.  “I’ve been studying all day, and I think I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.  I needed a break.”

“Well, you came to the right place for a break!  You want to dance?”

“Sure.”  Candace walked onto the dance floor with Jed, leaving me alone.

I looked around.  Brooke, the girl I met during the beginner lesson, was standing not far from me, talking to one of her friends that she came with.  I remembered that Brooke promised me a dance, so I walked up to her and asked, “Would you like to dance?”

“Not right now,” she said.

Undeterred, I turned next to her friend and asked the same thing.  “No, thank you,” her friend said.

I sat at a table facing the dance floor, the same table where Candace and Jed had placed their things, and watched everyone dance, slowly sipping my Roy Rogers.  About three songs later, I got up to use the bathroom and get another drink, and when I returned, Jed and Candace had sat back down, deep in conversation.  I did not feel right interrupting and asking Candace for another dance.

No one else that I knew was there, and no one else that I knew showed up later that night except for Ben Lawton.  I had nothing against Ben, but I was not looking for guys to dance with.  After about an hour and a half, at the halfway point of the night, Matthew gathered everyone into a circle for the birthday dance.  I was bored and frustrated, since I had only danced two times so far that night, once with Candace and once with a stranger who was actually kind enough to say yes.

For the birthday dance, everyone with a birthday that week would stand in the middle of the circle, and people would jump in and dance with one of the birthday people until someone else cut in.  Usually each person’s turn lasted for about thirty seconds.  Today there were two guys and one girl in the circle.  I stepped in about a minute after the song started, slowly walking toward the birthday girl.  I took her and started doing the basic step, then turned her to the outside.  “Happy birthday!” I said.

“Thanks,” she replied, smiling.

I was about to try what I learned in the beginner lesson today, switching into the Charleston basic step, when another guy came up and stole her from me.  I walked back to the circle on the outside, feeling defeated.  I hardly got to dance with her at all.  That other guy cut in way too early.  I sat down for a while.  Maybe I would have more luck the second half of the night.

As the regular dancing started again, I sat on the sidelines slowly sipping on my third Roy Rogers of the night, wondering if drinking something alcoholic would make me feel better but not ready yet to give up my personal opposition to drinking alcohol. Ben Lawton saw me and came over to say hi.

“Hey, Ben,” I replied.

“How are you?”

“I’m not having a good night, honestly.  No one is dancing with me.”

“Just go up and ask.”

“I have been.  I’ve mostly gotten turned down.”

“That happens sometimes,” Ben said.  “Don’t let it get to you.”  But it was in fact getting to me.  Not only was I feeling like some kind of loser, but I was bored, just sitting there watching people dance.  I took a sip of my Roy Rogers, and Ben asked, “What are you drinking?”

“Roy Rogers,” I said.

“Do you not drink alcohol?” he asked.  “You’re old enough, aren’t you?  I always thought you were in my year.”

“I turned twenty-two in August,” I explained.  “I just don’t want to drink.  I don’t like the idea of being out of control of myself.  It doesn’t seem Christ-like to me.  And I didn’t grow up around drinking.  My dad drank a lot when he was younger, but he’s been sober since I was in elementary school.”

“Makes sense.”

Ben and I continued making small talk about my student teaching and his classes; he was my year in school, but he had not graduated yet.  When the next song began, he said, “I’m gonna go dance.  It was good talking to you.  I hope you enjoy the rest of the night.  Go ask someone to dance.”

“I’ll try.”

I got up and noticed Brooke standing by herself.  She promised that she would save a dance for me.  Maybe she was ready for that now.  I walked up to her and asked, “May I have that dance you promised now?”

“No,” she replied, sounding a bit uncomfortable and irritated.  She walked away from me.

I sat back down, confused.  She seemed so friendly when we were paired in the beginner lesson.  What changed?  It almost felt like she had suddenly found out something about me that made her want to avoid me.  But, if so, what did she find out?  And who told her?  The only people I knew here were Jed, Candace, and Ben, and none of them would have any reason to make Brooke not want to have anything to do with me.

I sat there bored and not dancing for another half hour after I talked to Ben.  By now, it was 10:15, and I had pretty much given up trying to find someone to dance with.  I was ready to go home.  Jed had driven separately, so I did not have to stay until closing and give him a ride home.  I was not having fun, and I was under no obligation to stay.  I walked around to make sure I said good night to the few people there whom I knew.  Jed and Candace were sitting at a table, talking; I told both of them that I was feeling unusually tired, and wanted to call it a night early, I said the same thing to Ben a few minutes later.

As I walked toward the door, I saw Brooke and her friends standing at the side of the dance floor.  Brooke made eye contact with me, and I stopped for a second, holding on to a shred of hope that she was about to realize that she had not yet fulfilled her promise to save me a dance.  Then I looked away and continued walking.  It was not worth getting turned down again.  I started to walk away.

Just as I turned away from Brooke and her friends, I heard a voice behind me shout, “Yeah!  Turn around and go home!  You’re weird!”  I turned back to look at them, and they were all giggling.  I started walking away from them again.

As I passed the bar, the bartender who had made my Roy Rogers asked me, “Another one?”

“No thanks,” I said.  “I’m gonna call it a night early.”

“Sleep well!  I’ll see you next week!”

I nodded, then walked to the car and sat there for about five minutes, thinking, before I turned the car on.  I do not know if it was Brooke or one of her friends who called me weird.  I do not even know for sure that their comment was directed at me, but it certainly appeared to be. None of this made sense to me. Brooke was inexplicably two-faced, acting friendly and nice and then suddenly turning on me.

One person was nice to me that night: the bartender who made my drink.  I genuinely appreciated her gesture.  The fact that she knew my regular drink without me even having to say it really made me feel like I belonged there, like Sunday swing dancing at the U-Bar was a part of my life and I had a place among the people there.

But nothing else tonight gave me that feeling.  My usual friends that I danced with were not there, and they had been showing up less and less often since school started.  And now I was finding it impossible to dance with new people. I realized on the way home that night that I was no longer having fun swing dancing.  New episodes of The X-Files were scheduled to begin the following week, at the same time as swing dancing, and when I found out that Eddie Baker and John Harvey and their roommates at the De Anza house were going to start their X-Files watch parties again, I chose that over swing dancing.  The nice bartender had said that she would see me next week, but she did not see me the following week.  In fact, I never saw her again.

This was not, however, my last time swing dancing ever, nor was it even my last time swing dancing at the U-Bar.  I went back under somewhat different circumstances several months later, but I eventually quit again.  That is a story for another time.

I came back to the world of swing dancing in 2007.  I was in my early thirties, living about thirty miles from Jeromeville across the Drawbridge in Laguna Ciervo, and I followed some friends from the church I went to at the time to a weekly swing dance in midtown Capital City called, appropriately enough, Midtown Swing.  As I went through the beginner lesson and started dancing with my friends, all the muscle memories from eight and nine years earlier came flooding back to me.  I even saw Ben Lawton there; he was still around and still swing dancing after all those years.

I was also caught off guard that night in 2007, because Lacey Kilpatrick was there.  That was only the second time I had seen her since moving away from Jeromeville, and things still felt a little awkward, plus it was completely unexpected because I never knew her as a swing dancer.  And that encounter was even more strange in hindsight, since I became a regular at Midtown Swing for about a decade after that, and I never saw Lacey there again.  Wait… I haven’t mentioned Lacey in this story yet.  Hold that thought.  That is also a story for another time.

Readers: Have you ever quit a regular hobby? What made you quit? Tell me about it in the comments.

I wrote on the other blog some behind-the-scenes information about this episode: click here.

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October 22-23, 1998.  A party at the De Anza house, and a familiar face from the past. (#196)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 8 Comments

I rode my bike south on Andrews Road toward campus.  I had an hour before my class started, but I would rather sit around on campus than at home, and I also felt like having a couple slices of the really good pizza that they made at the student-run Coffee House for lunch.  I enjoyed feeling the warmth of the sun on me as I pedaled the familiar route, especially knowing that its time was limited.  Late October in Jeromeville was very pleasant weather, with a high temperature of around 75 degrees today, but if this year was anything like the previous four years I had spent in Jeromeville, the weather would suddenly get cold and possibly rainy a few weeks from now.

I parked my bike at the Quad, locked it, picked up a copy of today’s Daily Colt campus newspaper and read the front page as I stood in line for pizza.  When I sat at a table with my food a few minutes later, I saw Eddie Baker walking toward me.  “Hey, Greg,” Eddie said.  “How’s it going?”

“Good,” I replied.  “You?”

“I’m good.  Meeting with some of the Bible study leaders later, but I got here early.”

Eddie graduated in June, as did I.  This year he was working part time on staff with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, a chapter of a national organization called Intervarsity.  Dave McAllen and his wife Janet were the head staff of JCF; I assumed that this was the Dave that he would be meeting.

He continued, “Shouldn’t you be in Nueces student teaching now?”

“I’m just there for the first three periods, until 10:58.  Then I come back home.  I have a class on campus today at 1.”

“I see.  How’s teaching going?”

“Not bad.  One of the students got suspended this week.”

“Wow.  What did he do?”

“I’m not sure exactly, but I heard the master teacher say it was drug related.”

“Dang.  How old are these kids again?”

“High school.  He’s a junior.  But taking geometry, which is normally for sophomores, so already he isn’t exactly the best student.”

“Yeah.  Do your students like you?”

“Some do, some don’t, I guess.”

“That makes sense.  I was thinking earlier, are you all serious, or do you ever joke around with the students?  I had a teacher in high school who joked around a lot.  He was really funny.”

“I’m still figuring out what is and isn’t ok to do.  But I joke around a little.  Like last week was Homecoming, and for some reason they did something where the nominees for Homecoming Court had to do silly things.  One day they weren’t allowed to talk, and if a teacher called on them, they had to act things out and answer without talking.  And two of the nominees were in my class, so I called on them as often as I could.  At least until they got really tired of it.

“That’s great,” Eddie replied, laughing.  “Hey, I wanted to tell you, Friday after JCF people are hanging out at our house.  You’re invited.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Thanks!  Yeah, I’ll be there!  That sounds like fun!”


I was excited the following night on my way to JCF.  Of course, I should be excited about JCF every week, because I got to worship God with over a hundred other University of Jeromeville students, and I got to learn about the Bible.  But I had to admit that this week felt more exciting than usual because of Eddie’s party afterward.  I had made a lot of great friends in the three years since I first got involved with JCF, but I also often felt slightly on the outside of the cliques that formed within the group.  Knowing in advance about something social happening afterward gave me one less thing to worry about this week.

This year, JCF met in the large lecture hall at 2101 Harding Hall.  I walked in and looked around for a seat.  I arrived early enough that there were plenty of empty seats.  As I looked around, something registered in my mind as being out of place.  It took me a few seconds to process what I saw, after which I did a double take and looked again, because the whole scene was confusing the more I thought about it.

Haley Channing stood across the room from me, talking to Tabitha Sasaki.  Haley was accompanied by a middle-aged man whom I was pretty sure was her father.  I had met Mr. Channing once before, a couple years ago when Haley’s parents came to visit for the weekend of the Spring Picnic.  This was shortly after I met Haley, before her mother passed.  Also with them was a skinny sandy-haired freshman boy named Brennan, whom I had seen around JCF this year but never actually spoken to.

Why was Haley here?  She graduated.  She moved back home, hundreds of miles away.  Apparently she was up here visiting, which made sense because she still knew people in Jeromeville.  Tabitha, for example. But why was she talking to Brennan?  He and Haley did not go to JCF at the same time; Brennan was a freshman, and Haley graduated last spring before Brennan started here.  Did they know each other from somewhere else, or did Haley just meet Brennan tonight?  And why was Haley’s father here?  He had probably met some of Haley’s Jeromeville friends over the years, but would he really travel that far with Haley on what was likely at least an overnight trip just to see his daughter’s friends?  Haley had an older brother who graduated two years ahead of us, and I know he still lived in Jeromeville last year.  Maybe Haley’s brother still lived in Jeromeville, and Mr. Channing came up to see him too.  Maybe he just wanted to get away for a weekend.  It had been two years since Mrs. Channing passed, and grief hits people in unexpected ways sometime.

I sat down and decided not to go talk to Haley right away.  Maybe later, but not right now.  I did not want to interrupt whatever Haley and the people around her were talking about.   I had been called out for that before; once at JCF when her mother had recently passed, she was talking to her friends, I asked what was wrong, and I was told later that it was weird how I kept trying to talk to her.  It would be better to wait for the right time.  After all, everything was going to feel weird with Haley around, and it was none of my business why her father was here or how she knew Brennan.

Not necessarily, I told myself.  I had no reason to feel weird around Haley.  Sure, she did not like me back, she did not feel the same way about me as I felt about her, but we had coexisted peacefully at JCF for a year and a half after that conversation, until she moved away last summer.  I had no reason to believe things would be any different today than how they were during that time of peacefully coexisting.

At the end of the night, after the worship and message ended, I wandered in the general direction of where Haley and her father were, saying hi to a few others along the way.  While I did not want to interrupt or try too hard, I did not want to be completely aloof either.  Haley’s pretty blue eyes looked up at me as I approached, and she smiled.  “Greg!” she exclaimed.  “How are you?”

“Pretty good.  It’s good to see you again.”

“You’ve met my dad right?”

“Yes,” I said.  Mr. Channing gestured to shake my hand, and I shook back.

Haley then gestured toward Brennan and asked, “Have you met my brother, Brennan?”

Brennan was Haley’s younger brother!  That explained so much!  Haley’s father was up here visiting his son, newly away at school, and Haley came along for the ride since she still had friends in Jeromeville from her time here.  “I’ve seen him around, but I didn’t know he was your brother.”

“Brennan, this is Greg.  He was in my year, and he’s still in Jeromeville, student teaching now.  Right, Greg?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Nice to meet you,” Brennan said, shaking my hand.

“How’s teaching going?” Haley asked.  “Are you actually teaching the class, or just helping out?  How does it work?”

“It’s going pretty well.  I’m mostly just helping out now, but the two master teachers I’m working with are going to gradually let me start teaching lessons soon.  By January I’ll be doing most of the teaching myself.”

“What classes?  And which school?  I forget.”

“Geometry and Basic Math B, at Nueces High.”

“So you drive from Jeromeville to Nueces every day?”

“Yeah.  I’m there for the first three periods, then I come back here and have education classes at UJ in the afternoon.”

“That’s great!”

I looked at Brennan again, then back to Haley, and said, “So all three siblings in your family ended up going to Jeromeville?”

“Yeah!  Ever since Brennan and I visited Christian when he was a freshman, we both really liked it!”

“It’s worked out well for our family,” Mr. Channing added.  “We had dinner with Christian before this, and we’ll see him again tomorrow.”

“That’s good.”

“Are you going to the party at the De Anza house tonight?” Haley asked.

“Yeah!  Will I see you there?”

“Yes.  We’re gonna take Dad back to the hotel in a bit, then head over there.”

“Sounds good.”


I lingered around Harding Hall to talk to as many people as I could after JCF.  I was one of the last to leave, so when I finally arrived at Eddie’s house on De Anza Drive in north Jeromeville, the party was already packed.  I saw many of the JCF regulars there, along with a significant number of people I did not know.  I assumed that many of the people I did not know were freshman or new transfer students who had just begun attending JCF this quarter.  I had not met all of the new students.

The De Anza house had a large living room with couches and a television in front.  A stairway to the right of the front door led upstairs to four bedrooms, and a long dining and family room extended across the back of the house.  A dining room table and another couch were in that room, along with a foosball table.  A few minutes after I walked in, I heard shouting coming from the back.  I headed in the direction of the shouting and saw Brent Wang and Todd Chevallier on one side of the foosball table and Colin Bowman and Andrew Bryant on the other side. Colin and Andrew each had their pants down around their ankles, playing in T-shirts and boxer shorts.  “What is going on?” I asked.

Jason Costello, one of the housemates who lived at the house, pointed to the score counters and explained, “House rule.  If you go down seven to nothing, you have to drop your pants.”

“Okay,” I said, shaking my head.  Kind of silly, and inappropriate, but typical of things that male university students might come up with.

I wandered around for a few minutes, saying hi to people, asking what they were doing, and answering their inevitable questions about my student teaching.  About half an hour after I got there, Eddie asked me if I wanted to play Mafia.  I excitedly said yes and walked toward the couch at the far end of the back room where the Mafia game was forming.  I had played this game a few times both with friends from JCF and with the youth group at church.  In the game, led by a narrator who was not playing, three players would secretly be chosen as the Mafia, the doctor, and the detective.  Some people played with two Mafia, especially in large groups, but for this game we only had one. In each round, with no one looking or knowing, the Mafia would secretly choose a person to assassinate. Then the doctor would secretly choose a person to revive, attempting to guess who had been assassinated. Finally, the detective would secretly choose one person, and the narrator would silently communicate to the detective whether or not that person was Mafia.  The living players would then discuss and choose to accuse someone of being Mafia. The accused player would be executed, eliminated from the game, and if this player was not in fact Mafia, the process would repeat until the killer had been correctly identified, or until the killer had killed everyone.

John Harvey, one of the other housemates here who, like Eddie, was on staff part time with JCF, was the narrator.  He passed out face down slips of paper with the roles randomly written on them. I discreetly looked at my paper; I had no special role.

John stood in the middle of the players, who formed a rough circle.  Seth Huang, Ellie Jo Raymond, and Autumn Davies were squeezed onto the couch with me.  Todd Chevallier, no longer playing foosball, sat in a recliner.  Eddie sat on one of three chairs that he had brought over from the dining room table, with the other two occupied by girls I did not know, probably freshmen.  One of them still had her name tag from JCF on; it said “Stacie.”  Haley and Brennan sat on the floor, along with Ajeet Tripathi, Leah Eckert, Tim Walton, and Brianna Johns.

I closed my eyes with everyone else as John asked each of the people in special roles to make their selections, one at a time.  When I opened my eyes with the others, John said, “Greg!  You have been assassinated.  And the doctor was unable to revive you.”

