June 19, 1998.  Fight the future. (#179)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

“Hey, Greg,” John said, opening his front door.  “What’s up?”

“I’m done,” I replied.  “That’s about all I’ve been thinking about since yesterday.  I’m done with finals.  I’m done with my bachelor’s degree.  It feels kind of weird.”

“I bet it does.  Congratulations.”

“You said you have one more quarter?” I asked.

“Two more.  I’ll be finished in March.  How’d finals go?”

“I think I did pretty well.  What about yours?”

“I did well enough.  Let’s just say that.”

“Hey, John?” I heard Eddie Baker’s voice call from the kitchen.

“Just a minute,” John said.  “I’ll be right back.”

I looked around the living room of the De Anza house, as my friends called it because it was located on De Anza Drive.  I had been here many times over the last few months.  We had our weekly watch parties for new episodes of The X-Files here until a month ago, when the show went into reruns for the summer.  Since then, I had also been here for the Man of Steel competition and the senior banquet for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  John and Eddie lived here with four other guys, all of whom were well-connected in the JCF social circles, and things always seemed a little hectic and noisy at the De Anza house whenever I had been here.

Most episodes of The X-Files were standalone stories, but there were also recurring storylines that so far had continued through the series’ five-year run.  As was usually the case, the recent season finale of The X-Files closed with a cliffhanger, setting up the events of next year’s season.  But this time, fans had something else to look forward to, a feature film in theaters called The X-Files: Fight The Future.  With everything in my life for the last week revolving around final exams, which were now finished, and my upcoming graduation, which was just a day away, going with a group of friends to watch a movie seemed a bit out of place.  But it was important that I still live my life, even with this major event on the horizon.

I was running a little late that morning.  Most people had already arrived, and there were about twice as many guys as girls.  The girls seemed to be clustered on the couch.  Tabitha Sasaki, who was Eddie’s girlfriend, sat next to two freshman girls, Chelsea Robbins and another one whom I recognized.  “Hey,” I said, walking over to them.

“Greg!” Tabitha said.  “Congratulations!  Finals are over!”

“Do you know Morgan?” Chelsea asked, gesturing toward the other girl on the couch.

“I’ve seen you around,” I said as Morgan shook my hand.  “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too!” Morgan replied.  Morgan was of average height, taller than Chelsea, with light brown hair and glasses.

“How did finals go?” Chelsea asked me.

“Pretty well, I think.”

“You’re graduating, but you’ll still be in Jeromeville next year, right?”

“Yeah.  Student teaching.”

“What are you gonna teach?” Morgan asked.

“High school math.”

“Eww.  I hated math.”

“Hopefully my students won’t say that.”

“Yeah, I had a lot of math teachers who weren’t very good,” Morgan explained.

I heard Eddie’s voice again as he walked out into the living room.  “Raise your hand if you can drive,” he said.  I raised my hand, and Eddie began asking people how many could fit in our cars.  When he got to me, I said, “Four, plus me.”

Eddie appeared to be counting people and figuring in his head.  “How about this?  Myself, Lars, Morgan, and Greg will drive.  That’ll be enough to get us all there.  Everyone else, pick a driver to go with.  We’ll leave in five minutes.”

People walked around the room coalescing around the four drivers.  “Do you have room in your car for us?” Dave McAllen asked, approaching me with his wife, Janet.  Dave and Janet were the head staff for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, several years older than the rest of us.

“Sure,” I said.  John joined us a minute later, followed by Colin Bowman, a sophomore who would be the co-leader of the Bible study I was going to be in next year.  The five of us walked out to my red Ford Bronco, parked on the street in front of the house.

“Everyone knows how to get there, right?” Eddie called out as we headed to the cars.  “Let’s all meet outside the theater.  See you there!”

I got into the driver’s seat and unlocked the door, tilting the passenger seat forward so that people could get in the back.  John took the front seat.  “So are you guys excited for this movie?” he asked.

“Yes!” I replied.

“I want to know what happened to the mind-reading kid,” Dave said as I pulled away from the house and headed toward Coventry Boulevard.  The season finale of the TV series featured a preteen chess prodigy who had the power to read minds, because he had been genetically engineered with genes from both normal humans and aliens.  “How exactly does having alien DNA make you read minds?” Dave continued.

“We’ll just have to find out,” Janet replied.

“I want to know more about that creepy black stuff in people’s eyes,” John said.

“Creepy black stuff?” Janet asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said.  “That alien black oil stuff that infects people.”

“I missed that.”

“I don’t know everything about it,” I said.  “I missed a lot of season 3 and part of season 4, because the show used to come on Fridays, and that was when I started going to JCF on Fridays.”

“Oh, yeah,” John said.  “I forgot it used to be Fridays.”

We continued discussing The X-Files as I turned south on G Street toward downtown.  I zigzagged to Cornell Boulevard, drove under the notoriously narrow railroad underpass and past Murder Burger and the new In-N-Out Burger, and turned onto Highway 100 eastbound toward Capital City.  At that time, Jeromeville had only one six-screen movie theater and one older single-screen theater.  It would be difficult to get tickets for a group of twenty people for the first showing on opening day of the X-Files movie, so Eddie and John decided instead to get advance tickets to see the movie in Capital City.  Capital City, in the next county to the east across the Capital River, was much larger, with many large movie theaters spread out across the city and its suburbs.  I crossed the river about ten miles after leaving Jeromeville, with the historic drawbridge visible about half a mile north of the modern freeway crossing.  I drove through downtown and then got onto another freeway headed northeast, toward Capital East Mall, a familiar destination to me.  My first time at that mall, freshman year, I had begun to have an emotional breakdown, running an errand as a favor to my mother that was not as easy as I expected it to be.  I had been there many times just to buy clothes, since Jeromeville’s anti-corporate City Council had successfully kept department stores out of Jeromeville.  Twice, I had been there with a group as temporary workers to do inventory for one of the large stores, to raise money for JCF.  One of those times I was paired with an attractive young female store employee, whom I never saw again.  My mind drifted to her, wondering what she was up to these days.

The movie theater was a detached building in the same parking lot as the mall.  I parked and walked with the others in my car to the front of the theater, where Eddie and his passengers were already waiting.  Lars and Morgan and their passengers each arrived separately within the next ten minutes.

“Do you have the tickets?” Lars asked Eddie.

“Yes,” Eddie replied, handing each of us a ticket.  We all walked inside, and after using the bathroom, I waited as some people bought snacks.

As the movie began, the title credits appeared over a graphic effect meant to look like black liquid.  Apparently the creepy black stuff that we had discussed earlier would figure in this plot.  The scene quickly transitioned to two prehistoric Ice Age humans being attacked by a fierce otherworldly creature.  One of them stabbed the creature; as the creature bled, its black blood began flowing into the man, as if the blood was sentient.  The scene then transitioned to the present day, where some boys playing outside discovered the skull of the prehistoric man and promptly became infected by the black alien blood.  This was going to be interesting, I thought.  Hopefully I would be able to follow the story, since I had missed some of the previous episodes about the black liquid.  Or maybe this one scene was enough to explain the origin of the black liquid sufficiently enough to follow the movie.

The series’ main characters, Mulder and Scully, first appeared in the next scene, with Scully trying to think rationally about their assignment and Mulder rambling philosophically.  Even though I was sitting in a movie theater watching a big screen feature film, this felt just like a typical episode of The X-Files.  The next several scenes also stayed faithful to many the series’ core themes: black helicopters, government cover-ups, and Mulder and Scully’s superiors getting on their case.  The scene shifted back to where the boy found the black alien goo, and many in the theater gasped when the Smoking Man, a recurring villain from the series, first appeared.  Watching a movie with a large group of fans, having that collective experience of seeing things on the big screen for the first time, was a new experience for me, but I loved it.

About midway through the movie, Mulder and Scully discovered a top secret facility involving corn fields and millions of bees.  They barely escaped the facility, but one of the bees hitched a ride on Scully’s clothes and stung her several hours later.  Scully began describing her symptoms in detail as she lost consciousness.

“No one is really gonna say all that as they’re fainting,” Lars whispered from somewhere near me.

“She’s a doctor,” I replied.  “She might.  It’s her area of expertise.”

Instead of regular paramedics in an ambulance, mysterious agents took Scully away and attempted to shoot Mulder.  Mulder woke up in the hospital, surrounded by his three weird friends, who were also recurring characters on the show.  I clapped at their appearance, and I heard a few other people start to clap after I did, but the rest of the theater did not seem as excited to see these three as I was.

On the screen, Mulder encountered a man with a British accent.  I recognized him; he had worked with the Smoking Man and the others behind the conspiracy in several episodes of the series.  Now he was betraying the others and helping Mulder, apparently disapproving of the conspirators’ plans to create human-alien hybrids to resist the alien colonization.  He said that Mulder’s father, who had connections to these people, had hoped that Mulder would fight the future.

Fight the future.  That was from the movie’s title.  Nice.

On the screen, Mulder traveled to Antarctica, acting on information given to him by the British man, to break into a facility operated by the conspirators.  Mulder rescued Scully in the end, as I expected since I knew that the television series would be continuing.  But the final scene implied that the conspirators had other facilities elsewhere, including one whose location was given by onscreen text as “Foum Tataouine, Tunisia.”

“Dude!  That says ‘Tatooine!’” Lars whispered loudly, referring to the similarly named home planet of Luke Skywalker from Star Wars.

I did not like whispering in movie theaters, but Lars happened to point out something related to a tidbit of knowledge that I knew. “That’s where that part of Star Wars was filmed,” I whispered back.  “The planet Tatooine was named after a city in Tunisia.”  I was impressed with myself for having gathered much knowledge of Star Wars in the last year and a half, since my old roommate Brian Burr had made me a fan and brought me to the films’ theatrical re-releases.

The screen faded to black, and the credits played over the song “Walking After You” by the Foo Fighters, the song from the movie soundtrack that had been released as a radio single. After the credits ended, we all walked into the lobby, sharing our thoughts about the movie.  “So I have a question,” John said.  “When Mulder got to Antarctica, I was thinking about the midnight sun and all that kind of stuff.  And I realized something.”

“Oh yeah?” Tabitha replied.

“It looked like it was summer in America, like in the beginning of the movie when the boys found the skull.  It looked hot and sunny outside.  But if it’s summer here, then it’s winter in Antarctica.  So shouldn’t it have been dark?”

“Dude, you’re right!” Lars exclaimed.  I thought about this; he was right.  This seemed like the kind of thing I should have noticed.

“Maybe it was a hot day in the fall, or the spring,” I suggested.  “Then it wouldn’t have been completely dark in Antarctica.”

“Or maybe you’re just making excuses,” John teased.

“Now this is going to bother me,” I said.

“Dos Amigos is right next door,” Dan said, gesturing in the direction of Dos Amigos.  “You guys want to get lunch?”