That was a quick game for me, I thought.  I had no further role in this game, but I could watch the proceedings.  And I was curious to know who had picked me to go out first.  The other players threw out various speculative theories of who was responsible, with none of them drawing much of a reaction until Ellie Jo pointed at Autumn and said, “Autumn has been awfully quiet through all of this.”

“What? Me?” Autumn exclaimed.

“You’re right,” Eddie said.  “She has.  I think it’s Autumn.”

“I would never hurt Greg!  Greg is my friend, and I’m, well, shaken up at his death.”  Autumn gestured as if she were holding back tears, but it was easy to see that she was not actually crying, since she was also holding back laughter.  “These accusations against me are the last thing I need in this time of tragedy!” she exclaimed.

“It’s totally Autumn,” Ajeet concurred.

“Are you ready to vote?” John asked.  Autumn continued trying to defend herself and clear her name, but everyone else wanted to vote.  “Three, two, one, go!” John said.  As John said “go,” Autumn pointed at Ellie Jo, and everyone else pointed at Autumn.

John said, “Autumn is not the Mafia.  Put your heads down.”  Everyone groaned, with some making expressions of surprise.  Since Autumn and I were out of the game, we were no longer required to put our heads down.  When John called for the mafia to awaken and choose the next victim, Stacie opened her eyes and smiled.  I was not expecting Stacie to be the killer, although I knew nothing about how she operated in games like this since I did not know her.  She pointed at Eddie.  Tim was the doctor, and he pointed at Ellie Jo.  Ajeet was the detective; he pointed at Brianna, and John shook his head no.

“Everyone, wake up,” John announced.  “Eddie, you were murdered in the night.”

“Me?” Eddie said incredulously.  “What did I do?”

John shrugged.  “I don’t know, but you can’t talk.  You’re dead.”

Everyone looked around, trying to figure out who could be responsible.  Todd spoke up after a few seconds.  “Okay, hear me out.  I have a theory.  Let’s look at this.  Who did the Mafia take out first?  Greg.  And then Eddie.  These were not random victims.  Greg and Eddie graduated.  They have degrees.  They’re going to be powerful and influential in this game.  Who else would target the people with degrees?  Someone who also has a degree and knows these two well.  And the only other person here with a degree is Haley.”

“No!” Haley replied, laughing.  “It wasn’t me!  These two were in my year!  We’ve been through so much together!  I’m not going to murder them!”

“That sounds like something that you would say if you were secretly in the Mafia,” Stacie suggested.

“Yeah!  She’s right!”  Ajeet shouted.  Others shouted concurring sentiments.

“I think we’re ready to vote,” Todd told John.  John counted down, and most of the surviving players pointed at Haley.

“Haley is not Mafia,” John said.  “Put your heads down.”

The game continued for several more rounds.  Ajeet was the next to be targeted, and since he was the detective, that conveniently eliminated the possibility of the detective learning who the killer was, and using that to sway the discussion.  No one ever suspected Stacie, and she ended up winning, successfully eliminating everyone without ever getting voted out herself.  Todd, the last player eliminated, said, “Really?  It was Stacie?”

“It was,” Stacie replied.  “And I fooled all of you.”

“So taking out Greg and Eddie first?  That was just coincidence?” Todd asked.

“Yeah.  I didn’t know they graduated.  Just a lucky guess.”

“Well played,” I told Stacie.  “Good game.”

“Thanks,” she replied.


The drive home from the De Anza house only took a few minutes, since my house was only about a mile away.  I did not leave until almost one in the morning; by then, the party had wound down, and most of the guests had left.  As I drove home in the cold, clear night, my thoughts were on Haley.  I thought about what could have been, what might have happened had things gone differently two years ago.  Then, as I pulled up to the red light to make a left turn onto Andrews Road, I made myself remember that this was not meant to be, and that it was pointless to think about it now.  I tried making myself think about other things, but my mind was back on Haley by the time I got home and went to bed.

I never saw her again after that night, and as is often the case when I have just seen someone for the last time, I did not realize at the time that it was the last time I would see her.  Back in 1998, people had to make much more effort to stay connected than they do now.  She never specifically mentioned wanting to stay in contact with me, and I did not feel comfortable asking her for her contact information, given our history.  It might make me look desperate trying too hard to stay in touch with someone who rejected me.  At some point in the 2010s, I saw her on Facebook where it suggests people you may know, and I recognized her even though she had a different last name.  I did not try to contact her.  If she were ever to initiate contact with me, I would accept, since she was my friend in the past.  But I still do not feel right reaching out to her, for the same reasons as before.

I did not understand it then, but growing apart from people is just a natural part of life, and there is not much I can do about it.  Not everyone was meant to be a part of my life forever, nor was I meant to be part of everyone else’s lives forever.  Haley would not be part of my life going forward, not romantically, not platonically, and at some point, I came to make peace with that.  I would make new friends.  Some of them would become part of my life forever, and others would pass out of my life a few years later just as Haley did.

Readers: Have you ever had a former love interest or significant other show up somewhere unexpected? How did that go? Tell me about it in the comments.

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

The weather in Jeromeville was always beautiful in October.  Jeromeville got very hot in the summer, but by October the weather had cooled to a happy medium, still warm enough to be outside without the intense heat.  My routine this October was a little different from that of previous years, but I was settling into what would be my routine for this year.  Drive 19 miles down Highway 100 to Nueces for student teaching.  Come home.  Eat lunch.  Go to class in the afternoon.  I was still volunteering as a youth group leader at Jeromeville Covenant Church on Wednesdays, I was still going to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship’s large group meetings on Fridays, and I was in a Bible study with JCF on Tuesdays, led by my friends Courtney Kohl and Colin Bowman.

The baseball postseason was happening, but I was not following it.  The Bay City Titans were tied for the last playoff spot and lost the tiebreaker game.  Two players on other teams that year, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, had broken the previous record for home runs in a season; McGwire’s 70 had become the new record, which would only stand for three years.  While that had attracted many fans back to the sport that had lost fans in 1994 after a labor strike had ended the season early, many baseball purists would later look negatively on this era.  Many of the home run hitters of that time were using performance-enhancing drugs, or suspected of doing so, since baseball had more lenient rules about some substances that were banned in other sports.

I was also going swing dancing every Sunday at the University Bar & Grill.  Swing dancing was the big fad of 1998.  Many of my church friends had gotten into swing dancing over the last year, and while I resisted for a long time, having no interest in dancing, I finally gave it a try a few months ago and really enjoyed it.  My roommate Jed Wallace was really into swing dancing, and he went to the U-Bar on Sundays too, but many of my friends who were regulars there when I first started going had been there less often since school started again.

One Sunday morning that month, I sat in church trying to pay attention.  The worship team played a few songs at the beginning of the service.  Then the pastor got up and spoke something which I am sure was very nice, about some meaningful passage from the Bible.  But no matter how hard I tried, I could not pay attention, because I knew what I had to do today once the service was done, and that was all I could think about.

Of course, the world would not end if I did not go through with it.  This requirement for today was entirely self-imposed.  But I felt like I was going crazy, and whatever the outcome, good or bad, I knew that I would feel better once it was done.

It started a week ago.  Actually, it started months ago, but all of these thoughts intensified a week ago.  There was a welcome back potluck after church that week, to coincide with the start of fall classes.  Someone from the church had constructed a temporary dance floor out of plywood on the lawn between the church entrance and the parking lot.  After the potluck and dance party, the dance floor would be disassembled and used to build a new stage platform at the end of the church sanctuary building, where the worship team plays and the pastor preaches, about eight inches off the ground.  I dressed for church that day the same way I normally dressed for swing dancing: a white t-shirt, clip-on suspenders, black slacks, and a gray flat cap, the one I bought a while back when I went shopping with Bethany Bradshaw.  Bethany was not here this morning; she went to a different church.

Several non-dancers at church commented on my attire.  I said thank you and explained that it was for swing dancing.

After the service, after everyone had had time to eat, I heard swing music start playing.  I did not know the name of this song, but I had heard it before at the U-Bar.  I could not see who was controlling the music.  Maybe someone had just put on a Best of Swing Dancing CD of some sort.  The technology existed now to make custom CDs that were playable in ordinary CD players, so maybe someone made a custom mix CD of swing music.  I danced a few times with friends whom I knew were dancers.

About six or seven songs in, I saw Sasha Travis standing on the side of the dance floor, looking like she wanted to dance.  She wore a dark blue dress that came down to her knees.  Her hair was long and straight and brown, the same way she always wore it.  I walked up to her and asked, “Would you like to dance?”

“Sure!” she replied, smiling.  I led her to the dance floor, and we began dancing to “Zoot Suit Riot” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.  I was starting to get annoyed with this song; it was overplayed, it was always the first thing that people on the outside of the swing dancing revival movement associated with modern swing dancing, and Jed went on this whole rant recently about how much he hated this song and how it was not real swing music.  But I was willing to put all of that aside if it meant getting to dance with Sasha.

Step, step, rock-step.  I had been doing this for a few months now, and the basic step had almost become automatic to me.  I started doing some turns, lifting my arm and turning Sasha to the time of the music.  “I really like that hat,” Sasha said, smiling.

“Thanks,” I replied.  “It’s the same one I’ve been wearing for at least a month now.”

“I know, but I like it.”

A little bit later, I led Sasha into an inside turn, where she moved across the front of my body.  As she did, she playfully grabbed my hat and put it on her own head.  “That looks good on you,” I said, hoping that she would not notice that I was starting to get sweaty, and that the hat had absorbed the sweat of the last month and a half at the U-Bar.

“Thanks!” Sasha said, smiling.  I continued dancing with her for the rest of the song.  At the end of the song, I dipped her into my arm.  She tried to reach up to hold the hat on, but I knocked it off, grabbed it before it hit the ground, and put it back on my own head.

“Thank you for the dance,” I said.

“Thank you!” Sasha answered.  The two of us walked back to the side of the dance floor and talked with some of our mutual friends until people asked them to dance.


Ever since the moment Sasha stole my hat, a week ago now, I could not get her off of my mind.  It felt like I was thinking about her all the time, in the car on the way to my student teaching assignment, while I was helping those students learn math, while I sat in class.  

I took three deep breaths in my seat after church ended, and I walked outside.  I saw Sasha walk outside that door just a few seconds ago; hopefully she was not in a hurry to get home.  She stood talking to Courtney and Erica, her roommates.  I walked up, ready to ask Sasha if she had a minute to talk, but Courtney saw me first and said, “Hey, Greg!  How are you?”

“Pretty good,” I said.

“How was your weekend?”

“Nothing special.  Just catching up with studying and homework.  Probably going swing dancing again tonight at the U-Bar.”

“That’s fun!” she said.  “I won’t be there tonight.”

After Courtney turned to talk to someone else, I knew I had to force myself to say what I needed to say, or else I would chicken out again.  I walked up to Sasha and said,  “Sasha?  Can I tell you something?”

Sasha turned toward me, clearly not expecting this.  “Okay,” she said.  I stepped about ten feet away, out of earshot of anyone, and motioned for her to follow me.

“I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you these last several months,” I explained.  “I like dancing with you, and I enjoy hanging out.  I was wondering… I really like you, and I was wondering if you were interested at all in, you know, being more than just friends.”

Sasha gave me a strange look.  I was not sure what to make of it, but whatever would be the typical reaction of someone getting this news and being interested in return, this was not it.  “Greg, I’m sorry,” she said.  “You’re a really nice guy, I’ve enjoyed hanging out too, but I just don’t see you that way.”

I nodded slowly for a few seconds.  “That’s ok,” I replied.  “You don’t need to apologize.  I just feel like I’m at the point where I need to say something.  I needed to know.”

“I understand,” she said.  After a few seconds of silence, she added, “Don’t feel bad.”

“I won’t,” I replied.  “Will you be at the U-Bar tonight for dancing?” I asked.

“I won’t be there tonight.  But have fun!”

“I will,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic.


When Jed and Brody moved into this house, Brody suggested that we do a communal meal once a week.  The rest of us approved of this idea.  Tonight it was Sean’s turn to make dinner, and he made some dish with chicken and rice.  I did not talk much at dinner.  I did not feel like talking.  Brody asked me at one point how my weekend went, and I just said fine without giving any details.  Brody mentioned that he would not be having dinner with us next week, because it was his birthday and his family was taking us to dinner.  Jed told us all about how he had just bought the album Americana Deluxe by a swing band called Big Bad Voodoo Daddy on CD.  After dinner, as we were cleaning up, Jed put his CD on; I recognized some songs from swing dancing at the U-Bar.

Later that night, I was in the large bedroom I shared with Jed, sitting at my desk reading for one of my classes.  Jed walked in and asked, “Hey, is everything okay?  You seemed kind of distant at dinner.”

“I just have stuff on my mind,” I explained.

“I don’t want to pry, but I have a question for you.”

“What is it?”

“After church, I saw you talking to Sasha,” he said.  My heart sank.  How much did Jed know?  Was he going to make a big deal and make fun of me, put me down for my choice of women?  Was he going to tell me it was inappropriate for me to feel that way, since she was only eighteen years old and I was twenty-two?  He continued, “I was talking to her a few minutes later, and she was acting really weird, not her usual self.  And you’re not your usual self tonight.  What were you two talking about?  Is this all connected?”

I sat in my chair, looking up at Jed, then looking off into the distance, trying to figure out how much to say.  I did not want anyone knowing about any of this.  I did not know that Jed would be talking to Sasha immediately after I did.  But he was not exactly being intrusive; he did not talk to her after church with the intention of finding out what I had told her.  He was simply being observant.

“This is just between us… promise?” I said.

“Yes.”

“I told her I liked her, and she didn’t like me back.”

Jed nodded.  “I wondered if it was something like that,” he said.

“Hmm,” I replied, still not looking Jed in the eye.  I wondered if my actions had been so obvious that everyone at church knew by now.  But then again, maybe not; had I been in his position, observing all that he had about me and Sasha today, the same thought probably would have crossed my mind.

“Sorry about that,” Jed said.  “Is it going to be weird seeing her at church and being friends with her roommates and everything?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.  I really did not.

“Have you been out with her a lot?”

“Not like one-on-one.  Just hanging out in the same circles, and dancing, and stuff like that.”

“She probably wasn’t expecting you to say that, then.”

“I guess.  I’m just so bad at this.”

“Everyone goes through this.  Don’t let it get you down.”

“I’m trying not to.  But it’s hard.”


Two days later, I was driving east on Coventry Boulevard, still thinking about Sasha.  I had managed to go all day Monday and Tuesday without seeing Sasha or any of her roommates on campus, and no one else had mentioned Sasha to me since I talked to Jed Sunday night.  But my destination tonight was Bible study, and Courtney, one of the leaders, was one of Sasha’s roommates.  If Sasha had been acting strangely after our conversation on Sunday, strangely enough to give Jed an outline of what was happening, then I assumed that her roommates were likely to know at least part of the story as well.  If she told them what she told Jed, though, I did not know if she had identified me as the guy who she rejected.

Things like this were why it had always been so hard for me to communicate my feelings toward women.  Back in the spring of 1990, as I was finishing middle school, my friend Paul Dickinson asked me if I liked a girl named Rachelle Benedetti, because he noticed I was often looking at her or trying to talk to her or something like that.  I admitted to Paul that I liked Rachelle, within a week it seemed like the whole school knew, and I was mortified.  I did not want everyone I knew to be in my business like this.

For an hour and a half, for most of Bible study, I thought that maybe I had gotten away with it.  Everything felt normal.  The only time I talked about things other than the passage of Scripture that we studied was when I got there and Colin asked me how student teaching was going.  But I was wrong.  After the study, I was usually in the habit of not rushing home, catching up with my friends first for a while.  Courtney came up to me a few minutes after we finished, and asked, “How are you doing?  I heard about what happened Sunday.”

“Yeah,” I said, not sure where to take this conversation.  Courtney seemed sympathetic, at least.  “I’m okay, I guess.”

“There’s someone out there for you,” Courtney said.  “Just keep praying about it.”

“I guess,” I said, trying to act appreciative of Courtney’s concern instead of rolling my eyes at the dumb cliché.

“They always say love finds you when you stop looking for it.”

Great, I thought.  An even worse cliché.  I heard that all the time, but how would love find me if I stop looking for it?  I was not really actively looking, I was just living my life, and no one had found me yet.  Of course love would find someone like Courtney when she was not looking for it; she was a pretty blonde girl, bubbly and friendly.  I was not so lucky.  I just said, “If you say so.”

“Everyone goes through this.  It’s just part of life.  You might need time, but someday you’ll wake up and feel like it’s time to get over it,” she said.  “Like when Brody and I broke up, I needed a few days to just sit with my feelings, but now everything is okay, and we’re still friends.”

More mildly angry thoughts bubbled in my mind.  I had no idea that Courtney and Brody broke up.  I was always the last to know anything.  These people were in the closest thing I had to an inner circle of friends.  Brody even lived at my house.  And yet I had no idea what was going on in their lives.  Apparently I was not in either of their inner circles, or anyone’s for that matter.  “That’s good,” I finally said, dejectedly.  “I’m not upset with her.  She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Who didn’t do anything wrong?” Colin asked, walking over to see what we were talking about.

“It’s nothing,” Courtney replied.  “Just something Greg said to someone that was taken the wrong way.”

“Yeah,” I said.  Courtney seemed to be deflecting the conversation away from the topic of Sasha now that Colin was within earshot, and for this I was thankful.  I did not want too many people to know about this.  But just in case, I added, “I don’t really want to keep talking about it, if that’s okay.”

“That’s fine.”


I was still thinking about this when I drove home later that night.  I was twenty-two and had never come close to having a girlfriend.  Things were starting to feel hopeless.  I had no idea what I was doing, and it seemed to come so much more easily to everyone else than it did for me.  No girls liked me, and nothing I could do would change that.

Part of the problem was that I did not know how to communicate my feelings to a girl.  When I was interested in someone, I always felt like I had to keep it a closely guarded secret, so she had no idea.  Why was I like this?  Probably because I grew up constantly being teased for everything, so I was just used to doing whatever I could not to give metaphorical ammunition to bullies, even though I really had not experienced much traditional bullying as a university student.  Also, my mother and her extended family were always in everyone’s business, and I did not want my romantic interests to become public knowledge that everyone started talking about.