“Yes!” I shouted.  It had now been over seven hours since I had my small bowl of Cheerios in the morning, and I had not snacked during the movie.  Others seemed in favor of this idea as well.

The original Dos Amigos restaurant was a quarter-mile from my house in Jeromeville; this one in Capital City was the second location, and the menu said that there was a third location in Blue Oaks.  Dos Amigos served Santa Fe style Mexican food, different from most other Mexican restaurants here in the western United States.  I had been to the Jeromeville Dos Amigos several times, and this one was clearly a different building with a different layout, but the decor was similar.  The walls were painted in the Southwestern adobe style, and decorative strings of dried chiles hung from wooden beams painted turquoise.  I ordered the same thing I had gotten before in Jeromeville, the Southwest Chicken Burrito.

“So what’d you think of the movie, Greg?” Dave McAllen asked.

“I loved it,” I replied.  “Even if it did just leave me with more questions than answers.”

“Of course they’re gonna do that, though,” John said.  “The series is still going.”

“I heard once that the show was going to end after this season, and they would just make movies after this,” Chelsea said.

“I heard that too,” Eddie replied.  “But then they decided to keep the show going instead.  Probably because it was getting high ratings.”

“Makes sense,” I said.  My food arrived, and I dipped a tortilla chip in pico de gallo and ate it.  The pico de gallo at Dos Amigos was amazingly good, different from any other pico de gallo I had ever eaten.

“Did those actors just come out of nowhere when the X-Files series started?” Janet McAllen asked.  “What else have they been in?”

John, Eddie, and I looked at each other awkwardly, as if trying to decide who would speak the awkward truth to our spiritual mentors.  It felt like we were each saying “not it” to each other in our minds.  I finally broke the silence.  “I heard David Duchovny did adult films,” I said.

“Well, it wasn’t exactly adult films,” Eddie said.  “It was a racy TV show on premium cable with a lot of nudity.”

“Hmm,” Janet replied.  No one said anything more about that.

“It’ll be interesting to see how much from the movie makes it into the show when they start again next season,” Lars said.

“I know,” I replied.  “Apparently the alien colonization is inevitable now.  What did that guy from Tataouine say at the end?  ‘One man cannot fight the future.’”  The others chuckled.

The rest of that afternoon, amidst the rest of the movie discussion and small talk that happened in Dos Amigos and on the drive home, I kept thinking about the movie’s title.  The X-Files: Fight The Future.  The title screen at the beginning of the movie simply said The X-Files, although the longer title appeared on the movie posters.  What did it mean to fight the future?

As far as I knew, my future did not include an Earth where humans would be used as hosts for alien parasites to gestate and colonize.  But equally grand changes were coming in my life.  Tomorrow, I would walk across a stage in the Recreation Pavilion, with Mom, Dad, and my brother Mark watching from somewhere in the stands, as I received my Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Jeromeville.  Next year, I would still be in Jeromeville, but I would be spending my mornings twenty miles off campus, student teaching at Nueces High School.  And a year after that, I would have a job as a teacher somewhere, no longer taking classes at UJ.  My future did not present a choice as stark as the one in the movie.  I did not have to decide between secretly developing a vaccine against the black alien liquid or genetically modifying myself with alien genetic material.  But changes were coming in the future, as they would for the rest of my life, and then, as always, I had a choice.  I could fight the changes, with no guarantee of success, or I could adapt myself to live with the changes.  Knowing which to do in each situation was not always easy, but it was an important life skill.

So I kind of messed this up. Years ago in my notes, I wrote down to use “My Hero” by the Foo Fighters as the song for the episode where character-Greg almost wins Man of Steel. And with episodes about movies, I usually use the popular song from the movie as the song for that episode. But this means that two of the last three episodes have used Foo Fighters songs, and I try not to repeat artists that quickly. Oh well… not much I can do about it now, and I don’t think any of you will be picky enough to care.

Readers: Are you usually the kind of person who fights changes or embraces them? 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.

June 13-16, 1998.  My best creative ideas always happen when I have a lot of work to do. (#178)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 3 Comments

I rode my bike along the path on campus that passes between the North Residential Area and the Recreation Pavilion.  I thought about how, one week from now, I would be inside the Pavilion, wearing a cap and gown, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Jeromeville.  It felt so surreal that four years at UJ had already passed, and with so many recent events in my life centered on the end of the school year, my upcoming graduation was on my mind often.  But first, I had three final exams.

As I continued my ride on that Saturday afternoon, zigzagging across campus, my mind wandered to thoughts of Dog Crap and Vince, my website with crudely illustrated stilly stories about two quirky teens and their friends.  I had not made a new episode in several months, and I was playing with a few ideas in my head.  But, just after I crossed from campus into downtown Jeromeville, I got a brilliant idea while waiting at a red light on Third Street.

I should make a Dog Crap and Vince board game.

I had made a board game before.  Two years ago, I was at my parents’ house during summer break, and my brother Mark and I made a silly game called The Adventures of Erzix, based on a bunch of inside jokes.  In that game, the players raced around the board fighting weird characters in the neighborhood by rolling dice.  Players could collect Item cards, some of which increased the probability of winning a fight.  I could adapt some of these principles to a game based on Dog Crap and Vince, but I did not want the entire game based around fighting.  Dog Crap and Vince was a relatively peaceful and nonviolent fictional universe.  Maybe, I thought, instead of having to battle, players would complete tasks, based on previous episodes of Dog Crap and Vince.  A while back, I made a movie with the youth group kids at church in which Dog Crap and Vince traveled to Jeromeville to meet a video game master named Fish Boy, but their friend who drove them got lost.  So one of the tasks could be to find Fish Boy and not get lost.  And maybe there could be a Map card that prevented the player from getting lost.