But, I realized, on those few occasions where people did know about my romantic interests, none of what I feared happened.  Sure, back in middle school, Paul told a lot of people that I liked Rachelle, but they did not make fun of me for it.  He was just trying to help.  At the end of that year, when we took the honor roll trip to the amusement park at Mount Lorenzo Beach, he let me sit next to Rachelle when we rode the Giant Wave.  Jed and Courtney were not making fun of me about Sasha either; they just did not want to see me get hurt.

That was pretty much it.  The topic of Sasha rejecting me never really came up again among any of my friends.  It stayed on my mind for a long time, though.  The next time I had to change my password, a few months later, my new password combined the numbers on Sasha’s license plate with the name of a villain character from a TV show.  I used that password for over a decade, long after she was no longer a daily thought.  And almost two years after she rejected me, when I was ready to buy my first car with my own money, I decided to make a decision on a car that day instead of sleeping on it, because the next day was Sasha’s birthday, and I did not want my car to have the same birthday as a girl who rejected me.

When Sasha first met the guy she ended up marrying, who was also one of my church friends at the time, it felt a little awkward being around them.  But Courtney was right about one thing: after a while, things would start to feel okay again.

Readers: Do/did you share with your friends who you are/were interested in romantically? Tell me why or why not 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.

October 2, 1998.  Fall quarter this year felt very different from usual. (#194)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

Decades before the Wordle game took the Internet by storm, the College Ready Mathematics curriculum had the Silent Number Game.  The two games worked similarly; in the Silent Number Game, students had to guess a two- or three-digit number, and the teacher would silently mark how many of the digits were correct and how many of the correct digits were in the correct position.  Both games were inspired by the board game Mastermind, which in turn was inspired by various pencil-and-paper folk games.  The CRM geometry textbook instructed teachers to play a few games with students over the course of a week, and some of the homework problems in the book asked questions based on this game.  By explaining what someone knows or does not know after a few turns, and why, students use thought processes useful for making mathematical proofs, a concept that is introduced soon after the Silent Number Game.

Mrs. Tracy, my master teacher in the geometry class, let me lead the class in a few rounds of the Silent Number Game.  The students were getting better at the game over the few days that we had been playing.  Mrs. Tracy walked to the front to take over and finish teaching the lesson; I took a deep breath, still feeling tense after what had happened earlier that day in the Basic Math B class.  At least no one in the geometry class cussed me out today.

After Mrs. Tracy finished, I walked around the room helping students with their work.  I happened to glance at Andy Rawlings’ paper as he wrote an answer to this problem:

Tara is playing the Silent Number Game.
923   1 correct, 1 in the right position
964   1 correct, 1 in the right position
945   2 correct, 0 in the right position

Tara thinks that the number must start with 9.  Explain how you know Tara is wrong, and find the correct number.

Andy had written, “Tara is dumb.”  I pointed at his answer and said, “Really?  That’s what you’re going with?”

“Come on, Mr. Dennison,” Andy replied.  “It even says she’s wrong.”

“Yes, but explain how you know.  Without calling her names.”

“Fine. Let me think about it.”  Andy erased his work as I moved on to the student behind him, Kayla Welch.  She had left the problem blank.  “Mr. Dennison?” Kayla asked.  “I don’t get this one.  I thought the number started with 9 too.”

“Let’s talk this out,” I replied.  “Why do you think it starts with 9?”

“Because the first two guesses started with 9, and she had one number correct and it was in the right position.  And the last one had two correct digits.”

“How many of the digits in 945 are in the right position?”

Kayla reread the problem.  “None of them,” she said, trailing off as she contemplated this information.  “But 9 has to be in the first position.”

“Let’s think about this.  If there is a 9 in the number, it has to be in the first position, because 923 had one digit correct and it was in the correct position.  But 9 can’t be in the first position because of what you said about 945.  What does that mean?”

Kayla thought about this, then said, “There isn’t a 9 in the number?”

“Right.  So which two digits of 945 are correct?”

“The 4 and the 5.”

“And, look at the other guesses.  Which digit is 4?”

“The last one.  Because 964 had one number in the right position.”

“So which of 923 is the correct digit?”

“Not the 9.  It’s the 2, because we already know the last digit is 4.  So the number is 524.”

“That’s what I got!  Good job!”

After the bell rang, Mrs. Tracy asked to talk to me for a minute.  “You did a good job of making Kayla think through that problem.”

“Thank you,” I said.  I sighed and added, “I don’t feel like I did a good job in Mrs. Matthews’ class this morning.  A girl cussed me out for telling her to get back to work.”

“That happens sometimes.  What did you do?”

“I looked over at Mrs. Matthews.  She gave me a Room Two form, and I filled it out,” I explained.  Everyone at Nueces High School knew that Room Two meant the room where students get sent out of class for misbehaving, and I learned this quickly during the week of teacher meetings at the start of the year.  “And I called her mom and left a message.”

“Then you did the right thing.  Don’t let it get to you.”

“I know.”

“Not every student is going to like you.”

“I know.  I’m learning that.”

“You did great today.  Don’t let it get to you.  Enjoy your weekend, and I’ll see you Monday.”

“Thanks.”


After I got home from student teaching, I made a sandwich, as I always did.  When I finished eating, I got on my bike and headed to campus.  Yesterday was the first day of classes for the University of Jeromeville’s fall quarter.  Classes started on a Thursday, as fall quarter always did, but fall quarter this year felt very different from usual.  For one thing, one of my classes for the student teaching program had already been meeting for a month.  Student teaching itself was an eight-unit class officially called Education 306A: Teaching Mathematics in Secondary Schools, consisting not only of the time I spent at Nueces High every morning but also an hour-long seminar every day.  The UJ academic year started later than that of public high schools in the area, but Ed 306A followed the public school schedules.  I had two other education classes this quarter that met on the university’s academic schedule.  One of them started yesterday, and the other would start on Monday.  Neither of these classes met on Fridays, so all I had today was the seminar.

The classroom was about half full when I arrived, but of course “half full” was a relative term, so this meant that eight students and Dr. Van Zandt were in the room when I arrived.  This class was exclusively for students in the mathematics teacher certification program.  There were seventeen of us in the program this year, and Dr. Van Zandt, who had been the professor for this program since 1990, said that it was the largest class of future math teachers he had ever had.

Today, Dr. Van Zandt asked if any of us had any experiences to share regarding difficult students.  I raised my hand.

“Yes, Greg?” Dr. Van Zandt said.

“Just today, I told two girls to get back to work because they were talking.  One of them looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I don’t effing have to do what you say.’  But she said the actual word.”

“What a little brat,” Ryan Gaines, another student teacher working at Nueces High, said.  Some of the others chuckled.

“And how did you handle that?” Dr. Van Zandt asked.

“Mrs. Matthews gave me the form to send the girl to Room Two.  That’s where misbehaving students get sent.  She took it and stormed off.”

“Then I think you did what you needed to.  Did you do any kind of follow-up after that?”

“I called her mom and left a message.  Mrs. Matthews said that was required.”

“She’s right.  According to State Ed Code, if you send a student out of class for the period, you have to contact the parents.  That’s called a class suspension.  And it’s always a good idea to make contact with the parents as soon as possible after any kind of discipline.  Thanks for sharing, Greg.”

I listened to others share stories of their own misbehaving students.  Although I handled it well this time, that kind of defiant behavior from students made me angry.  And although a conversation with the girl’s mother may be productive in the long run, I secretly hoped that she would not call back.  Talking to parents terrified me, mostly because I was barely twenty-two years old and did not expect to be taken seriously by parents of high school students who were probably twice my age.


For the last three years, the highlight of my Fridays had been the large group meeting of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  Again, I knew that this year would be different.  I was no longer an undergraduate, and for some reason I had yet to understand, there were very few graduate students attending JCF.  I only knew of one at the time, a guy named Andrew Bryant who was now in his second year of getting his Ph.D. in chemistry.  Of course, this might just be a consequence of the fact that most graduate programs are a lot of work, leaving students little time to be involved in campus activities outside of their program.  I did not see a need for my student teaching to take me away from my involvement at JCF, or from activities at church.  Being in the student teaching program, I was classified as a graduate student, but I was pretty sure that actual graduate students working toward master’s, doctoral, or professional degrees had a much greater workload than I did.

The most visibly obvious difference at JCF was the location.  Since I started attending JCF early in my second year, the large group meetings had been in Evans Hall, but this year they moved to Harding Hall.  The buildings were not far apart; Harding was on the corner of Davis Drive and Colt Avenue, diagonally across from Stone Hall, and Evans was just on the other side of Stone.  But psychologically, I always associated Evans with JCF.  I had never been inside Harding, so this would feel like unfamiliar territory.

Harding Hall, like many of the buildings on this part of campus, was an older building, dating to the 1940s.  The University of Jeromeville had a world-class School of Veterinary Medicine, one of the largest in the United States.  Harding Hall was the original location of the vet school, but many of the laboratories and the teaching hospital moved in the 1970s to a new location on the edge of campus, between Andrews Road and Highway 117.  The vet school still had offices and classrooms in Harding Hall, and the entrance of the building reflected its history; above the doors stood relief sculptures of various animals.

My housemate Jed was with me when we arrived.  “Have you had a class in here before?” I asked.

“No,” Jed replied.

“Me either.  I’m not sure exactly where the room is.”

I opened the door and walked into the lobby.  A large stairway led up, with hallways on either side..  A handwritten sign on poster board said “Jeromeville Christian Fellowship” with an arrow pointing up the stairs.  As I walked up the stairs, the soft din of voices that I heard upstairs gradually became louder.

“What’s up, G,” Todd Chevallier said from the table where he sat, handing out the weekly newsletter and writing name tags.  He wrote “G” on mine and stuck it on my shirt before I could object, then he handed Jed his name tag.

“‘G,’” I said.  “I guess I’ll be ‘G’ tonight.”

“It’s not a bad nickname,” Jed said.

“There are only two people who are allowed to call me ‘G,’” I explained

“Oh yeah?  Who?” Todd asked.

“When I was in high school, my friend Jessica always used to shorten everyone’s name.  Melissa became ‘Mel,’ Renee became ‘Nee,’ Kevin became ‘Kev.’  She called herself ‘Jess.’  I already went by a one-syllable name, so I became ‘G.’  And then later our other friend, Melissa, also started calling me ‘G’ sometimes, but not as often as Jessica.”

“That’s funny.”

“And now I guess I’ll have to tell people that story,” I said, patting my ‘G’ name tag with my hand.

The large lecture hall, room 2101 Harding Hall, held around three hundred students, larger than JCF’s previous location in 170 Evans.  The seats were steeply inclined, such that the entrance to the room, in the back of the seating area, was on the second floor, but the front of the room was level with the first floor.  The room was not very full yet.  Jed and I sat on the left aisle about halfway toward the front.  I skimmed through the newsletter, then watched the room gradually fill up.

I had been part of this group for long enough that I knew many of these people.  But I could not help but notice the absence of those people who had graduated last year and left Jeromeville.  Ramon Quintero, Sarah Winters, Krista Curtis, Xander Mackey, Raphael Stevens, Scott and Amelia Madison, Joe Fox, Alyssa Kramer, Evan Lundgren, and Haley Channing were all gone, among others.  There were some students from my year who had graduated but stayed in Jeromeville, as well as some from my year who had not finished their degrees; I said hi to one of those, Mike Knepper, as he took a seat down the row from Jed and me.

Brent Wang was a senior this year; he played keyboard and was this year’s worship team leader.  He led the group in a song.  Eddie Baker, who graduated my year and was now on staff with JCF, gave the announcements, followed by Brent and his band playing a few more songs.  After this, Todd and Brent, along with senior Ajeet Tripathi, a junior named Ellie Jo Raymond who was on the worship team with Brent, and sophomores Brianna Johns and Chelsea Robbins performed a skit based on the TV show “Friends,” which most people I knew were obsessed with but I could never get into.  The skit was amusing, but many of the references to the TV show went over my head.  I made a mental note that the first large group two years ago, with the Scooby-Doo skit, was funnier.  Of course, I was a little biased, since I was part of that skit.

The rest of the night was structured similarly to every other JCF meeting I had been to, except that Janet McAllen’s message was fairly light and general about following Jesus without including any heavy theological concepts.  This made sense, because new students who are just checking out all the groups on campus often came to the first meeting of the year, and we did not want to get too intense for students who are just checking out Christianity for the first time.

After the message, the band played one more song, and then the group dispersed.  Jed walked over to talk to a group of students from his year; I followed him.

“Hey, Greg,” Tim Walton said, looking at my name tag.  “‘G?’ Is that what we’re calling you now?”

“What’s up, G?” Brianna Johns asked, emphasizing the G and giggling.

“Todd wrote that as a joke,” I explained.  “How were your summers?”

“I just went home,” Tim explained.  “Nothing special.”

“Same,” Brianna added.  “I was just working.  How was yours?”

“It was good.  I just hung out in Jeromeville, doing youth group stuff with J-Cov.  And I started swing dancing.”

“Fun!” Brianna said excitedly.  “Are they still doing that at the U-Bar?  I went a few times back in the spring.”

“Yeah.  You should come back,” I said, adding in my mind without saying out loud that I could always use more beautiful women like you to dance with.  “And my student teaching program started five weeks ago, and one of my classes here did too.”

“Wow!  You’ve been busy!” Brianna said.

“How is teaching going so far?” Tim asked.

“Pretty good,” I replied.  “So far I’m just observing and helping answer students’ questions.  I’ll gradually start teaching soon, and a few months into the year I get to take over the class.”

Chelsea Robbins turned around, having overheard what I had just said.  “What grade are you teaching?”

“High school.  Geometry and Basic Math B.”

“Here at Jeromeville High?”

“No.  Nueces High.”

“You commute to Nueces every day?  Wow.”

“It’s not that bad of a drive.  And all my classes here are in the afternoon, because these classes are specifically for student teachers who are in the classroom in the morning.”

“That makes sense.  Have the students been nice so far?”

“Some are, some aren’t,” I explained.  “There’s this one girl in the Basic B class who is really mouthy and defiant.  I told her and her friend to get back to work, and she just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t effing have to do what you say.’  But she said the real word.”

“Wow,” Chelsea said.

“So what happened to her?” Brianna asked.

“She got sent to the detention room.  I got to call her mom, my first parent phone call as a teacher, but she didn’t answer.  I had to leave a message.  I can tell I’m going to have trouble with this girl.  On the first day of school, she came with a shirt that said ‘420.’  The master teacher sent her to the office to change on a dress code violation.  I had no idea what that even meant.”

Tim now rejoined the conversation, saying, “You didn’t know what ‘420’ meant?”

“No!” I answered emphatically.  “I grew up sheltered, my only friends were other honors students, and my social life in Jeromeville revolves around church.  How and why am I going to know marijuana slang?”

“You have a point,” he replied.


That night that Todd wrote my name tag as “G” happened during a time when I had lost touch with everyone I knew in high school.  Melissa Holmes was the last high school friend I had heard of, about six months ago.  I got back in touch with Melissa about a year later, and Jessica Halloran not too long after that.  Decades later, at our 30-year class reunion in 2024, I had already arrived when Jessica showed up.  She saw me and immediately said, “Hey, G!  How are you?”  I told her that she and Melissa, who was also at the reunion that night, were still to this day the only people allowed to call me “G.”

Dealing with students like Marie, the girl who cussed me out, was always my least favorite part of teaching.  My strength as a teacher is the subject matter, and it takes so long to walk to my desk and fill out the necessary forms when sending a student out of class that my natural inclination is to just ignore the misbehavior and move on with the material.  However, I also know it is necessary to deal with disruptions immediately, because small problems left unresolved become larger problems later that are more difficult to deal with.  This is true in many areas of life, not just issues of classroom management, and this is something that I am still learning now in middle age.  Early in the student teaching program, Dr. Van Zandt mentioned that teachers are lifelong learners, but we are all lifelong learners in some way regardless of profession.  Life is full of surprises, everything is constantly changing, and nothing I can do will change that.

Readers: What is something that is a key part of your job (or a key part of being in school, if you are a student) that you feel like you are not very good at and still have things to learn? 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.

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 7 Comments

I arrived home around noon, after my student teaching assignment.  It was not a good day.  In the Basic Math B class, one student who was sitting there doing nothing had argued with me when I told him to get to work.  Ms. Matthews, who I had discovered was not exactly the friendliest teacher in the world, had taken a somewhat scolding tone toward me about not getting into arguments with students.

I changed out of my work clothes, and turned on the computer.  I answered emails, then I lay on my bed reading.  A little after two o’clock, I heard a large vehicle of some sort stop outside the house.  This was probably the moving van, I thought.  I peeked out the window and, seeing a familiar boy with bushy blond hair get out of the moving van and walk toward the house, I got up to open the door.  A middle-aged couple whom I did not know was with him; I assumed this must be his parents..

“Hey, Jed,” I said to him, opening the door.  “Welcome.”

“Hi,” Jed’s father said to me, extending his hand.  “Dave Wallace.  You must be either Greg, Sean, or Brody.”

“Greg,” I said, shaking Mr. Wallace’s hand.  “Nice to meet you.”

“I’m Sherri,” Jed’s mother added.  “It’s nice to meet you too.”

“How was the drive?” I asked.  “Must have been long.”

“We left Sand Hill at seven this morning,” Jed explained.  “Stopped for lunch and gas in Ralstonville.”

“Yeah, that’s a long drive,” I replied.

“I think we should start with the bed,” Mr. Wallace said.  “Can you help us carry it?”

“Sure,” I replied.  “Sean is in the living room; he said to get him when it was time to help.”

After Sean introduced himself to Jed’s parents, we all walked back to the moving van. Sean and I pulled a twin size mattress out and awkwardly carried it toward the door.  I walked in first, walking backward, and hit my head on the wall behind me.  “Ow!” I cried out

“Move to your right,” Sean suggested.

“I can’t,” I said, pinned to the wall by the mattress.  Sean continued trying to get the mattress through the door in a position that could be easily moved down the hall to the bedroom I would be sharing with Jed.  I moved in the opposite direction, to my left, giving Sean room to get the mattress through the door, then we lifted it and pushed it down the hallway into the room.  We stood out of the way as Jed’s parents brought in a box spring the same way.  As Sean and I walked back out to the moving van, we passed Jed walking the other way with bed frame parts.