I thought about elements of other board games that I could incorporate into the Dog Crap and Vince game.  Play money was a key part of many classic games like Monopoly and The Game of Life.  How could I incorporate money into my game?  Maybe the player also needed money to complete the tasks.  The player had to ride a train to Jeromeville, for example, and buy a ticket.  Players would have to choose between two strategies: attempting goals quickly, or waiting to collect enough items to guarantee successful completion.

After I got home from my bike ride, I showered, changed into clean clothes, and sat down at my desk to sketch the board for the Dog Crap and Vince game.  I borrowed the design of the board from the Erzix game; the board was a rectangle, with another path down the middle, and players could move in any direction.

Later that night, I decided to be productive, since after all, it was finals week.  I got out my handwritten notes for Dr. Hurt’s Christian Theology class and retyped everything into a Microsoft Word document; I had found that this was an effective way of studying for me.  I had started working on this yesterday, and I was about halfway through.

I opened another Word document where I typed anything that came to mind for the Dog Crap and Vince game.  I had decided by now what the three tasks would be, and more Item cards were coming to mind as I attempted to study.  I was also thinking that there should be a second deck of cards, similar to Chance or Community Chest in Monopoly, where the result of the card could be good or bad depending on the card drawn.  These Encounter cards, as I decided to call them, allowed me to include more characters and scenarios from existing episodes of Dog Crap and Vince.  For example, I made one Encounter card that required the player to fight the same school bully character who was the antagonist from my movie, with the fight resolved by a dice roll as in the Erzix game.

I knew that I needed to focus on studying for a while, but I took a break after copying two more chapters to think of more Items and Encounters.  I marked squares on the board where the player would draw an Item or an Encounter card.  I also added locations from Dog Crap and Vince’s world around the board.  Some of these locations would have special roles in the game, and players would be sent to other locations by Encounter cards.  It took me a while to get to sleep that night, because I kept thinking about this game.


“Greg!” Taylor Santiago said as soon as he saw me leave the building after church the next morning.  “What’s up?  How’s your finals week looking?”

“I have Christian Theology tomorrow, math Tuesday morning, and Healthful Living Thursday,” I replied.  “And the writing class doesn’t have a final.  I had to revise my story from earlier in the year, and that was already due Thursday.”

“I was going to ask, can you come over Tuesday night?  Noah and I are going to have a game night for a study break.  We’re gonna have snacks, and we’re gonna play Settlers of Catan.  You’ve played that with us, haven’t you?”

“Yeah.  Once.  That sounds good.  I’ll be there.”

“How’s studying going?” Taylor asked.

“It’s going.  I’m a little distracted, because I suddenly got this great idea.  Isn’t it weird how my best creative ideas always happen when I have a lot of work to do?”

“Yay for procrastination!  What kind of idea?”

“I’m making a board game based on Dog Crap and Vince.”

“That’s cool!  What’s it like?”

“You move around the board and complete tasks by rolling dice, and you can collect items to make it more likely to complete the tasks.”

“That sounds fun!  Bring it on Tuesday if it’s ready to play.  I wanna try this.”

“I will!”

After I said hi to a few others, I walked back home, made lunch, and then went back to my computer to work on the Dog Crap and Vince game.  Although this game was mostly nonviolent, I kept one of the fighting aspects of Erzix: when a player landed on an already occupied square, the two would fight, by rolling dice, with the winner stealing an Item and a dollar from the loser.  I also added silly weapon Items that would add to the die roll for a fight.

I tried to think of other ideas I could borrow from existing games.  I added Encounter cards that send the player to Detention, which worked similarly to Jail in Monopoly, as well as Items that a player could use to send someone else to Detention.  I got more ideas while studying over the next few days, and after my final on Monday morning, I printed the text of the cards on the printer, adding my drawings below the text.


On Tuesday, after my math final, I brought the drawings for Dog Crap and Vince to the coin-operated copy machines in the library and copied them.  I did not want to cut apart and assemble the original drawings, as I did with the Erzix game; instead, I made photocopies, so that I could make additional copies of the game for others once it was perfected.  Also, this way, if I made changes to the game, I also would not need to start completely over; I could just modify the originals slightly and copy them again.

When I got home, I glued file folders together to make a board that folded in three parts and glued the copies of the game board drawings onto it.  I cut out the cards and assembled them, gluing the front to the back, so that the cards were twice as thick as normal sheets of paper.  They would still have to be shuffled carefully.

I heard the front door open, followed by footsteps in my direction.  Sean opened the door to our shared bedroom.  “Hey, Greg,” he said.  “What are you working on?”

“A Dog Crap and Vince board game.  It’s my new procrastination project.”

“Procrastination project?  Do you have one every finals week?”

“Not all the time.  But I do seem to get my best ideas when I have tons of stuff to do.”

“How do you play?”

“I’ll show you after it’s done.  I’m…” I trailed off before finishing my sentence.  If I told Sean about the game night at Taylor’s house, I would feel rude not inviting him, but since it was Taylor’s event, I did not feel right bringing someone else without permission.  I decided on a compromise, even though it would require me to have a conversation that could get uncomfortable.  “Taylor is hosting a study break game night tonight.  I told him I was working on this game, and he said I could bring it.  Do you want me to ask if you can come?”

“Tonight?  I was already going to a study group for my Wildlife Bio class.”

“No problem,” I said, relieved that I would not have to ask Taylor if I could bring Sean.

When the time came to go to Taylor’s house, I took one die out of my Monopoly game and put it in a shoe box with the game board, card, and pieces.  I made the six-minute walk to Taylor’s house, carrying the box.

“Hey, Greg,” Taylor said when I arrived.  I looked around the room; Noah Snyder and Brody Parker were also there, along with Martin Rhodes, who lived there.  Adam White, the youth pastor at church, also lived in this house, but he appeared to be busy in his room.  “Did you bring it?” Taylor asked.

“I did,” I said, holding up the shoebox.

“What’s that?” Noah asked.

“I made a board game based on Dog Crap and Vince,” I explained.

“That sounds fun!  Are we gonna play it?”

“Taylor told me to bring it.  Should we play this first, or Catan, or something else?”

“Let’s do your game first,” Taylor said.  “Does anyone else care?”

“That’s fine,” Martin said.  “I want to see this game.”  Brody did not object either.

I opened the board on the table and began explaining.  “The object of the game is to be the first to complete three tasks.”  I pointed to each of the spaces on the board where these tasks would be completed as I explained, “Ride the train to Jeromeville and find Fish Boy to train you at video games.”

“I remember that,” said Noah, who had seen the movie multiple times.

“Wait in line for a Giant Quadruple Burger,” I explained.  “And go to the Ice Monkeys game and get your favorite player’s autograph.”

“Ice Monkeys?” Taylor asked.

“My brother made up that name,” I explained.  “That was his team when we did the Moport tournaments.  And I’ve used it in Dog Crap and Vince too.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I continued explaining about Items, Encounters, and Detention, and I went through the stack of Items explaining what each card did.  “Any questions?” I asked when I finished.

“Is this all written down somewhere?” Brody asked sarcastically.

“Right here,” I said, pulling the printed rules out of the box.

“I think it might be better to just go, and we’ll figure it out,” Noah suggested.

“Okay,” I said.  “Let’s roll to see who goes first.”  Each of us rolled the die, and Martin got the highest number.  I dealt one Item and five dollars to each player, the standard hand for starting the game.  Martin rolled and moved left toward the train station.  I rolled next and moved up the middle, toward the cheeseburger goal.  After my recent obsession with In-N-Out Burger, my brother had named the fast food restaurant in Dog Crap and Vince “Up-N-Down Burger,” a comically obvious parody.  I included this name in my game.

On my second turn, I landed on the space for Up-N-Down Burger.  “So now I have to wait in line for the burger.  I roll the dice to see if I’m stuck in line.”

“What do you need to get?” Taylor asked.

“4 or higher is success, 3 or lower is failure.  Same as all of the tasks.”  I rolled a 2.  “Stuck in line.  So I wait here and try again on my next turn.”  Later, on my next turn, I rolled a 5, so I paid five dollars for my giant cheeseburger.

“How do you keep track of who has completed which goals?” Noah asked.

“You just have to remember,” I said.

“You should make little tokens to pick up for each goal.  Then you don’t have to remember, and everyone can see who has what.”

“That’s a good idea,” I replied.  “I’ll work on that.”

On Brody’s next turn, he reached the train station.  He showed a Train Ticket Item card and said, “I have this Train Ticket.  So I can ride the train without paying?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And I completed this goal?”

“You have to roll for it.  Because you might get lost trying to find Fish Boy.”

“I need a 4 or higher?”

“Yes.

Brody rolled 1.  “Well that sucks.”

On Brody’s next turn, he rolled again and got 4.  “So now I found Fish Boy?”

“No,” I replied.  “You have to leave and come back.  And buy another ticket.”

“What?  How come you didn’t have to do that with the burger?”

“The rules are different for the burger.  You’re just waiting in line.  But with the train station, you have to take a trip on the train, and if you don’t find Fish Boy, you still have to catch the train back home.”

“Whatever,” Brody said.  I could tell that he disapproved of this rule, but each task was different, and it was all written down.

Martin was the first one to complete all three tasks.  “Now what?” he asked.

“You need to go back home, but you need to get there on an exact roll.”  My turn was next, so I placed an Item from my hand on the board, with the corner of the card pointing to the space right in front of the Home space.  “And you’ll need to get past this Roadblock,” I said.

“What does that mean?” Martin asked.

“You need a Bomb to blow it up.  Move right next to the Roadblock.  You can stop in front of the Roadblock even if you rolled a higher number.  Then, at the start of your turn, play the Bomb, and put both cards in the discard pile.

“The Roadblock is a cow blocking the road!” Taylor exclaimed, looking at my drawing on the card.  “You’re gonna have him blow up a cow?”

“I guess,” I said, chuckling.  I had not thought of that.

It was still my turn, so I rolled the die and moved.  “Encounter,” I said.  I picked up the card and read it out loud.  “Sludge gives you a Christmas present.  Get one Item.”

“What’s that thing on his head?” Brody asked.

“It’s his hair.  He has one long spike of hair in the front.  He’s from an actual episode.  Sludge is a really weird kid at their school.”

“That’s really saying something, since Dog Crap and Vince aren’t exactly normal.”

“Really,” I said.  I drew an Item card from the deck and immediately played it.  “I found Evidence.  Martin, go to detention.”

“Aw, man,” Martin said, moving his piece to the Detention space.

“What does it say on the card?” Taylor asked.

“It’s a badly forged letter.  It says, ‘Please excuse Vince from class because I’m sick.’”