After helping Mr. Wallace carry in a large bookshelf, and bumping my body against the wall just as I had with the bed, I switched to carrying cardboard boxes small enough to be handled by one person.  I went to get a drink of water after carrying about five boxes, and when I got back to the bedroom, Jed was looking through one of the boxes, pulling compact discs out and putting them on the bookshelf.  The first two were music by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and the Squirrel Nut Zippers, contemporary swing bands that had capitalized on the recent revival of swing dancing.

“Do you know if they still have swing dancing at the U-Bar on Sundays?” Jed asked me.

“Yes!” I replied.  “I’ve been going since the end of June.”

“Nice!  How do you like it?”

“I’m not very good, but I’m having fun with it.”

“I went once with Ben Lawton last year.  I found a place to dance back home and got really into it.  It’s been fun.”

“That’s awesome.”

He then unpacked three CDs by the Celtic-Canadian folk musician Loreena McKennitt and asked me if I had ever heard her music.  “I only know that one song that’s popular right now,” I explained.

“She has a song that’s popular?”

I was surprised that Jed did not know this; apparently he was a fan of hers before she was popular.  “‘The Mummer’s Dance,’ or something like that.  They play it on 100.3.”

“Oh,” Jed replied dismissively.  “I don’t think that’s her best work.”  I said nothing in return, since I was unfamiliar with Ms. McKennitt’s music.  Jed changed the subject when he unpacked a large hardcover book, put it on the shelf, and said, “This is my prized possession.”  I read the cover: it was J.R.R. Tolkien’s entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, all in one volume.

“Nice,” I replied.  “I’ve actually never read that.”

“You’ve never read Lord of the Rings?  We might need to fix that.”

“Maybe,” I replied.

“I read it twice a year.  And I have another copy in paperback to lend to people, whenever you’re ready to read it.”

“I’ll let you know.”

“They’ve started working on a new Lord of the Rings movie series.  It’s gonna be so good, but it’ll be a few years before it’s done.  They haven’t even started shooting yet.”

“That’ll be fun.”


A couple hours later, Mr. Wallace told Sean and me that we were invited to go to dinner with them.  “Jed said something about a Mexican place right around here that’s a little different from most other Mexican places, but he couldn’t remember what it was called.”

“Dos Amigos,” I said.  “Santa Fe style Mexican food.  I love that place.”

Dos Amigos was only a quarter mile away, so Jed, his parents, Sean, and I all walked there, down Acacia Drive, right on Maple Lane, and across Coventry Boulevard to a strip mall.  “You’re not driving all the way back tonight, are you?” Sean asked.

“No,” Mrs. Wallace explained.  “We got a room in downtown Jeromeville tonight, at the Colt Inn.  We’re leaving in the morning.”

“We have another son who is old enough to stay by himself for a night,” Mr. Wallace explain.  “Hopefully he won’t burn the house down.”

I could not tell if Mr. Wallace was being serious or sarcastic.  “How old is he?” I asked.

“Fifteen.”

Probably sarcastic, I thought.  Fifteen was old enough to stay alone overnight; at least that was the way most people saw the world in 1998.

After we ordered and sat at our table, Mr. Wallace said, “So, Greg.  Jed tells me you’re in the teacher certification program at UJ, studying to be a math teacher.”

“Yes.  I’m doing my student teaching in the mornings at Nueces High.”

“I’m a high school vice principal.  When you’re done with the program, I might have a job for you if you want to move south.”

“Wow,” I said.  “Thank you.”  I had not considered moving across the state to Sand Hill, but I also did not want to rule anything out.

“What curriculum are they using in Nueces?”

“CRM. College Ready Mathematics.”

“That’s really popular up here, apparently.”

“Yes.  One of my professors co-wrote it.”

“We tried that for a few years when it first came out,” Mr. Wallace explained.  “Then we threw it in the trash where it belongs.”  I nodded, not saying anything, as he continued.  “It’s cheap, because the books are paperbacks; that’s how it got so popular.”

“I’ve heard Dr. Samuels speak about it,” I said, a little nervously considering how hostile Mr. Wallace had been to CRM.  “It sounds like it’s meant to be implemented a certain way.  My brother used it for one year, and from what I heard, his class wasn’t doing it right.”

“That’s because there is no right way to do it.  You’ll see.  And hopefully you’ll figure out what works for you and what doesn’t.”

“Yeah.”

“Sean?  What did you say your major was?” Mr. Wallace asked.  I relaxed a little as the conversation turned to another topic.  I did not want to argue the pros and cons of the College Ready Mathematics curriculum with someone more experienced on the subject than me, especially given my personal connection to Dr. Samuels.


With Jed back in town, there would be one more familiar face at swing dancing every week, although he was a guy so I would not be dancing with him.  The following Sunday night, three days after Jed moved in, he came with me to swing dancing at the University Bar & Grill.  As we headed south on Andrews Road, Jed asked, “Are there a lot of people swing dancing this summer, with school being on break?”

“It’s a decent crowd size,” I replied.  “There are still people around.  But I didn’t start going until the beginning of summer, so I don’t know what the crowd was like during the school year.”

“That’s true.  The place I went dancing back home had a pretty big crowd, but some of them came from farther away.”

“Yeah.”

“The first time I was there,” Jed said, “about midway through the night, this knockout blonde walks up to me, and asks me to dance.  I was like, ‘Hello, nurse!’”

“Huh?” I said, confused.  “Nurse?”

“‘Hello, nurse!’” Jed repeated.  “Animaniacs?”

“I never got into that show,” I explained.  “That was around the time I stopped watching kids’ cartoons.”

“Really?  You never watched Animaniacs?” Jed sounded like he was having a hard time believing this, much as he had reacted a few days earlier when I told him of my unfamiliarity with Tolkien.  I was used to getting that reaction when people talked about movies and television shows I had not seen.  “That show was so good!  ‘Hello, nurse!’ was what they said when they saw a pretty girl.”

“I see.  I guess I just never took the time to get into it.”

“So anyway, this blonde girl walked up to me and asks me to dance.  I asked her for her name, and she said, ‘Trouble.’”

“Her name was ‘Trouble?’”

“It was a nickname, but that’s what everyone calls her.  She’s a really good dancer, though.”

Jed stopped talking about Trouble when we arrived.  We each paid the cover charge and walked toward a nearby table where Erica Foster and Sasha Travis were sitting.  “Hey, Greg,” Erica said.

“Do you two know Jed?” I asked.  I looked back at Jed.

“I’ve seen you at church before,” Erica replied.  “You two are roommates this year, right?”

“Yeah.  Jed, this is Erica, and Sasha.”

“Nice to meet you!” Sasha exclaimed.

“You too,” Jed replied, shaking Sasha’s hand, and then Erica’s.

“Are Courtney and Cambria coming tonight?” I asked.

“No,” Erica said.  “They’re packing for Outreach Camp, and they didn’t want to stay out too late.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“How come you’re not going this year?  Don’t you usually go to that?”

“I have student teaching,” I explained, still a little disappointed that I would not be joining the rest of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship at their camp next week.  “School at Nueces High already started three weeks ago.”

“Oh, that’s right.  How’s that going?”

“I’m getting used to it.  Mostly I’ve just been watching, and occasionally answering student questions.  One of the master teachers is going to let me try teaching a lesson soon, though.”

“That’s exciting!”

“Do you go to J-Cov too?” Jed asked Sasha.

“Yeah.  I’ve been going there all my life.  I grew up in Jeromeville.”

“Nice!”

“My dad is on the elder board.  And Erica and I have been best friends for a long time.”

“You want to dance?”

“Sure!”

Jed went onto the dance floor with Sasha, and I followed soon after with Erica.  When the song was over, we came back to the table where Erica and Sasha had been sitting.  A girl I did not know asked Jed to dance, and I just sat watching for the next song.

One of the quirks of this time of year in a university town like Jeromeville is gradually seeing people who went away for the summer reappear.  About half an hour after we arrived, I noticed a familiar face walking by.  She had straight brown hair halfway down her back, and glasses, and she wore a medium-length black dress.

“Candace,” I said as she walked by.

Candace turned around and looked at me, surprised to see me.  “Oh, hey,” she said.  “I didn’t know you danced.”

“I just started a couple months ago.  Have you been doing this for a while?”

“I started in March or April, maybe?  Before I went back home for the summer.”

“That’s cool.”

“Are you coming back to chorus this year?”

“Probably not.  My schedule is pretty much set for the whole year, in the student teaching program.”

“That’s right.  You graduated last year.  So that’s what you’re doing now?  Getting your teaching certificate?  What are you teaching?”

“I’m teaching math, at Nueces High.”

“That’s cool!” Candace said.  “Good luck with that!”

Jed walked up at that moment, and I asked him, “Do you know Candace?  I know her from when I was in chorus.”

“I’m Jed,” he said, extending his hand to shake hers.  “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” Candace replied.

“Jed is my roommate for this year,” I explained.

“Oh, okay.”

“Would you like to dance?” Jed asked Candace.

“Sure,” she replied.

“Save me a dance later?” I asked Candace.

“Of course!”

While Jed and Candace were dancing, I went to the bar to order a Roy Rogers.  After I got my drink, I saw Bethany Bradshaw walk in with a group of people presumably from University Life, the student-age group at her church.  Bethany was one of the first friends I made from dancing, and I knew a few others in her group, so I walked over to talk to them.  “Hey, Greg,” Bethany said, giving me a hug from the side.

“Hi,” I said, taking a sip of my drink.  “How’s it going?”

“Pretty good.  What have you been up to?”

“The usual.  Jed moved in a few days ago.”

“That’s right.  Jed is your roommate this year.”

Ben Lawton, one of the other U-Life people I knew, overheard us and turn around, asking, “Jed?  Jed Wallace?  Is he here tonight?”

“Yes.  I drove him here.”

Ben scanned the room, saw Jed dancing, and said, “I need to go say hi to that guy once he’s done dancing.  He came with us once last year.  I didn’t know he was still dancing.”

“He told me he got really into it back home over the summer.”

“Good for him.  I always told him he would like it.”

When a new song began, I asked Bethany if she wanted to dance.  She said yes; I put my drink on a table near the U-Life group and led Bethany to the dance floor.  After the song, she told me that she thought I was getting better; I was not sure what she saw in my dancing that had improved, but it was nice to get a compliment.


It was a good night overall.  I got brave and asked a total of four girls I didn’t know to dance, and two of them actually said yes.  Jed and I stayed until the last song that night.  As more people came back to Jeromeville for the summer, I was hoping that more people I knew would come dancing regularly.  That would be nice.

Living with Jed would be interesting this year.  He was definitely not a typical university student.  He marched to his own beat.  I never did become familiar with any other works of Loreena McKennitt, other than that one song.  And I never accepted Jed’s offer of borrowing his Lord of the Rings paperbacks, although I did read the trilogy a few years later, when the first of the movies was finally being released and heavily hyped.

Jed was eccentric, in a good way.  People like that either find people willing to accept their differences and live very happy lives, or they are rejected by people in the mainstream who are unwilling to accept someone who is different.  I have always felt different, and I have experienced both kinds of reactions from society around me at different times in my life.  Looking back, I do not know if Jed had experienced as much difficulty as I have at times in finding people who accept him, but regardless, tonight ended up being a major positive milestone for him, because I had just unknowingly introduced Jed to his future spouse.  But that is a story for another time.

Readers: Do you have any friends who are eccentric, quirky, or unusual, but in a positive way? Tell me about them 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.

September 5, 1998.  Welcome, Faith. (#192)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 1 Comment

I had lived in the 902 Acacia Drive house for a little over a year now, and one of the most convenient things about this house was its proximity to my church, Jeromeville Covenant.  I was involved enough in church activities in those days that I typically went to church multiple times in an average week, and most of the time I walked.  Today was a Saturday morning, it was already eighty degrees out, and I was wearing long pants and carrying a sweatshirt since I knew I would be in a cooler climate later that day, so I was sweating by the time I got to the fellowship hall.

When I arrived, Adam White, the youth pastor, was there, along with Noah Snyder, Cambria Hawley, Taylor Santiago, Courtney Kohl, Erica Foster, and a girl I had never seen before.  She had short, chin-length brown hair and brown eyes, and appeared to be around my age.  I knew that someone I did not know would be here today, but for some reason, this was not what I expected her to look like.

A few weeks ago, Adam had sent an email to all of the youth staff with the subject line “Welcome Faith!”  I thought it was going to be something inspirational, or the title of a new sermon series at church or something, until I read it and quickly figured out that Faith was the name of a person.  Noah had previously had a part-time position as the junior high youth ministry intern at church, and he had not chosen to continue in this position for the 1998-99 school year because of his academic commitments.  According to Adam’s email, the new intern was a 22-year-old girl named Faith Wiener, and she had never seen the western United States before other than for her job interview, so he asked us to brainstorm fun things that we could do as a group on her first weekend in Jeromeville.

Of course, the thing that stuck out the most to me was that Faith was a girl, and she was my age.  I wondered, what did she look like?  Was she cute?  Was she single?  I knew she was a Christian, since she was moving from some other part of the country to take a job at a church.  The second thing I noticed was her last name, since I still had a teenage boy sense of humor.

While I was laughing at Wiener, I got a silly, snarky idea.  I hit Reply and started typing.

9:00am Meet at the church.
9:05am Taylor and Noah have tickets to the Titans game, so they leave for Bay City for the rest of the day.
9:10am Courtney, Cambria, and Erica start practicing swing dancing moves.
9:42am Brody shows up late.
10:00am The rest of us all start a big game of Settlers of Catan.
11:52am The game finally ends.  Greg narrowly loses.
11:54am Greg gets out a borrowed video camera to film footage for another Dog Crap and Vince movie.

My silly itinerary continued with lots of inside jokes and activities suited to the interests and quirks of the people in the group.  Adam replied, “LOL!”  That was the end of that, or so I thought, so I was surprised to realize that someone had taken one of my suggestions seriously.

“Hi,” the new girl said to me as I approached the circle.  “I’m Faith.”  Faith shook my hand, and I noticed a hint of a Southern accent in her voice.

“I’m Greg,” I replied.  “Nice to meet you.”

“Are you a student at the University of Jeromeville?” she asked.

“Yes.  I just finished my degree, and now I’m in the student teaching program.”

“That’s nice!  What are you teaching?”

“High school math.”

“Math!” Faith replied.  “I was never good at math.”

“I get that reaction a lot,” I said, laughing.

“Have you started teaching yet?” Taylor asked.

“Yes.  Monday was the first day of classes.  At the start of the year, I’m mostly just observing.”

“You’ll have to tell us all about your first week on the drive down!”

“I will!”

“Drive where?” Faith asked. “When are y’all gonna tell me what we’re doing today?”

“So this is a surprise?” I asked.  “Faith doesn’t know what we’re doing?”

“No, I don’t,” she said.  I looked over at what Taylor was wearing, wondering if the writing on his shirt and hat had given away our plans.

“We’re still waiting for Brody,” Adam said.  I smiled, knowing that my silly email correctly predicted that Brody would be late.  “But I guess we can tell you now.  Do you like baseball?”

“I don’t hate it, but I’ve never been to a real Major League Baseball game or anything.  We’re gonna watch a baseball game?  Is that it?”

“Yes,” Noah said, taking over the explanation.  “We were brainstorming what to do to welcome you here, and Greg wrote this silly email with all of our habits and idiosyncrasies.  Taylor and I go to a lot of Bay City Titans games, so Greg said we would show up for five minutes and then leave for the Titans game.  So, I thought, why don’t we all actually do that?”

“That’ll be fun!” Faith replied.  “I’ve heard Bay City is beautiful!  How long does it take to get there?”

“Probably about an hour and a half.  We were going to go in the church van.”  Brody walked in as Noah was explaining this part.  “And here’s Brody.  So we can leave as soon as everyone gets their stuff together.”

“Great!” Faith exclaimed.  “Let’s go!”


Brody showed up as we were packing the church van, so his tardiness did not delay our trip.  The first nineteen miles of the drive to the Titans game, from Jeromeville to Nueces, was exactly the same as my commute to my student teaching assignment, where I had been going every morning for two weeks at that point.  Taylor picked up on this and asked as we were approaching Nueces, “So, Greg, you’re making this drive every day now?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What school are you at again?” Noah asked.  “Aren’t there two high schools in Nueces?”

“Yes.  I’m at Nueces High, on the north side of Nueces.  Wald High School is on the south side.”

“So tell us about your first week!” Cambria said.

“I have two classes.  Basic Math B 1st period, and geometry 3rd period.  Then I go back to Jeromeville for education classes in the afternoon.  And I hang out in the teacher lounge 2nd period.”

“What’s Basic Math B?”

“The teacher described it as the math class for kids who will never take another math class in their lives.  It counts for high school graduation requirements but not for college prep requirements.  They just do a very brief entry-level survey of a lot of topics that you don’t usually see in math classes.”

“Interesting.”

“I’m not really doing much yet.  So far I’ve just been observing, and the two master teachers have talked to me about what they do, and given me some tips.  I’m supposed to take over geometry by November and Basic B by January, but both teachers have said I can start as soon as I’m ready.”

“That’s exciting!”

“Also in January, they’re going to add a third class for me to observe but not take over.  I don’t know yet what class that’ll be.”

“What are the students like?” Noah asked.

“I don’t know them very well yet.  And it’s hard to talk about them as a whole group.  Everyone is a little different.”

“Do any of them stand out in your mind yet?” Taylor added.  “Like, this one is going to be difficult, or this one is going to be a class clown, or anything like that?”

“There’s one guy in the geometry class named Andy,” I said.  “He seems like he’ll be fun.  Really friendly.  But I wouldn’t really call him a class clown, because he’s in geometry as a freshman so he does well enough in school that he’s a year ahead in math.”

Courtney, who had been listening to the entire conversation about my student teaching so far, asked the next question.  “What do the students call you?  Mr. Greg?  Or Mr. Dennison?  Or just Greg?”