“‘Because I’m sick?’” Taylor repeated, laughing.  “That’s good.”

“Is there a ‘Get Out of Detention’ card?” Martin asked.

“I have one,” Taylor said.  “What will you give me for it?”

“Are you allowed to do that?” Noah asked.

“Yes,” I said.  “Players can buy, sell, and trade Items freely.”

“You have four dollars?” Martin said, looking over at Taylor’s money pile.  “I’ll give you three dollars.  I don’t need money anymore, and that’ll give you enough to get the Box Seats and get your last goal without having to roll.  Then we can have a fair race to the finish line.”

“Deal,” Taylor said, giving Martin his Get Out Of Detention card.

“This is interesting,” I said, watching, as I took my turn and moved in the direction of the stadium, my last goal.  “I didn’t expect there to be all this negotiation when I got the idea for this game.  But I like it.”

“Yeah,” Taylor replied.  “It’s interesting how you can’t always anticipate everything.”

After Martin got out of Detention, he moved toward the goal, reaching the Roadblock on his second turn.  He blew up the Roadblock, leaving him two spaces from the end, but he rolled a 4.  “You said I need exactly 2 to get to the goal?” Martin asked.

“Yes.  Going Home for the win is the only time you need exact roll to get to a dead-end square.”

“So I just stay here?”

“No,” I explained.  “You still have to move 4, in a different direction.”

On Taylor’s next turn, he landed on the same square as Martin.  “Fight!” Taylor said.  He played a card from his hand and shouted, “Fart Spray!”

“What?” Martin asked.  He looked at my drawing of Vince spraying a can of Fart Spray in Dog Crap’s face.  “Dude!  Dog Crap is wearing a BWF shirt!”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I put that in there just for fun.”

“So I add 1 to my roll for the Fart Spray,” Taylor said.  He rolled the dice and got a 4.  “So that’s 5.  You have to beat a 5.”

Martin rolled a 6.  “Like that?” you mean.

“Ohhhhh!” Brody shouted.  “Taylor still lost!”

Martin and Taylor continued back and forth for a few turns, neither one of them getting the exact roll they needed.  In the meantime, I finished my third goal and began moving toward Home, getting the exact roll on my first try.  “I win,” I said.

“What?” Martin cried out in protest.

“It’s rigged!” Taylor shouted.  “You made the game!”

“I just got the right rolls,” I said, shrugging.

“I know.  Just kidding.  Good game.”


The original plan for that Tuesday night was to play Settlers of Catan; we played one game, and Noah won.  I taught the game to Sean the next day. I played the Dog Crap and Vince game with my church friends a few other times that summer.  I went home to visit my family a few weeks later, and I taught it to them.  I got it out every once in a while when I went to game nights.  But the game really began to take on a life of its own about four years later.  I was living in Riverview, teaching middle school, and running a Board Game Club once a week after school.  I taught the game to some of the students there, even though they were unfamiliar with Dog Crap and Vince, and they loved it.  They especially enjoyed putting me, their teacher, in detention.  I had a color printer at that time, so I printed a new copy of the game, adding color to my original 1998 drawings.

In my early thirties, I brought the game to a new friend’s house; he was instantly intrigued, and it became a regular go-to activity for me and this new group of friends for a while.  We had an annual tournament every year from 2009 to 2018; I won three of the ten championships.  The Dog Crap and Vince game was definitely one of my more enduring creations, and it is interesting to think about how it all started because I was procrastinating during finals week.  I did well on all of my finals, though, so it all worked out.

Readers: What’s your favorite lesser-known board game or card game, if you have one? Tell me about it in the comments.

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June 6, 1998.  Passing the torch. (#177)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

I headed east on Coventry Boulevard, making the familiar drive to the De Anza house.  I had not been there for almost three weeks.  The guys who lived there hosted a weekly watch party for the TV series The X-Files, but the season had ended and the watch parties had been suspended with the show now in reruns for the summer.  The guys from the De Anza house were also the current hosts of the Man of Steel competition, and this was what brought me there on that Saturday morning, just before I would begin my last few days of classes and my last final exams as an undergraduate.

When I arrived, about a dozen guys were already there, including the six who lived at the De Anza house: Eddie Baker, John Harvey, Lars Ashford, Xander Mackey, Jason Costello, and Ramon Quintero.  I arrived on time, and in the following half hour, many more showed up.  I heard murmurs of others’ conversations through the din of voices, everything from routine small talk to talk of upcoming summer mission trips.  Lars, John, Jason, and Ramon were also playing GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64; I heard the sound effects from the game coming from the TV, as well as those four guys occasionally shouting at each other in response to being shot in the game.  My brother Mark had gotten that game for Christmas, but I had only played it a few times while I was home on break.  I was not very good at it.

This was my third time participating in the Man of Steel competition, an event held annually among the men of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  The events for this competition were the same as last year: disc golf, taco eating, and poker.  When I was a sophomore, Brian Burr and his roommates hosted the event.  They graduated that year and passed the hosting duties to Eddie.  Eddie was graduating this year, so someone else would have to take over as host next year.

In my first Man of Steel, a lot of very large guys dominated the eating contest, able to stuff ridiculous amounts of food in their large mouths.  Some of these guys were also really good at both disc golf and poker.  But all of those guys had graduated, and as I looked around the room, no clear favorites stood out to me.  JCF also had a large freshman class this year, and some of those freshmen, like 3 Silver and his friend Randy, looked like they could be formidable competitors.

At around 10:30, Eddie called us to attention.  “It’s time to begin,” he said.