“They call me Mr. Dennison,” I said.  “That was one of my first questions when I started the program.  Usually, the students call student teachers by their last names, the same as they would regular teachers.”

“Mr. Dennison,” Courtney repeated.

“Andy, the friendly guy I was just talking about, asked if he could call me ‘Denny.’  Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.  But I’m still not used to being called Mr. Dennison.  A student who isn’t in my class asked me who I was the other day, and I told him I was a student teacher from Jeromeville.  He asked my name, and I said Greg.  I realized afterward that I should have said Mr. Dennison.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Noah said.

Nueces and Fairview were separated by only a couple miles of oak-dotted grassy hills.  Just west of Fairview, Highway 6 southbound split off headed toward Los Nogales and San Tomas.  This was where I normally turned to go to my parents’ house.  After Nueces, Highway 100 climbed into the hills for about six miles, then dropped down to the city of La Yegua on the other side.  We then crossed a bridge and drove through a string of small cities along the shore of the Bay, then crossed a much larger bridge leading directly into downtown Bay City.

Somewhere in the hills between Fairview and La Yegua, Erica asked Faith how she found the job at Jeromeville Covenant.  “The Internet,” she replied.  “I had just graduated with a degree in Christian education, and I wanted to see a different part of the country, so I went on this website with job postings in ministry.”

“Wow,” Erica replied.  Of course, a decade later there would be nothing unusual about Faith’s story, but in 1998 the idea of posting jobs on the Internet was a newly emerging technology, and finding a job that way was not something that everyone heard about every day.

“Where did you say you were from?” Brody asked.

“North Carolina.”

“Have you lived anywhere else?”

“I went to college in Tennessee.  And I did a month long mission trip in Brazil.”

“What do you think of it out here so far?”

“It’s definitely different.  I’m still trying to get used to everything.”

“Jeromeville isn’t exactly typical of this area,” Adam explained.  “Or of anything, for that matter.  I’ve lived in Jeromeville for eight years now, since I was a freshman at UJ, and it’s a very unique place.  An extreme example of a university town.”

“How do you think that affects ministry?” Faith asked.  “And the church in general?”

“You have a lot of kids whose parents have a very high level of education.  Professors, researchers, and people with money who just like living in a community like Jeromeville.  So the kids tend to have a lot of pressure to succeed, academically and financially.”

“I see.”

“Also, the local culture isn’t always supportive of Christianity.  It’s a college town, so you have a lot of people who emphasize cultural diversity, different world religions, New Age spirituality, stuff like that.  And a lot of atheists among the intellectuals.”

“That makes sense.  And I think that’s part of what drew me to look for a job far from home was the challenge of working with a different student population than I’m used to.  To see how God is working in a different part of the country.”


When we arrived at the stadium, we parked the van near the outer edge of the main parking lot.  I wondered if we were going to park in that sketchy neighborhood a mile away from the stadium where Noah and Taylor usually parked when they went to games; apparently not.

According to the clock in the van, the game had already started by the time we parked.  It looked like a fairly full parking lot, but probably not full enough to suggest that the game was sold out.  We had not bought tickets yet; it would be kind of disappointing if we came all this way and were unable to get into the stadium.

The only places with nine available seats together were high in the upper deck in the outfield.  That would be the farthest away I had ever sat at a baseball game, but given the circumstances this was not unexpected.  We had no other choice unless we decided to split the group, and splitting the group would have completely defeated the purpose of us hanging out together so that Faith could get to know us.  Adam paid for the seats using church youth group funds; I could tell from the section number that we were in left field.

After passing through the turnstiles with our tickets, we rode a long escalator to the upper concourse.  Once we arrived at our section, we had to climb up about twenty rows to the very back.  This stadium was a huge, oddly-shaped ring of concrete that the Titans baseball team shared with the Captains football team, and because of its odd shape, the seats in the upper deck in the outfield were quite far from the actual field.  We could not see the big screen scoreboard from where we were, but a smaller scoreboard positioned on the opposite side of the stadium from the big one proclaimed that it was the second inning, and Philadelphia was leading Bay City by a score of 1 to 0.

Faith sat next to me on my right.  “Have you been to a lot of games here?” she asked.  “You seem to know your way around the stadium.”

“I’ve gone to a few every year since I was ten years old, with my family,” I explained.  “Noah and Taylor are the ones who really go to a lot of games.”

“We got season tickets this year,” Taylor added, overhearing what I said and pointing to his seats in the lower deck behind right field.  “We usually sit down there.  My dad and his friend are using our tickets today.  I’m gonna go say hi to them later.”

A little while later, Faith asked Adam some questions about the church government at J-Cov, and in the Evangelical Covenant Church in general.  Adam said something about congregational governance.  I did not really know much of what that meant.  I knew a little bit more now about the history of the Evangelical Covenant denomination, and of J-Cov specifically, because I took the church membership class a couple months ago.  I had never thought much about how different branches of Christianity have different kinds of hierarchies of leaders who oversee groups of churches.  I got the sense that being governed congregationally meant that the important church leadership decisions were made locally, by a board of elders composed of church members, not imposed by the denomination.  And I knew that, as a full member of J-Cov now, I would get to vote on whether or not to confirm future church elders.

An inning or two later, I was listening to Courtney, Cambria, and Erica talk about their new apartment, a large four-bedroom townhouse that they shared with Sasha Travis and Kirsten Mendoza, when I suddenly heard the loud crack of a ball being hit hard, followed by cheers from the crowd.  I looked up.  Barry Bonds, the Titans’ star player and leading power hitter, was dropping his bat and slowly rounding the bases, as if to indicate that he knew right away that the ball he had just hit would be a home run.  I looked around and spotted the ball in the air just as it landed, directly below me to this part of the park.  The Titans now led 3 to 1.

At the next inning break, Adam got up to use the bathroom.  Faith thought of another question to ask, and since Adam was gone, she asked me instead.  “So are most of y’all on youth staff students at the University of Jeromeville?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “All of us are, except I guess Noah isn’t anymore.  He graduated last year, and he’s doing teacher training, like me, but he’s commuting to Capital State for their teacher training program.  Cap State is less expensive.  I thought about doing their program too, but I decided to stay at UJ, because I already knew the professor who runs the program at UJ.”

“I see.”

“Taylor is our year too, but he has one more quarter before he finishes his undergrad.  Courtney and Cambria and Brody are all in their third year, and Erica is a sophomore.”

“So you and Noah and Taylor are all the same age as me? Twenty-two?”

“Yes.  Actually, Taylor’s not quite twenty-two yet; his birthday is on Tuesday.”

“Huh?” Taylor said, overhearing his name.

“I just said your birthday is coming up.”

“Happy early birthday, Taylor!” Faith said.

“Your birthday is easy to remember,” I explained.  “9-8-76.  Like counting backwards.”

“I’d never thought of that,” Taylor remarked.  “Leave it up to the math guy to think of something like that.”

“Anyway,” Faith continued, “I was just thinking about how college students make good youth group volunteers, so having the university nearby is good for a strong youth program.”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “Most of us around our age in Jeromeville just moved here for school.  But Erica and Brody grew up in Jeromeville.  They attended our youth program as students, before I was around.”

“Oh, okay.”

Adam returned to his seat in the middle of this conversation and added, “Until recently, J-Cov went several years without a permanent senior pastor.  The previous pastor, who had been there a long time, resigned abruptly, and the next pastor that they called was not approved by the church members, so they had to start the long search process over again.  It really was our strong youth and college ministry that kept the church surviving through those years.”

“I came to J-Cov right at the end of that time,” I said, “so I don’t know all of the history about that.  But we definitely have great youth and college programs.”

“That’s good,” Faith replied.  “That’s important for any church to have.”


Of the many baseball games I’ve been to over the years, that one on the day I first met Faith is probably the one I remember the least.  We sat so far up, and we had so many conversations going, that it was hard to pay attention to the game.  I do not remember who won or what the score was.  But that day was not about the game.

Many years later, in 2018, Adam, at the time forty-six years old with a wife and two girls, left his position as youth pastor at J-Cov, which he had held continuously since 1996.  I drove across the Drawbridge to attend the service at J-Cov that morning and a reception for Adam at the church afterward.  During the reception, those of us who knew Adam were invited to share things we appreciated about him as a youth pastor, and I was one of the first to stand up.

“What I appreciate the most about Adam,” I said, “was the way that he not only invested in the lives of the youth, but he also invested in the lives of the other leaders.  He hung out with us, he checked to make sure we were doing okay, and I always felt like the youth leaders were like part of a family.”  Noah was there too, and after the reception, he said that if I had not said what I did, he would have said the same thing about Adam.

Today’s baseball game was one of those moments.  I did not pay much attention to the game, but I paid attention to the other leaders, the conversation in the van on the trip there and back, and the music of Edge Mix ‘98, the mixtape of Christian music that we gave to the youth group kids who came to Winter Camp, playing in the background.  Therse were the people I would be volunteering with for the next year, and possibly longer if I stayed in Jeromeville longer.  Faith was a new person in our family, new to the area, and this trip was about making her feel welcome in our family.  That in and of itself made the experience worthwhile.

Readers: What was an experience you had where the time with friends ended up being more memorable, or more important, than the experience itself? Tell me about it in the comments.

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August 29, 1998.  The shopping trip with Bethany. (#191)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

I looked at my watch; it said 11:30.  I had spent most of the four hours or so since I woke up lurking in an Internet Relay Chat trying to talk to girls, and sending emails to a couple of girls whom I had met in IRC chats over the years who actually stayed in touch.  After a long week of meetings and teacher work days, preparing for my upcoming first day as a student teacher in a classroom, I wanted to relax and unwind and do very little on this sunny and hot Saturday morning.  But I had plans this afternoon; I needed to get dressed.

My house, the left half of a duplex, had three bedrooms in a line, with the largest in the front of the house and the smallest toward the back.  The living room, dining room, and kitchen were in the back of the house, past the small bedroom.  Last year, I shared the large room with Sean Richards, but I had been alone in that bedroom temporarily for about a week now.  Josh McGraw, now a married man, had finished moving his stuff out of the middle bedroom, and Sean had moved his things from his half of the front bedroom into Josh’s old room.  Sam Hoffman had moved out of the smallest bedroom a month ago, and Brody Parker, whose parents also lived in Jeromeville, was gradually moving things in all month.  I did not move anything into the empty half of my bedroom, though, because Jed Wallace would be arriving later in September to take over that half of the room.  Sean was out of town that weekend, so I had the house to myself, unless Brody dropped off more stuff at some point.

I showered and threw on a Bay City Titans t-shirt and black cargo shorts.  I typically dressed like this on hot days, and the fact that I had plans today in the first place stemmed from the fact that I normally dressed casually like this.  I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and ate it with tortilla chips and a banana.  I finished a while before one o’clock, so I went back to my computer and more failed attempts to talk to girls in the IRC chat until it was time to go.

I drove the short distance down Acacia Drive to Maple Lane, then continued across Coventry Boulevard to the Redwood Grove Apartments, on the corner of Maple and Alvarez.  I parked on the street and walked through the parking lot of the apartment complex, looking for apartment 41.  I had only been here before, and I had no idea how the apartments were numbered, because that one time was three years ago and I never went inside.  The apartments closest to the street seemed to have small numbers starting with apartment 1, so number 41 was probably closer to the back.

I walked past the swimming pool.  The picnic table next to the swimming pool was still there.  Three years ago, right around this time of year, I sat at that picnic table with a girl I had just met and would never see again.  On that night, just like this morning, I had been in a chat channel on IRC trying to talk to girls.  I found a girl my age who also lived in Jeromeville, and on a whim I asked if she wanted to meet in person.  She lived in these apartments that year, and we sat at that picnic table on a pleasant late summer night just talking about life.  I could tell that we did not have a lot in common, and I never tried to meet her in person again after that, but we occasionally still talked on IRC for a few months after that.  She was the only person from the Internet whom I had ever met in real life.

I found apartment 41 and knocked.  Bethany Bradshaw answered the door, wearing overall shorts with a white T-shirt underneath and Birkenstocks.  I felt at ease knowing that she was not dressed up either.  “Hey!” Bethany said.  “How are you?”

“I’m good,” I replied.  “Just been relaxing this morning.”

“You ready?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Let’s go!”


Swing dancing had become a nationwide fad over the last year, and when many of my friends got into it, I thought they were weird.  But I eventually gave it a try and had fun, and now swing dancing was my new hobby.  I spent most Sunday nights that summer swing dancing at the University Bar & Grill.  I met Bethany at swing dancing a little over a month ago. I also knew her from University Life, the college group at her church; I attended U-Life in the summer because the group I normally attended, Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, did not meet during the summer. Last Sunday, I had just finished a dance with Bethany, and I said, “Thank you!  So what are your plans for the week?”

“Not much,” she replied.  “You wanna follow me to the bar?  I’m gonna get a drink.”

“Sure,” I said, surprised at first because Bethany was a church girl, not the type to drink.  Also, she was only twenty years old, not of legal drinking age.  She ordered something called a Roy Rogers.

“I might actually leave a little early tonight,” I said.  “But not any time soon.  I have to drive to Nueces in the morning.  It’s my first teacher work day.”

“That’s exciting!  So just meeting with teachers, no students tomorrow?”

“Right.  The students start next week.  So I’m going to have to get up early every Monday.  I hope that doesn’t get too much in the way of being able to dance Sunday night.”  I watched the bartender make Bethany’s drink, putting ice in a glass and pulling something from under the bar that looked like one of those retractable pull-out kitchen faucets, but with buttons on it.  The bartender pressed a red button, pointing the faucet into the glass, and something that looked like cola came out.  She pulled a bottle from the shelf behind her and poured a thick red syrup into the drink, mixing it with a straw.  Then she added a maraschino cherry and handed Bethany the glass.  “What is a Roy Rogers, anyway?” I asked.

“Coke and grenadine. Cherry-pomegranate flavor.  Non-alcoholic.”

“That sounds good.  Can I have one too?” I asked the bartender.  As she made my Roy Rogers, I told Bethany, “I figure I’ll play it safe and leave a little early tonight, then I can figure out whether I’ll need to leave early or not in the future once my schedule gets settled.”

“Sounds like a good plan.”

“I don’t know what to wear tomorrow.  I was thinking a polo shirt and Dockers, but I don’t know if I should be wearing a tie or what.  And I don’t know if it’s different on days when students aren’t there.”

“I don’t know either.”

“I need to get work clothes.  I really don’t have a lot of nice clothes.  I have this button-up shirt I’m wearing tonight, and one more, and that’s about it as far as dress shirts.  I don’t even know what I’m looking for, though,” I said.  The bartender handed me my drink and I took a sip.  “This is really good.  I like this.”

“One of these days, I need to go exchange a pair of pants at Macy’s in Cap City.  I got the same size I always do, but I guess this brand runs small because they don’t fit.  You wanna come with me and shop for work clothes, and I can help you pick stuff out?”

“Sure!” I said.

Now, six days later, I was heading east toward Capital City with Bethany, going to Macy’s to shop for work clothes. This was the first time Bethany had ever been in my car.  “Do you listen to music when you drive?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied.  “Actually, it’s weird.  I always listen to music when I’m alone in the car, and I usually don’t listen to music when I’m driving and other people are in the car.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I guess I’m just self-conscious.  People love to make fun of music they don’t like, and I don’t want people making fun of me and my music.”

“Let’s get you out of your comfort zone.”  Bethany turned on the radio; “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind came on.

“This song always gets stuck in my head,” I said.

“I know!  I heard it the other day, and hours later I’m walking around the apartment going ‘doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo.’  And apparently the lyrics are really dirty.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, a little disappointed because I liked the song.  “I’ve never been able to understand all of what he’s saying.”

“Me either, but I guess it’s about sex and drugs or something like that.”

“Does it bother you?  You want to change the station?”

“It’s almost over anyway.  Don’t worry about it.”

After finding a spot in the parking garage next to Macy’s, I locked the car, and the two of us walked toward the entrance.  “Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo,” Bethany sang.

“This is going to be our new inside joke all weekend, isn’t it,” I said.  “Just randomly singing Semi-Charmed Life.”

“Seriously, that song gets stuck in everyone’s head!  Apparently that’s what it takes to have a hit song, even if the lyrics are, well, dark and uncomfortable.”

“True,” I said.

This Macy’s was a large store, with three floors and a basement.  I found a store directory and followed the directions to the men’s clothing department.  “I’ve been in this store once before,” I said.  “It’s a lot bigger than any of the department stores back home.”

“Plumdale has department stores?” Bethany teased.

“No.  But Gabilan and Santa Lucia both have small one-story shopping malls.  Some of the department stores have an upstairs too, and that’s it.”

“Looks like men’s shirts are over there,” Bethany said, pointing.  We walked over to a section of wall with cubby-hole-sized shelves, each filled with men’s dress shirts.  I quickly realized that they were arranged by size, with the same shirt in each column and each cubby-hole containing the same size shirt.  “Do you know your size?” she asked.

“The two dressy shirts I have are 17½ neck, 34 sleeve, but the sleeves feel a little too short.  So probably 17½-36.”  I spent several minutes looking over the dress shirts and picked out five of them, three in solid colors, one with vertical stripes, and one with both horizontal and vertical stripes.  All five were pricey, in my opinion, but relatively inexpensive for Macy’s; I stayed away from the pricey designer brands, mostly because I could not tell the difference between name brands and cheap clothing just by looking.

I noticed an entirely different display of dress shirts nearby and asked, “What are these?” I read the sign with the price on it.  “Short sleeve dress shirts.  I should probably get some of these for when it’s hot.”

“You could do that,” Bethany said.  As I had with the long sleeve shirts, I picked out a few short sleeve dress shirts, size 17½, in different colors and patterns.

Next we moved on to pants; I tried on a few pairs to make sure I had the right size.  I got a few ties too, in a variety of patterns, in colors that would go with the shirts.

“See?” Bethany said.  “You’re doing just fine shopping for work clothes.  I think all of this will look good together.”  We walked past a display of sweaters, and Bethany asked, “How are you on sweaters?  For when it gets cold?”

“I have one,” I replied.  “I could probably use a couple more.”