“But we just started,” Lars protested from the other side of the room, where he and Ramon were now playing GoldenEye with 3 and another freshman, Blake Lowry.  “And Blake hasn’t gotten to play yet.”

“How long of a game did you set it to?” Eddie asked.

“Ten minutes.”

“Fine.  Finish your game.  No one start any new games.”  Eddie sounded a little annoyed, and I did not blame him.

At 10:38, thirty-eight minutes after our scheduled start time, the “one minute left” message flashed on the GoldenEye screen, and Eddie started getting our attention.  When the game ended, Eddie explained that we would be playing disc golf in groups of four, as always, and that we would leave every five minutes, and that we would be keeping to the schedule.  “No one start any new games of GoldenEye,” he specifically pointed out.  “The first group will be Raphael, 3, Todd, and Randy.”  I was not in the first group, so I walked around talking to people while I waited to be called.

“How’s it going, Greg?” Tim Walton said, shaking my hand.  Tim, with his relatively thin frame and Buddy Holly glasses, did not strike me as being particularly athletic, or one who would be a threat in the eating competition, but he could end up surprising me.  I should not underestimate my competition.

“Good,” I said.  “Hoping to keep improving.  My first time doing Man of Steel, I was terrible, but Eddie told me last year that if there had been a Most Improved award, it would have been me.  I hope I keep improving.”

“Good luck.  That’s a good attitude to have.  You’re graduating, but staying in Jeromeville, right?”

“Yes!  I can’t believe it’s almost over.  Just a few more classes, then finals.”

“And then the X-Files movie!”

“Yes!”

“There’s a big group of us going on the Friday afternoon when it opens.  Are you coming with us?”

“Yes.  And I can drive people too.”

“That’ll be fun.”

“What are you doing this summer?” I asked.

“Just going home working.  And I’ll be up here for the weekend for Scott and Amelia’s wedding, so I’ll probably see you then.”

“Yes.”

Tim’s disc golf foursome got called at that time, so he had to leave.  My foursome went next, five minutes later; I was with Blake, Jason, and Ajeet Tripathi.  The four of us walked outside.  The De Anza house was nicknamed for its location, on the corner of De Anza Drive and Avalon Way in north Jeromeville.  The Coventry Greenbelts, a series of connected bike trails with landscaping on either side, ran between people’s backyards in this part of Jeromeville, connecting two large parks and numerous smaller parks and playgrounds.  I discovered the Greenbelts three years earlier, during the spring of freshman year, while I was riding my bike around Jeromeville enjoying a nice day.  My life has never been the same, as recreational bike rides became a much more regular part of my life after that discovery.

One of the Greenbelt trails crossed Avalon Way just across the street from the De Anza house.  The instructions for the disc golf game said to cross the street and start from the large pine tree.  I pointed to what looked like a large pine tree in that direction, and as I approached, I saw a sign that said “START HERE” attached to the tree with duct tape.  “Here it is,” I said.  “Good luck.  Who’s going first?”

“Go for it,” Blake said.  “You’re the senior.”

“If we’re going by age, Jason’s older than me.  He already had his birthday this year.”

“I can go first,” Jason said.  “Where’s the hole?”

I read from the course instructions, then pointed a few hundred feet down the path and said, “That trash can down there, next to the bench.”  As in regular golf, we usually referred to our starting places as “tees” and the targets we had to hit as “holes,” even though they were not actual tees and holes in the ground.

Jason looked down the path and threw his disc.  The path to the first hole was long and straight, and his first throw easily covered more than half of the distance to the target.  I stepped up next, still using the disc that I had gotten from Brian Burr for the 1996 Man of Steel competition.  Brian’s faded initials were still on the back in black marker; I had added my name next to it, with my phone number in case I lost the disc and someone else found it.  I swung my arm back and forth a couple times, still holding the disc, trying to concentrate on throwing straight.  I had trouble throwing straight in previous years, and since I had not actively practiced, I tried to focus on throwing straight.  I pulled my arm back, then released it forward, letting the disc go; it flew relatively straight down the path, not as far as Jason’s but much more on course than some of my other disc throws had gone in the past.

After the others made their throws, we walked to where our discs were and continued throwing toward the trash can, in order from farthest to closest.  Jason hit the target in three throws.  My second throw landed about ten feet from the target.  I picked up the disc and nonchalantly tossed it at the target, nodding my head to show how easy this would be.  The disc sailed over the trash can and landed on the far end of the bench next to it, still about ten feet away from the target.  “D’oh!” I cried out in frustration, in the style of the television character Homer Simpson.

“Ooooh,” Blake said.

“But at least you did a pretty good Homer voice,” Ajeet added.  I looked at the trash can and concentrated as I carefully tossed the disc toward it; the disc lightly bounced off the trash can and fell to the ground.  I wrote down my score of four throws next to Jason’s three on the score sheet.  I had made a crucial mistake, being too careless on that last throw.  I told myself that I would learn from this mistake and not do that again.

We continued along the course, throwing our discs from pre-marked tees listed on the instructions, trying to hit some target in as few throws of the disc as possible.  Disc golf was usually my worst of the three events in this competition, but I felt like I was doing a little better than usual just by concentrating and not being careless.  When we returned to the De Anza house after 18 holes l knew that I was not in last place, because just within our foursome, my score was one throw better than Blake’s.