“They would never sell something like this in the women’s section,” Bethany observed, pointing to a sweater with green and blue horizontal stripes.

“Why not?” I asked, genuinely confused.

“The horizontal stripes make you look fat.”

“Really?  I don’t think so.”

“That’s how women would see this.”

“Hmm,” I replied, not sure what to say, not wanting to back myself into a corner where Bethany would interpret anything I said as calling her fat.  I did not think she was fat.  I grabbed two sweaters in solid colors, one dark blue and the other dark green.  “I think this is most of what I need,” I said.  “You want to go get your stuff now?”

“Sure, if you’re done,” Bethany replied.

As we were leaving the men’s section, I heard Bethany say, “Look!  This is what you should get!”  I looked up and saw a display of fedoras, driver caps, bowler hats, and other men’s hats that would look right at home on a swing dance floor, next to a display of suspenders.  With swing dancing being such a fad in those days, it made sense that stores would attempt to cater to that crowd.

“I think about this sometimes,” I said.  “So many of the regulars at swing dancing dress in old-time clothes for it, and I don’t.  Maybe I should start dressing up for dancing.”

Bethany grabbed a gray flat driver cap and put it on my head.  “I like it,” she said.  I walked to the nearest mirror, straightened the cap, and smiled.

“This kind of hat makes me think of Jed Wallace,” I said. “Do you know Jed? He goes to both JCF and U-Life, and he has a hat like this. One like this, too,” I said, pointing to the fedora on the rack. “He was a freshman last year.”

“I think so. He has bushy blond hair?”

“Yeah, that’s him. He’s gonna be my roommate this coming year.”

“Oh, nice!”

“I think I’m gonna buy this hat. I like it.”

“Really? To wear to swing dancing?”

“Yeah.  I guess I need some suspenders now too.  Do they make suspenders that go with normal pants, or do you need special pants for them to attach to?”

Bethany grabbed a pair of black suspenders with two straps crossed in the back in an X shape, with clips on each end of each strap.  “These just clip on to normal pants.  These other ones over here, they have button holes, and they go with special pants that have buttons just for suspenders.”

“I see,” I replied.  “I guess I could use these.”  I added the clip-on suspenders to everything else I was carrying.

Bethany, noticing that my arms were very full, suggested, “Why don’t we go pay for your stuff now, then we can look for my stuff?  Then they’ll give you a bag and it’ll be easier to carry everything.”

“Good idea.”  I walked to the nearest cash register and watched as the cashier added all of my purchases.  This was probably the most money I had ever spent on clothes in one sitting, I thought, as I handed the cashier my credit card.  I had enough money to cover it and still pay off my credit card bill in one month, though.  My parents had given me money as a graduation gift, and I had not spent it on anything yet.


Bethany had no problems exchanging her pants, mostly because she had a receipt and Macy’s had the correct size in stock.  “Are you coming to swing tomorrow?” she asked me on the drive home.

“Of course,” I said.  “Wearing my new hat and suspenders.  Are you?”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder if they’ll ever talk about how to lead a dip in the beginner lesson.  Last week I was dancing with Sasha Travis, and I tried dipping her at the end of the song, and I almost dropped her.”

“Oops,” Bethany said.  “Is Sasha one of your church friends that you hang out with there?”

“Yeah.  She has straight brown hair and glasses.  Kind of skinny.”

“Oh, okay.  I know which one she is.  I can show you tomorrow what I know about dipping and being dipped.”

“Sure.  That would work.”

After we got back to Jeromeville, I pulled into the parking lot of Redwood Grove Apartments and drove toward the back, now that I knew where Bethany’s apartment was.  “Thanks so much for suggesting this,” I said.  “And for coming with me.”

“Yeah!” Bethany replied.  “I had fun!  I’m sure you’ll look great meeting the students on Monday.”

“Thanks.  I’ve been trying not to think too much about it.  I’m scared.”

“You’ll do fine.  And you’re not actually teaching them on the first day, right?”

“Right.  Over the next few months, I’ll be gradually taking over the class.”

“So you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“I guess,” I said.  After an awkward lull of about seven seconds, trying to think of what else to say before Bethany left, I started singing, “Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo.”

“I told you,” Bethany laughed, “that’s going to be stuck in my head all day now.”

“So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night at the U-Bar?”

“Yes!” Bethany exclaimed.  She leaned over and hugged me from the passenger seat.  I turned awkwardly and hugged back.  “See you then.  Have a great rest of the night.”

“You too!” I said. I watched as Bethany walked toward her apartment and drove away after I saw her unlock the door and go inside.

When I got back to my house, I noticed Brody’s car in the driveway, and when I walked inside I heard him unpacking things into his closet.  “Greg?” he called out.  “Is that you?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “What’s up?”

“Just unpacking more stuff.  Going back to my parents’ in a bit, since I don’t have a bed yet here.  What about you?”

“I went to Macy’s in Cap City with Bethany Bradshaw.  I was telling her last week–”

“Ooo, Greg has a girlfriend,” Brody teased.

“No, I don’t,” I replied, rolling my eyes.  “Last week at swing dancing, I told her I needed to get nice clothes for student teaching.  And she needed to exchange something there, so I came along.”

“Which one is Bethany?” Brody asked.  I described her, and he said, “I think I know who you mean.  I’ve seen her dancing with you before.”

“And I also got this.”  I pulled the suspenders and hat out of the bag, and added, “To wear to swing dancing.”

“Nice,” Brody said.  

I went back to my room and unpacked the bag of clothes, realizing I had a lot of ironing to do now.  That was the boring part.  The exciting part was that I had a hat and suspenders.  A lot of people at swing dancing dressed in period clothing.  Sometimes I felt like I stood out for not dressing the part, and now that I had become a regular, showing up virtually every Sunday night, wearing a hat and suspenders would make me feel more like I actually belonged there.

I picked out one of the short sleeve dress shirts, a light blue one, and ironed it, planning to wear it with a tie tomorrow.  Unfortunately, no one told me that short sleeve dress shirts are not usually worn with ties; I was just thinking that it would be hot, and I wanted to be comfortable.  I was not planning on wearing a tie every day to work, only on special occasions, but the first day of school was a special occasion when I wanted to look nice for students meeting me for the first time.  It was several years before I realized that I never saw anyone else wearing short sleeve dress shirts with ties.  I could be surprisingly oblivious to some things.

Later that night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I started picturing what tomorrow night would be like, showing up to swing dancing at the U-Bar in a white shirt and black slacks, with my new flat driver’s cap and clip-on suspenders.  Bethany would probably make some comment, since she was there with me when I bought them, and so would Brody since he saw me bring them home.  I really hoped that girls would notice and want to dance with me.  I pictured Sasha Travis walking up to me, her brown eyes smiling at me from behind her glasses, and excitedly telling me how much she loved my hat.  I drifted to sleep imagining Sasha dancing with me.  I pictured myself hearing the song end and leading Sasha into a perfectly executed dip, then talking to her for a long time afterward and becoming oblivious to everything and everyone around me.

HDR debug info : AIScene(35) WDR(0,0)SV(3)SGL(0)HGL(0)SGLPU(0)SGLAY(0)AY(108)

Readers: Do you have to dress up for work, or for any other activity you do regularly? Do you like dressing up? 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.

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 14 Comments

I pulled out of my driveway on Monday morning and drove down Acacia Drive to the stop sign at Maple Lane.  I turned right on Maple, left at the traffic light onto Coventry Boulevard, and then left again at the second light onto the ramp for southbound Highway 117.  After four years of traveling by bicycle and bus to classes at the University of Jeromeville campus, just a mile from my house, this year would introduce a new experience to my life as a recent university graduate: commuting.

Highway 117 passed through Jeromeville below ground level.  I drove past the ramps for West Fifth Street and Davis Drive, crossing under those streets along with two pedestrian crossings and one street with no access ramps.  The highway then ascended to ground level just south of Jeromeville and merged with Highway 100, the major east-west freeway of this region.

On my right, between the road and a fruit orchard, I saw a sign listing distances to upcoming cities to the west.  Silvey 6 miles, Nueces 16, Bay City 70.  Starting from my house, the commute would probably be around nineteen miles each way if Nueces was sixteen miles from this point.  I could definitely handle a commute of nineteen miles one way every day, especially with good music on the radio.  These days, it seemed like every time I turned on the radio, I kept hearing “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith.  It was a sappy power ballad composed by Diane Warren, who was best known for pop music, not rock.  It was still a pretty good song, though, and it was admirable that a band that had been around for almost three decades could still make big hits.  Maybe I should have this perspective on my life, instead of worrying about getting older now that I was twenty-two years old.

Jeromeville was in the middle of a very long valley that ran mostly north to south, a flat interruption of the mountains that made up most of the western United States.  Nueces was on the western edge of this valley, just below the foothills of a ridge rising about two thousand feet, which I could see ahead of me now.  The sun rises early in the morning this time of year, and the morning light coming from behind me in the east illuminated the ridge enough to see the dark green oaks and bushes growing among the tan dry grass.

On my left, the small city of Silvey interrupted the farms and orchards and cow pastures, but on my right, the agricultural land continued until I reached the Nueces city limits.  The second Nueces exit was Highway 6 coming from the north.  I weaved through the traffic coming from Highway 6 to get into the right lane, so I could take the next exit, Buena Vista Avenue.  This street ran parallel to the freeway; I headed west toward the old part of Nueces.

Nueces was a city of eighty thousand, larger than Jeromeville, and much more populous than the rural area of Plumdale where I went to high school, but somewhat smaller than Gabilan, the city next to Plumdale where my grandparents lived.  Nueces had few tall buildings, typical of cities of its size in the Valley.  Its name, Spanish for “nuts,” referred to walnuts and almonds grown in the area.  I wondered if teenage boys at Nueces High School ever made jokes about their school’s name meaning something that was a slang word for male gonads.  Maybe not, though, since my understanding was that actual Spanish speakers called testicles “huevos,” literally “eggs,” instead of “nueces.”

Buena Vista Avenue narrowed to one lane in each direction just before I reached the school.  The neighborhood looked several decades old, and when I arrived at the school, I noticed that the building looked around the same age as those around it.  The school sprawled across a large campus of one-story buildings, with covered walkways but no proper hallways.  NUECES HIGH SCHOOL, HOME OF THE BULLDOGS proclaimed a sign in the front.

I found the office near the front of the school.  “May I help you?” the secretary asked.  “Are you a new teacher?”

“I’m a student teacher from Jeromeville,” I explained.  “Greg Dennison.”

“Here you go!” she said, grabbing a folder from her desk that had my name on it.  Two others were next to mine, labeled “Ronald Pinkerton” and “Ryan Gaines.”  I recognized those names; they were two other student teachers from my program at UJ who had also been assigned to Nueces High.  “The meeting is right over here in the library,” she said, pointing out the door through which I had just come in.

I walked into the library, about fifteen minutes before school started, and by the time everyone arrived, the first thing I noticed was that I had worried about being underdressed for nothing.  Back in Jeromeville, I usually wore a t-shirt and jeans to class, and a collared shirt and jeans to church.  I dressed slightly nicer today, wearing a collared shirt and slacks, but I was not sure if that was enough.  Looking around the room, though, I saw that many of the other male teachers were wearing t-shirts, jeans, shorts, sandals, things like that.  Some wore baseball caps.  I suspected that they were underdressed because today was a day with no students on campus, and that they would be dressed more nicely next week when the students arrived.

“Greg!” I heard a voice call from halfway across the library.  I looked around at the tables in the middle of the library where everyone sat, and I spotted Josh McGraw waving at me.

“Hi!” I said, sitting at an empty seat next to Josh.

“What’s up, buddy?”

“You know.  My first day.  Just trying to figure all this out.”

“We’ve all been there.  You’ll do fine.  And technically it’s my first day too.”

The principal of Nueces High School, Martin Garrett, welcomed everyone back, then went around the room to introduce the new teachers and the student teachers.  Ron Pinkerton, one of the other student teachers from Jeromeville, was sitting on the other side of Josh and me and noticed me clapping loudly when Mr. Garrett introduced Josh.  “You two know each other?” Ron whispered to me.

“He was my roommate last year and the year before,” I replied.  “He did the science education program at UJ last year and got hired here.”

“Oh, wow!  You both just happened to end up at Nueces High?”

“Yeah!”

Most of that first day was kind of boring.  Mr. Garrett discussed a lot of things which did not all pertain to me as a student teacher.  He led the student teachers on a tour of the campus.  Ron, Ryan, and I met with all of the math teachers. I would be in Basic Math B period 1 with Ms. Kate Matthews and Geometry period 3 with Mrs. Judy Tracy.  The math education program at Jeromeville typically placed student teachers in one grade-level class and one class of students below grade level, so that student teachers would experience a wide range of ability levels.  This was also why student teachers from UJ commuted to Nueces and other nearby cities: Jeromeville was a university town, and many of its students came from much more educated families, atypical of public schools in the rest of the state.

The three of us from UJ were excused from the teacher work day two hours early, because we had a class every Monday back in Jeromeville, Education 306, a seminar with Dr. Van Zandt, the supervisor of our program.  The UJ academic year had not started yet, but this class followed the schedule of the schools where we did our student teaching.


The next day, I drove back to Nueces for more meetings at the school.  After hearing presentations about areas of improvement for the upcoming year, and long-term plans to incorporate more technology into teaching, I went to go find the teachers I would be working with, so I could talk to them in more detail.  I wanted to ask Kate Matthews about Basic Math B, since I was not entirely sure what the class was.

“The thing you have to remember,” she explained to me, “is that most of these students are never going to take another math class in their lives.  This class doesn’t count toward college application requirements, it’s just enough math credits to graduate from high school.”

“What exactly is it that they’ll be learning?”

“We pretty much just go through the textbook.  It’s a survey of math topics, but taught in a way to make it accessible for students who haven’t had algebra or geometry.”

“I see,” I said, flipping through Kate’s copy of the textbook.  “Will I get my own copy of the textbook?  Do I need it yet?”

“You will.  The librarian is really busy right now, but check later this week.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Usually how it works, I’ll tell the students on the first day that you’ll be helping out in our class this year.  Then gradually over the next few months, I’ll be turning the class over to you.”

“Are we avoiding the word ‘student teacher?’  Do we not want them to know that I’m brand new to teaching?”

“It doesn’t really matter.  They’ll figure it out.  Some of them have had student teachers before.  You’ve probably been trained on how to use CRM?”

“I’ve heard the basics,” I explained.  “I have a training for CRM tomorrow and Thursday.”

“We don’t use CRM for Basic B, obviously, so I don’t usually use those techniques in Basic B.  My teaching style is much more straightforward.  We go over the homework, then students take notes on the new material, then they try some problems, and whatever they don’t finish is homework.”

“Makes sense.”

“You’ll be in another class this year, right?  A class that does use CRM?”

“Yes.  Geometry with Judy Tracy.”

“Judy doesn’t use all of the CRM techniques.  If your program is pushing you to use CRM techniques, is that going to be a problem?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.  “I’ll have to ask my professor about that.”

“No big deal.  Just something to keep in mind.”

Two years earlier, when my brother Mark began high school, my mother told me that the school was using a new math book, from a series called College Ready Mathematics, and that one of the authors of the CRM textbooks was Dr. George Samuels from the University of Jeromeville.  I took a class from Dr. Samuels later that year, and it was he who first put the serious idea in my head to consider teaching as a career.  My brother did not have a good experience with CRM, though; during phone calls with Mom that year, she often jokingly told me to tell my professor that his math book was terrible.

The CRM textbooks were popular in this region, not only because of their local origins, but also because they were paperbacks with no color photos inside, making them considerably less expensive than traditional hardcover textbooks.  The curriculum also satisfied many of the buzzwords that were trendy in education at the time, being based around group work, manipulatives, and student-centered discovery-based learning.  Last year, as part of my orientation to the mathematics education program, I heard Dr. Samuels give a presentation on CRM.  Hearing the program presented from the perspective of an insider, these nontraditional methods made sense.  But for such a program to succeed, students, teachers, and parents would all have to buy in, and there was much that could theoretically go wrong.  I wondered what had gone wrong in Mark’s experience with CRM.  I also wondered exactly which CRM techniques Judy was not using, as Kate said.

Kate’s classroom, Room 129, was a portable classroom.  There were two main classroom buildings, a large one in the middle of campus with one- and two-digit room numbers, and a smaller one west of that with three-digit room numbers.  The portables were even farther to the west, with higher three-digit numbers.  The athletic facilities were east of the main building.  I had two more classrooms to stop by that afternoon.  The first one, Room 108 in the smaller classroom building, had nothing to do with my student teaching assignment.  This smaller building, like the larger building, had outdoor walkways instead of proper hallways, with a row of high windows allowing natural light into the classrooms while blocking students walking by from view of the students inside the room.  I would learn much later that there once was an elementary school located right next to Nueces High, and that when the high school expanded, the school district closed the elementary school and sent its students to other schools.  The high school then absorbed the elementary school campus, and this building was originally the main classroom building of that now-defunct elementary school.

I opened the door to Room 108.  Josh McGraw was inside, unpacking boxes and putting posters up on the wall.  “Hey!” he said when he saw me.  “What’s up?”

“I just wanted to see your classroom.”

“Here it is,” Josh said, extending his arm.  A table was full of an assortment of rulers and balance scales.  A microscope sat on a cabinet in the back.  When I arrived, Josh had been putting up a poster with pictures of the planets of the Solar System.  There were still considered to be nine in those days, including Pluto; it was not until 2006 that Pluto was reclassified into a new category of objects, along with Ceres, at the time considered an asteroid, and other objects not yet known in 1998.  The back of the classroom did have actual windows; they looked out onto a narrow space between this row of classrooms and the adjoining row, a space that appeared to be used only by school maintenance professionals, and possibly trespassing students doing things they were not supposed to.

“What classes will you be teaching?” I asked.

“Two periods of general science, two of biology, and one of AP Physics.”

“Wow,” I said.  “Giving the AP class to a brand new teacher.  I’ve heard that’s rare.”

“It is.  I guess no one else wanted it, and since my degree is actually in physics, it just made sense.  Did you take the Physics 9 classes at Jeromeville?  Did you use this textbook?”  Josh gestured toward a stack of around twenty large and familiar physics textbooks on a shelf.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I have that book at home.”

“Would you be willing to sell it to us?  We’re a few short this year, and we won’t be able to get more for a few months.  I said that there’s a class at Jeromeville that uses that book, so I can ask my friends if anyone has the book and is willing to sell it.”

“Sure.”

“Great!  I’ll tell our department chair.  Just bring it by later this week.”

“Sounds good!” I said.  “I’ll let you get back to setting up.  I need to go find Judy and talk about math stuff.”

“Is she your master teacher?”

“Yeah.  One class with her and one with Kate Matthews.  I’ve already talked to Kate.”

“Nice.  I’ll see you around then.”

I walked back toward the larger building, looking for room 37.  The larger building was very similar architecturally to the smaller one.  I knocked on the door and heard a voice from inside say, “Come in!”  When I opened the door and stuck my head inside, Judy smiled and said, “You’re my student teacher, right?”

“Yes,” I replied.  “Greg Dennison.”

“Come on in!  Did you have any questions for me?”

“First, I just wanted to make sure I could find the classroom.  I did.”  I looked around the room.  On the wall facing the outdoor walkway was a chalkboard, the old-fashioned kind that used actual chalk, as opposed to the dry-erase board in Kate’s room.  Above the chalkboard was a projector screen; not the pull-down kind, but a flat screen that made an angle up from the board so as not to cover any of the board as a pull-down projector screen would.  This room looked pretty old, but it would be adequate.

“Have you had the training for CRM yet?” Judy asked.  I could tell quickly that Judy was not originally from this state; she spoke with a noticeable Southern accent.  I never did learn the story of when and why she moved out west.  Judy was definitely older than Kate, probably in her fifties.

“Tomorrow and Thursday,” I said.  “But I know a little bit about it just because of its connection to Jeromeville.  I heard Dr. Samuels give a presentation on it.”

“Did you ever take a class from George Samuels?”

“Yes, I did.  He was actually one of the ones who suggested that I go into teaching.”

“How nice!”

“Kate told me that you don’t follow all of CRM’s recommended techniques.”

“I don’t know if I’d put it that way, but I see why she would say that,” Judy explained.  “I don’t have them sitting in groups, and I don’t do a lot of manipulatives.  We don’t have a lot of the recommended manipulatives at this school; we’re working on that.  But I do give them opportunities to discuss their work with neighbors.”

“I see.”

“You’ll end up finding something that works well for you.  Every teacher is different.”

“That makes sense.”

“You’ll just be watching me for the first couple months, and walking around to help students when they need it.  And you can start taking over the class as soon as you’re ready.”

“Sounds good.”

“So, tell me about yourself!  Are you married?  Do you have any kids?”

I paused, not expecting this question.  “No,” I said.  “I just graduated from UJ in June.  I turned twenty-two a week ago.”

“Really!  I would have guessed you were a few years older than that.”

“People have always assumed I was older than I really am.  As a kid, I thought it was because I was tall, but that doesn’t make sense as an adult.”

“That could be it,” Judy said.  “I was married when I was young and dumb, and that didn’t work out.  I just got remarried a year ago.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Are you from this area?” she asked.

“I just moved to Jeromeville for school.  I grew up in Plumdale, near Gabilan and Santa Lucia.”

“I love Santa Lucia!  It’s so nice there!”

“It is, but I knew I needed to get away and get on my own.  And Jeromeville offered me a scholarship for my grades.”

“Good for you!”


By the end of that week, I felt much more ready for this new challenge of student teaching.  My two days of training for College Ready Mathematics gave me a much clearer understanding of how the program was expected to work.  I learned about classroom manipulatives like algebra tiles, geoboards, and creative uses of tracing paper to teach concepts like symmetry. I also got my own copy of the CRM Geometry teachers’ edition, so I could start looking over what my students would be learning.

I quickly came to realize that the teaching methods for CRM were not the kind of teaching that came naturally to me.  I did not like working in groups as a student; the rest of the group would never concentrate on what they were supposed to do, and many of them did not know what to do in the first place.  I did not like the idea of forcing students to work in groups, or of teaching them how to work in groups.  I wanted to teach them math, not interpersonal skills that I myself did not possess.  It seemed like this kind of curriculum assumed fully engaged students, and unlimited resources with which to purchase classroom manipulatives and make copies.  For a curriculum developed by people who lived in Jeromeville, with its educated upper-middle-class families, these were reasonable assumptions, but they seemed much less reasonable in a working-class community like Nueces.

Hopefully, as Judy said, I would find a way to make the curriculum my own.   And I would not need to do this overnight.  I would spend the first couple months observing, gradually increasing my responsibilities in the classroom.  I would have plenty of time to figure things out.  It all seemed overwhelming right now, but I felt an excitement building that I did not usually feel at the start of a school year.  I still needed more work-appropriate clothes, I did not want to be inappropriately underdressed when I met the students, but I had a shopping trip planned this weekend.  I finally felt like real life beyond school had arrived.  And, just like Steven Tyler’s voice kept saying on the radio over and over again, I did not want to miss a thing.

Readers: Have you ever had a commute to work or school? What was it like? Tell me about it, or about anything else, in the comments!

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August 16, 1998.  Josh and Abby’s wedding, and two birthdays. (#189)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 11 Comments

“Bride or groom’s side?” the usher asked.  I knew quite a few guests attending this wedding, but I did not know this usher.

“I know both,” I said as I heard people approach behind me.  “I’m not sure which side I should be on.

Apparently one of the people approaching behind me was Taylor Santiago, because next I heard his voice say, “Come sit with us!”

“Okay,” I said.  I followed Taylor to a row in the middle of the church where Noah Snyder, Cambria Hawley, Erica Foster, Sasha Travis, Brody Parker, and Martin Rhodes were sitting, on the groom’s side, along with Adam White, the youth pastor here at Jeromeville Covenant Church.  I knew Abby and Josh through several different connections, most notably that Josh and I had been roommates for two years, but all of these connections ultimately led back to church and to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  The two of them had been leaders with the junior high group, along with me and the others I was sitting with.  Abby and Josh were going to switch to the high school group for next year, though, because both of them were close with students who would be starting high school.

Dan Keenan, the college pastor at J-Cov, began speaking about God’s divine and holy purposes for marriage.  Dan’s Sunday school teaching, and his sermons when he occasionally preached on Sundays, often followed some kind of acronym.  Since Abby and Josh were avid snowboarders, Dan explained four important keys to a Godly marriage using the acronym S-N-O-W.

I started to get bored about ten minutes into Dan’s sermon, so I looked around the room.  I recognized many faces, but I did not know everyone at this wedding.  Abby and Josh each had friends from before they came to Jeromeville, as well as people who they met from places other than church, and family members.  Weddings were still a new experience for me.  I attended a couple of weddings of relatives as a young child, then none for many years, but this was now my second wedding right here at J-Cov in less than two months.  I was now twenty-two years old, with a number of my friends in very serious relationships or engaged, so I expected that I would be going to many more weddings over the next couple of years.  And while I was happy for Abby and Josh, they were perfect for each other, I was finding weddings to be boring and unrelatable to me.  I had never had a girlfriend, I had never been in love, I had never come close to anything like this happening to me.  I had no frame of reference for what it was like to be pledging my life to be committed to someone in love.

After Pastor Dan’s sermon, Josh and Abby recited vows to each other and exchanged rings.  At Scott and Amelia Madison’s wedding, the one I had been to earlier this summer, one of the groomsmen stepped out and played sound effects of metal being forged, then returned with the ring.  Nothing silly happened with Josh and Abby’s ring presentation, though.  Dan pronounced the couple husband and wife, and everyone stood and clapped as Josh and Abby walked down the center aisle.

“How’s it goin’, Greg?” Noah asked once the newlyweds had left the room.  “Happy birthday, by the way!”

“Yeah, man!” Taylor added.  “Happy birthday!”

“I forgot it was your birthday!” Cambria said.  “Did you do anything exciting?”

“Today’s your birthday?” Sasha asked.  “Isn’t it Abby’s birthday too?  I heard someone say she was getting married on her birthday.”

“My birthday was yesterday,” I explained.  “I didn’t really do anything.  I was at my parents’ house last week, so they took me to dinner the night before I left to come back here.”

“Well, happy birthday!” Sasha replied.

“And you were right, it is Abby’s birthday today.  I’m one day older than her.”

“I think that would be kind of weird, getting married on my birthday.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because then my birthday would also be my anniversary, and I wouldn’t get a special day anymore.  I’d have to share it with my husband.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I said.  “But on the other hand, that means Josh is never going to forget Abby’s birthday.”

“He better not forget his wife’s birthday anyway, whatever day it is.”

“True.”


This wedding and the Madisons’ were the only ones I had been to as an adult, so I naturally found myself comparing the two wedding ceremonies and receptions in my mind as the day went on.  As I drove from the church to the reception, I kept expecting this reception to be significantly scaled down compared to the Madison wedding two months earlier.  Both wedding ceremonies were at Jeromeville Covenant Church, but the Madisons’ reception was on the other side of the Drawbridge, in a fancy ballroom in downtown Capital City.  Abby and Josh had rented the much simpler, and geographically closer, Jeromeville Veterans Memorial Hall.  I had been past that building many times in my car and on my bike, but I never knew what was inside.

The Veterans Memorial Hall was on 15th Street, less than a mile from the church.  It was part of a large park that included sports fields, a playground, a public swimming pool, and the place where people gathered every Fourth of July to watch fireworks.  Jeromeville High School was right next to the Veterans Memorial Hall.  I parked in the attached parking lot, between the park and the school, and walked inside.  It appeared that this building was just a community center that the city parks department rented out for events; the “Veterans Memorial” name referred to a series of plaques on the outside wall of the building listing names of Jeromevillians who died in foreign wars.  The main room was full of folding tables and chairs.  The tables were covered with plain white tablecloths and simple centerpieces with flowers.  As I suspected, this was less fancy than the Madisons’ reception, but this did not bother me at all.

I was about to sit at a table close to the long table where it appeared the food would be served until I noticed someone else’s name at the table.  I walked around trying to find my name until I remembered that everyone’s table assignment might be listed somewhere.  I returned to the entrance and found the list of table assignments, then walked to my table, at the complete opposite end of the room from the food table.  I was the first one to sit down at my table, and looking at the other name cards on the table, I deduced that Abby and Josh had arranged the seats intentionally, so that the wedding guests who knew each other would be sitting together as  much as possible.  The other youth group leaders, the same ones I sat with at the ceremony, were all at my table.  Sasha’s name card was at my table, but not directly next to me.  Hopefully I would still get a chance to talk to her

Since neither Sasha nor any of the others at my table had arrived yet, I walked around the room.  The other early arrivals included a few people I knew from church, so I spent a few minutes catching up with them.  I also looked around at the decorations.  On one wall was a bulletin board with the title “JOSHUA & ABIGAIL” spelled out on top, covered with photographs.  Pictures of Josh’s childhood adorned the left side of the bulletin board, pictures of Abby’s childhood on the right, and pictures of the two of them together in the center.  Josh and Abby were an outdoors-loving couple, and many of the pictures of them together depicted them hiking, camping, or snowboarding.  A guestbook was on a table next to the photos; I signed it.

By the time I got back to my table, Noah, Cambria, Erica, and Sasha had arrived.  “Hey,” I said as I returned to the table.

“So when does student teaching start?” Noah asked.  “High schools start earlier than UJ, so do you have to start when the school starts?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “A week from Monday, I have to go to the teacher meetings and some training that comes with the textbook.  Then the first day of school is the 31st.”

“And do your classes back at Jeromeville start then too?”

“Only the weekly seminar where the math students teachers meet and discuss things specific to math.  The other classes I have to take follow the university schedule.”

“I see.  Are you excited?”

“Excited.  And nervous.  I don’t really know what to expect.  But this is what I’m doing with my life now, so that part of it is exciting,” I explained.

Taylor and Martin had arrived while I was talking to Noah.  “What school are you at?” Martin asked.

“Nueces High,” I answered.  “Same school where Josh will be working.”

“Josh?” Sasha asked.  “This Josh?  He’s working at Nueces High?”

“Yes.  Josh finished his student teaching last year, and he got hired at Nueces High, to teach science.  So I’m going to know someone else on the faculty.”

“That’ll be fun for you two!”

“I know,” I said.  I tried to think of something else to say; I wanted to continue talking to Sasha.  She wore a black dress, slightly more formal than what I was used to her wearing, but otherwise she looked the same as she always did, with long, straight, brown hair and glasses over somewhat flattened facial features.  Sasha was not drop-dead gorgeous in the usual sense, but there was something charming and cute about her when combined with her enthusiastic yet slightly sassy personality.  “So how’s your summer going, Sasha?” I asked.  “How do you like being done with high school?”

“It’s nice,” Sasha replied.  “I’m mostly looking forward to moving out in a couple weeks!  And I won’t have to live in a dorm with other freshmen.”

“That’ll be nice, although my dorm experience wasn’t all that bad.  That’s where I met Taylor, remember.”  I gestured collectively toward Sasha, Erica, and Cambria, and said, “You three will be living together?  And Courtney and another girl I don’t know?  Is that right?”

“Yes!  It’s gonna be so much fun?”

“What?” Cambria asked.  “Did someone say my name?”

“I was just talking with Sasha about your apartment next year,” I explained.

“I’m excited!  You’re gonna be in the same house next year, but with different roommates, right?  Obviously Josh won’t be there, since he’s married now.”

“Yeah.  Sean and I are still there, and Brody and Jed Wallace are moving in.  And Josh and Abby got an apartment in south Jeromeville, on Cornell Boulevard.  This is the first year since I started at UJ that I won’t be moving.”

“That’ll be nice.”


The master of ceremonies introduced Josh and Abby some time later.  Josh led the wedding guests in a prayer for the meal, and the guests were dismissed one table at a time to get food.  Each table had already been served bread and butter for an appetizer, and I had long since devoured more than my share of my table’s bread.  I was ready to eat, but it appeared that my table would not be dismissed for a while.

The meal was chicken, salad, and some kind of pasta.  It was not bad, but not really my usual kind of meal.  “When I get married, I’m going to have my wedding catered by In-N-Out Burger,” I commented.

“I don’t think your future wife would want that,” Taylor said.

“Well, then,” I explained, “if she doesn’t, then she isn’t the one for me.”

“I don’t think it works like that.”

“Why not?  If I’m going to marry someone, we need to have things in common.”

“Yeah, but your love of In-N-Out Burger isn’t really one of those essential things.  Especially when you’re planning a wedding.  You have to compromise on some things,” Taylor explained.

“Greg does have a point, though” Brody countered.  “It’s important to have things in common.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling humorously vindicated.

As the guests ate, Josh and Abby wandered among the tables, talking to their friends and family.  When it was my turn, Abby greeted me with an enthusiastic “Greg!” and Josh shook my hand, saying, “Hey, buddy.”

“Congratulations,” I said.  Then, turning to Abby, I added, “And happy birthday.”

“Thank you!” she replied.  “Didn’t you just have a birthday too?”

“It was yesterday.”

“Happy birthday!  Are we the same age?  Twenty-two?”

“Yes.  I’m one day older than you.  And now Josh will never forget your birthday, because it’s his anniversary too.”

“I know!  We need to get around to the other tables, but we’ll talk to you soon.”

“Yes.”  Turning to Josh, I added, “And Josh, I’ll see you at work a week from Monday.”

“Yeah!” Josh replied.  “For sure!  Are you ready for student teaching?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”


After dinner, the master of ceremonies invited members of the wedding party to toast the new couple.  Although I knew a lot of people at this wedding, most of the wedding party was made up of people whom Abby and Josh had grown up with.  The only person in the wedding party whom I knew was Sam Hoffman, Josh’s friend who had also lived at our house last year.  Sam and Josh were both physics majors, so most of Sam’s toast consisted of stories about late nights studying and working in the lab together.

Next, it was time to cut the cake.  The guests stood and gathered around the table with the cake.  Sasha got up a few seconds before I did, so I followed her and stood next to her.  She turned around when she heard me approach.  “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I replied.

“I was going to tell you earlier.  I really like your tie.”

“Thanks,” I said, smiling and blushing a little.  I was wearing the only tie I had; it was red, with dark blue diagonal stripes outlined in white.  When I graduated in June, I did not have a tie to wear with the shirt I wore under my graduation gown.  I had the clip-on bow tie that came with my tuxedo that I got for chorus performances, but Mom said that was too formal for graduation, so she brought one of Grandpa’s ties.  “It belonged to my grandfather,” I explained.

“Well, I’m sure he would have thought you were handsome.”

After Sasha said that, I realized that I had worded my statement awkwardly.  “He’s still alive,” I said.

“Oh!” Sasha replied.  “Then I’m sure he would find you handsome if he were here today.”

“Thank you.” I smiled as Josh and Abby took their pieces of cake and carefully moved their hands up to feed each other.  Abby smashed her cake in Josh’s face, and Josh did the same a split second later.  The guests cheered.  I did not.  “I don’t like this tradition of smashing the cake in each other’s face,” I said.

“But it’s fun!” Sasha replied.

“It’s your wedding!  It’s a serious event, and a solemn covenant before God.  And you’re supposed to trust your spouse, not mess up each other’s faces on your big day.”

“It’s not that big a deal!  Weddings can be fun!”

“I guess,” I said.

Josh and Abby wiped down their cake-stained faces as the master of ceremonies announced that it was time for the first dance.  It was a slow song which I had never heard before, but the voice and musical style were sufficiently familiar for me to guess that it was a song by Toad the Wet Sprocket.  Josh was a huge fan of that band and played their music in the living room sometimes when we lived together last year.  Before I met Josh, I already knew a few of their songs from hearing them on the radio.

A little later, the master of ceremonies announced that the dance floor was open to guests.  I had no interest in dancing to the clichéd pop songs typical of wedding receptions, but after a few of those songs, the disc jockey started playing swing music.  Swing dancing had become a huge nationwide fad over the last year, and while it took me a while to get on board, I had enjoyed learning swing dancing over the last couple months.  I turned to Sasha and asked, “Would you like to dance?”

“I would!” she replied.  I led her to the dance floor arm in arm and began dancing with her, enjoying the music and enjoying her smile.  At one point in the song, I turned her in a slightly different way than usual.  Matthew, who taught the swing dancing lesson at the University Bar & Grill, had taught this move last week, and I practiced it with everyone I danced with that night.  This was the first time I had done this move with Sasha.

“That’s a new one!” Sasha exclaimed, smiling.  “I like that!”

“Thank you,” I replied.  I did the same move two more times with Sasha later in that song, and I dipped her low into my arms on the final beat.

“You’re getting a lot better!” she said as we walked off the dance floor.

“Thank you!  Will you be at the U-Bar tonight after the wedding?”

“I will!  Will you?”

“Yes.  I’ll probably miss the lesson, but I was going to head over there as soon as this is over.  Save me another dance there?”

“Of course!”


Sasha did save me a dance at the U-Bar that night.  Two, in fact.  I kept doing that turn that she complimented until I realized that I probably should not keep repeating the same move over and over again.  I had a sense that nothing would ever happen between Sasha and me.  I was not popular with girls, and she was only eighteen, probably too young for me.  But I hoped I was wrong about that.

Grandpa never asked for his tie back, and I still have it today.  Once I started buying my own ties, I stopped wearing Grandpa’s as often.  As far as I can remember, no one else ever complimented me on that specific tie that way.

As I lay in bed that night waiting to drift off to sleep, I thought back on all that had happened today.  This was a milestone of sorts in my life, the first time I had been to a wedding of someone who was younger than me.  Josh was twenty-five, though, so it was not true that both people getting married were younger.  That milestone would not come for another two and a half years, at Liz Wlliams and Ramon Quintero’s wedding.  Liz and Ramon were barely younger than me, though; all of us were born in the same year, but I was a couple months older than either of them.  Liz and Ramon also went to J-Cov, but they were not at Abby and Josh’s wedding today; neither of them was in Jeromeville this summer.

Sasha enjoyed seeing the couple smash cake in each other’s faces at weddings.  If things did work out between Sasha and me, she would probably want to smash cake in my face at our wedding.  I most definitely did not want this.  But at this point, I felt willing to compromise on this one little moment of one day if it meant getting to be with Sasha for the rest of my life.  I might even be persuaded to find a real caterer instead of In-N-Out Burger.  As I fell asleep that night, I kept thinking about Sasha’s cute smile and giggle as she smashed a piece of wedding cake in my face.

Readers: What are your thoughts about smashing the cake in each other’s faces at a wedding? Or any other wedding traditions? 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.

August 7-9, 1998.  I made a third and final movie. (#188)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 7 Comments

“I’ll take ‘The Rapists’ for 200,” said Darrell Hammond on the television, impersonating Sean Connery.

“That’s ‘therapists,’” Will Ferrell replied, impersonating Alex Trebek, as I laughed loudly.  “Not ‘the rapists.’”

“Have you seen any of the other times they’ve done ‘Celebrity Jeopardy’ on Saturday Night Live?” Mark asked.

“You showed me one last year,” I said.  In those days, my brother Mark stayed up on Saturday nights recording Saturday Night Live, and if one sketch was not funny enough for his liking, he would rewind during the commercial and record over it.  This way, he had a tape of the best parts of Saturday Night Live to rewatch later, which he inevitably did every time I came back to Plumdale to visit my family for a few days.

I continued watching “Celebrity Jeopardy,” as guest host David Duchovny impersonated Jeff Goldblum, rambling incoherently like his character from the movie Jurassic Park, and Sean Connery continued acting hostile to Alex Trebek for whatever reason possible.  “That’s where you got that Jeff Goldblum impression earlier,” I said.

“Yeah,” Mark replied.  Earlier that afternoon, Mark’s friend Cody Kaneko had been over at the house, and they were outside showing me a new game they invented called Celebrity Baseball.  One of them would pitch to the other while they were impersonating celebrities, and in character, they would strike out, get hit by the pitch, and generally mimic horrible baseball injuries.  Mark was acting just like David Duchovny’s impression of Jeff Goldblum on Saturday Night Live; I did not get the reference earlier.

“I’m the cock of the walk!” Sean Connery shouted on the screen.  Mark repeated the line in the same voice.

“Okay, then,” I replied.

A little later, after the tape ran out, something uninteresting came on the television.  I asked Mark, “What do you wanna do now?”

“I don’t know,” Mark answered.

“Do you have any new Nintendo games?”

“Not really.  Not since last time you were here.”

I looked around trying to think of what else we could do.  Today was Friday, but that did not matter since there was nothing exciting for me to do.  I did not visit my family often these days, because I often got bored quickly.  I had no friends left in Plumdale whom I was still in touch with.  My family was not involved with any activities that would lead to meeting new people.  And Mark was often busy with basketball or baseball practice, depending on the time of year, although that was not the case right now in early August.  He was now sixteen, almost seventeen, and spending time with his own friends like Cody took priority over spending time with his older brother who lived two and a half hours away.  But suddenly an idea popped into my head, and I said something that ended up defining the rest of my trip home, without even knowing when I said it whether Mark would approve or not:

“You wanna get the Legos out?”

“Yeah!” Mark shouted.  We both ran to the closet in Mark’s room and began pushing the two large boxes containing our entire Lego collection into the living room.

Mom, drawn to react instinctively to the sound of plastic bricks shaking against each other, emerged from elsewhere in the house and stopped us.  “No,” she said.  “We don’t have room to set up the Legos in the living room right now.”

“What if we build them in Mark’s room?” I asked.  “Mark, is that ok?”

“Sure,” Mark said, shrugging.

“I guess,” Mom replied unenthusiastically.

“Yes!” I said, helping Mark push the Lego boxes back into his room.


I do not remember when I first took interest in Lego.  My earliest distinct Lego memory came on Christmas morning, 1980, when I opened a set called Main Street, which had just been released that year.  The box showed two buildings, a car dealership and a hotel, along with a construction crane, a car, a truck, and a popcorn stand, on two road base plates.  I was still an only child in 1980; Mark was born in late 1981.  Being a precocious child who could read from a young age, my excitement quickly turned to disappointment when I pointed to the box and said, “But this says, ‘Ages 6 to 12,’ and I’m only four.  I’m too young for this.”

“If you can read that, I think you’ll be ok,” Dad replied.

Although the 1980 Main Street set was the first Lego set I remember getting, it was not my first.  I already had a few assorted Lego sets that I still to this day do not know where they came from.  They might have been given as gifts earlier than Christmas 1980, or we might have gotten them from neighbors who were getting rid of them.  I accumulated many more sets throughout my childhood, as did Mark once he was old enough.  Our Lego collection got played with continuously until I moved away for school, and still occasionally since then. We did not often keep the buildings and cars from the sets built as they were intended to, though, preferring to take them apart and rebuild custom buildings.  Sometimes we got quite creative in what we built.  The last time Mark and I played Lego, a couple years ago when I was home, Mom saw Mark building urinals for his strip club.  “If the people who make Lego could see what you boys do with them, they would be shocked,” Mom said.

I had read once in a Lego product catalog that the toys were properly referred to as “Lego bricks” and not “Legos.”  I would come to understand later in life that there was a legal reason for this distinction: if “Legos” became a common generic noun for interlocking brick toys, then The Lego Group could lose their trademark on the name.  At the time, though, I did not understand the need for such picky behavior, and I referred to Lego bricks as “Legos” regularly.

By the time Mark and I went to bed that night, we had built a small city on his bedroom floor, with houses, stores, a police station, and a hospital.  We had also begun building a stadium for Moport, the sport that Mark and I played with his friends combining elements of soccer, football, and hockey.

Starting at some point in my teens, whenever Mark and I would build a new Lego city, we would have the same recurring characters living in our city.  One of my characters was a guy named Rico Suave; I got his name from a silly hip-hop song from my teens by a one-hit wonder named Gerardo Mejia.  Rico hung out with another guy named James who wore a do-rag.  Mark had more colorful and interesting recurring characters, including a strange woman named Griselda and a monkey figure, originally from a pirate set, named Spank the Monkey.  For this Lego city, Mark added a new character, a king figure from a castle set who rode around town on a horse, talking like Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery impersonation from Saturday Night Live.

Griselda ran a store called Griselda’s Bargain Center that sold random assorted objects.  For this Lego city, Mark wrote “We fix cars” on a piece of paper and taped it next to the door of Griselda’s Bargain Center.  I drove Rico Suave to Griselda’s Bargain Center and said that the car wasn’t working.  “What’s wrong with it?” Mark asked in character as Griselda, making a screechy old lady voice.

“I think one of the cylinders isn’t firing,” I said, trying to pretend that I knew something about cars.

“We can get that fixed right up for you!” Griselda shouted.

I got up to use the bathroom, telling Mark out of character that I would be right back.  When I returned to the Lego city, Mark had attached small round pieces to every available stud of Rico’s car.  “It’ll work great now with all these cylinders!” he said, in character as Griselda.

“That’s not where cylinders go!” I protested.  “They’re in the engine!”

“Do you want your car to run right or not?”

I removed the cylinders from Rico’s car and began driving it through the Lego city.  Mark took it from me and disassembled it into two pieces.  “It won’t work without the cylinders,” he said in Griselda’s voice.

“Fine.  Whatever,” I said.  I reluctantly replaced the ridiculous cylinders on Rico’s car and drove it around the city.  “Rico had a date tonight.  Now she’s not going to like him if his car looks weird like this.”

“I guess she’s not the one for him,” Mark replied.


The following morning, while we were eating breakfast, Mom asked Mark, “Boz is coming over today, right?”

“Yeah.”

I got an idea and debated for a few seconds whether or not to say it.  I spoke up eventually.  “Can you ask Boz to bring his camera?  We should make another movie, using the Legos.”

“Yeah!” Mark agreed.

I never owned any sort of video camera growing up.  The modern-day technology enabling everyone to have a video recording device in their pocket did not arrive in the world until I was into my thirties.  I always wanted a video camera, because I had so many creative ideas, but video cameras were too expensive, according to my parents.  Last fall, I made a movie with the youth group kids from my church in Jeromeville, based on my Dog Crap and Vince characters.  I borrowed a camera from one of the families at church.  When I went home for Christmas, Mark and I got another spontaneous movie idea; we hurriedly wrote a script and borrowed a camera from Mark’s friend Boz.  Boz played the title character, listed in the credits under his real name, Matthew Bosworth, while Mark and I had the two major supporting roles.  We got that idea approximately three days before I was planning to go back to Jeromeville, so we were on a tight schedule in addition to a nonexistent budget.  In reference to that, we called our production company “72 Hour Films.”

Within about an hour, we had written a script, a story about aliens invading a peaceful town and a band of citizens coming together to fight the aliens.  When Boz arrived at our house, Mark and I were working on moving the Lego city outside, because the yard would provide better lighting, and because we had some scenes planned that would be too messy to film indoors.

“Looks good so far,” Boz observed.  “How are we going to do the animation?  I don’t know if stop-motion will work on this camera.”

“Nothing fancy like that,” I said.  “You’ll be able to see our hands moving the guys, and their mouths won’t move.  This isn’t going to look like a big-budget production.”

“I see,” Boz said, chuckling.  “So what’s our first shot?”

“First we need to build a few more buildings.  The rest of the Legos are in Mark’s room.”

“Okay!” Boz exclaimed.  The three of us went back inside the house and built everything we still needed to make the movie, starting with a farmhouse where the farmer’s animals would be found mutilated.

Boz picked up Rico’s car and asked, “What’s wrong with this car?” Boz asked.

I explained to Boz about the cylinders, then I got an idea.  “Mark?” I asked.  “Will you let me take the cylinders off if I make Rico drive an El Camino instead?”

“You can make an El Camino with Legos?” Mark asked.

“I can try.”

“Okay.”

For some reason. Mark and I found the Chevrolet El Camino inherently humorous.  The car, popular with gangbangers and low rider enthusiasts, looked like a sedan or station wagon from the front but had the bed of a pickup truck in the back.  Mark referred to it as a “cartruck.”  I looked through the pile of loose pieces and rebuilt Rico’s Lego car to have a truck bed in the back.  “How’s this?” I asked.

“Perfect,” Mark replied.  Boz laughed enthusiastically.

We shot our movie, which now had the intentionally bad title “The Alien Killers,” mostly in order, although we saved the messy shots for last, so that we would not have to clean up in between shots.  I moved the farmer figure around his farm as he said something about missing and disfigured animals, which were not present in the shot.  He then came upon a giant egg, which was actually a water balloon filled with shampoo and other gooey substances.  To record him driving into town, I pushed his truck along the sidewalk and let go of the truck.  Boz recorded the moving truck, but not my hand.

By the time Boz finished recording the farmer talking to the police, with my hands moving the figures up and down as they spoke, Mom had come outside to watch us.  “Does it matter that you can see your hands on camera?” Mom asked.

“No,” I said.  “This is a low-budget production.”

Next, we recorded the alien spaceship, propelled by Mark’s hand, crashing into Rico’s house while he was not home.  With their spaceship damaged, the aliens, portrayed by regular Lego figures with brick-shaped heads, needed a getaway vehicle.  Portraying one of the aliens, Mark said, “This looks like a high-quality, fast Earth vehicle,” in the kind of nasal voice with which aliens typically speak in low budget science fiction films.

“What is this writing?” I said, in character as the other alien.  “‘El Camino,’” I continued.  Apparently these aliens had been observing Earth culture long enough that they could both speak English, even when speaking to other aliens who shared a native language, and pronounce Spanish words correctly.  We certainly were not making this movie with the goal of winning an Oscar for best screenplay.

In our next scene, the human citizens of the town along with Spank the Monkey would be coming together to discuss what to do about this alien threat.  I had it written on my script that Mark would be playing the character who stepped up to lead the Alien Killers, but that his lines would be ad-libbed.  Boz held the camera, so Mark explained to Boz, “After you say all the lines, just let it keep recording.  I’m going to do something.”

“That’s the character whose lines aren’t in the script,” I said, “right?”

“Exactly.”

Boz pressed Record, and I began speaking in character as several different people.  The townspeople decided to form a group called the Alien Killers, who would seek out and destroy the alien invaders.  “Who’s gonna be our leader?” I said in character as the farmer who discovered the giant alien egg.

At this point, from off camera, Mark’s new character wearing the king clothes jumped into the meeting.  “I’m the cock of the walk!” he exclaimed, in the voice of Darrell Hammond’s Sean Connery character from Saturday Night Live.  I rolled my eyes and tried to suppress laughter, since we were still recording.  Mark continued rambling some of Sean Connery’s lines.

We continued recording as the Alien Killers wandered outside of town to find where the aliens had landed.  When Rico saw his stolen El Camino parked on the side of the road, the Alien Killers began exploring the countryside.  When they came across the giant egg, the Darrell Hammond-Sean Connery character cut it open with a sword, and we punctured the water balloon, showering all of the nearby Lego figures with a wet sudsy mess.  “Ew!” Boz shouted with the camera still running.  We decided to leave that line in the movie, since someone would probably be expressing disgust after getting hit with all of that slime.


After we finished recording the rest of the scenes that involved alien slime, we cleaned everything up.  I moved all of the Lego city back into the house, a little at a time, while Mark and Boz played GoldenEye on Nintendo 64.  Boz went home around dinner time.

The following day, we recorded opening and closing credits, and I borrowed a second videocassette recorder from my grandparents so that I could edit the film.  I was done by mid-afternoon.  We called ourselves 72 Hour Films, but we made The Alien Killers in only 31 hours.  It was silly, but since it looked like it was intentionally supposed to be bad, it worked.

The Alien Killers was my last attempt at making a live-action film.  Over the next couple months, I tried getting the kids from church together to make a second Dog Crap and Vince movie, but it was too hard to work around everyone’s schedules to get them together.  We only recorded one day, and we only got a few scenes recorded on that one day since Ted Hunter, who played Vince, flaked on us.  I have done many other creative projects since, but not another live action movie.

At some point after I went back to Jeromeville, Mom disassembled the Lego city and put everything in the attic.  But every time I heard the topic of Lego come up in conversation, I would tell people that I was still playing Lego up until I was almost twenty-two years old, and I was not ashamed of that fact.

All of our Lego stuff, including the bricks, baseplates, instructions, catalogs, and idea books, sat in the attic collecting dust until 2022.  That year, at age forty-five, I went to visit home for a few days in June after my year as a teacher ended, and Mom, now seventy-two years old, showed me the attic, which she had been trying to clean and organize.  She pointed to the two large Lego boxes and said, “If you ever want to take the Legos back home with you, you can.”

“I think I might do that,” I said.  “It would be fun to see what I find.  Maybe build some stuff again, just for fun.”

“But if you do, check with Mark, since some of those were his.”

Later that day I texted Mark, who was living in another state at the time; he said it was fine for me to take all of the Lego stuff back home.  It sat in my garage for a few weeks, then I brought it into the house to organize pieces and see what all was in the box.  I still had instructions for most of my old sets; I built some of them and made some custom buildings with the rest of the pieces.  I eventually moved them to the spare room in my house.  Most of the cars and buildings we made in 1998 had been disassembled, but while I was looking through everything, I found Rico Suave in his El Camino, perfectly intact.

Having a hobby in today’s world, at an age where I have a job and can choose what to spend money on, is different from having a hobby as a child.  I discovered the Pick-A-Brick feature on the Lego website, where I could order individual parts rather than buying a set, and a few months after that, I found a used Lego store in my city that also sold individual parts.  Pretty soon, my little Lego city had grown to take over the entire spare room.  I have also made friends with many other adult Lego fans on social media.  With money not being tight for me, it was the perfect time for me to rediscover an expensive childhood hobby.  So far, no aliens have destroyed my city and laid slimy eggs, but anything could happen with a hobby that enables and encourages creativity.

Rico Suave in his El Camino

Readers: Do you have a childhood hobby that you rediscovered in adulthood? Or any childhood hobbies you would like to get back into? Or, if you are not an adult yet, do you have any hobbies that you hope stick with you into adulthood? Tell me about your hobbies 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.