Taco eating was next, my strongest event from previous years.  The rules were the same as last year: competitors had one minute to eat a Taco Bell soft taco, then fifty-five seconds to eat another one, then fifty seconds to eat the next one, continuing in this fashion.  If someone left a taco unfinished when time ran out, that competitor was eliminated.  Our group got called fifth out of the six groups, and so far Ramon was in the lead with six tacos.  Last year I made it to eight, so I was feeling pretty confident.

“Go!” Eddie shouted.  I finished the first taco relatively quickly and took a breath, preparing for the next one.  I ate the second and third tacos more slowly, trying to pace myself, but still with time left.  By the fifth taco, I was starting to feel rushed, but I managed to swallow the last of it just as time was expiring.  Blake did not; he was eliminated first in our foursome.  I did not finish swallowing the sixth taco in time, but I managed to fit what was left in my mouth in time.  Jason and Ajeet were both eliminated when the thirty-five seconds for taco number six expired.

I was the last one standing in our foursome.  I survived taco number seven, but half-chewed unfinished lumps of tacos number six and seven remained in my mouth as I began eating taco number eight.  I swallowed as much as I could as the twenty-five seconds for taco number eight began, then took a large bite, trying to chew as much as I could.  I swallowed more when Eddie called out that ten seconds remained; I had to make room to shove the rest of taco number eight in my mouth.  As Eddie counted down, I closed my lips around what remained of the last few tacos.

I swallowed, but now I had only twenty seconds for taco number nine.  I tore this taco apart with my fingers, covering my hands with grease.  I swallowed again, then opened my mouth, practically inhaling half of taco number nine.  As Eddie started counting down, “Five, four, three,” I swallowed quickly and used the palm of my hand to shove the other half of taco number nine inside.  I closed my lips just as time expired.

“Go!” Eddie shouted.  “Fifteen seconds!”  I swallowed and took a bite of taco number ten, trying to chew it as Eddie gave the ten-second warning.  I realized quickly that this was not going to happen.  I tried shoving the rest of taco number ten in my mouth as Eddie counted down, but I still had half of the taco sticking out of my mouth as time expired.  I was done, with a score of nine.  I raised my arms, excited for my accomplishment, as a mixture of lettuce, cheese, and taco drool began to drop down my chin.  Everyone cheered for me, in the lead with only one more group to go.  I got a little nervous watching 3 and Lars both finish taco number six, but 3 spit everything out of his mouth shortly after that, and Lars finished with seven. The eating event was over, and for that event, I was alone in first place.

For the final event, poker, we each started with one dollar in pennies, and we played for one hour in our same groups of four.  We took turns dealing, and the dealer chose which variety of poker we played each turn.  I played relatively conservatively, folding when I felt like I was not getting a good hand, and not betting too big when I did.  About halfway through the event, after  I had already folded, Ajeet went all in, confident that his ace-high straight would win, but Jason beat him with a flush.  Ajeet was eliminated.

In one hand of seven-card stud, with about ten minutes remaining, I had a pair of queens face down.  My first two face up cards were both sixes; I had two pair, and no one knew it.  This could work to my advantage, I thought as I nervously raised the bet.  I became a little less sure of what I was doing when the other two raised their bets as well.  On the sixth card, I received another queen face up.  I had a full house.  Blake had 7-8-9 showing, and he raised my bet; he probably had a straight, but my full house beat his straight.  On the final round of betting, after one more face down card, Jason raised.  He had three spades showing, so I guessed he might have a flush.  Blake matched his raise.  I looked at the others’ cards.  Jason and Blake both had a king face up, and my last face down card was a king, so no one could possibly have a king-high full house.  I could lose to an ace-high full house, but since no other pairs were showing, this was only possible if Jason’s face down cards were two aces and a card matching one of his face-up cards.  Blake had no ace showing.  I could also lose to four of a kind if someone had three face-down cards all of the same rank as one of their face-up cards.  These scenarios were unlikely, so I raised again.  Jason matched my raise, and Blake dropped out.

“What do you have?” Jason asked.

“Full house,” I said, showing my queens in the hole.

“Nice,” Jason replied.  “That beats my flush.  I thought both of you were bluffing.”

“I was bluffing,” Blake said, showing that he did not in fact have a straight.

I moved the large pot in front of me.  I won another hand in the ten minutes we had left, and by the time the hour was up, I had close to three hundred pennies in front of me.

Eddie tapped me on the shoulder after the poker games finished.  “Greg?  Can you come help me figure out the winner?”

“Sure,” I replied.  I felt honored to be included.

Eddie and I went to his bedroom, where he showed me a sheet of paper listing all of the twenty-three participants and their scores for the three events.  “Usually, we just rank each person first, second, third, and so on for each event, then we add the total of what places they finished, and the Man of Steel is whoever has the lowest total.  If there’s a tie, then we can look at other things.”

“Sounds good,” I said.  Eddie began ranking the disc golf scores, and I ranked the taco scores. I finished before Eddie did, so I did the poker rankings next.  I was particularly interested in my own scores; I was in first place in taco eating and third place in poker.  Not bad.  I looked over at Eddie’s score sheet for disc golf; my tenth place was solidly in the middle of the pack.  Definitely an improvement from last year.

Eddie and I began adding everyone’s three places to see who had the best total.  “It’s kind of different this year,” Eddie remarked, “because there’s no one who did well in all three events.”

“I see that,” I said.  “Randy got third in disc golf, seventh in eating, and first in poker.  That’s a total of eleven.  Did anyone do better than that?”

After Eddie finished adding the last few people, he said, “Eleven? No, no one has a total lower than eleven.  So Randy is our new Man of Steel.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a freshman win before.  Where did everyone else finish?  Who is the runner-up?”

Eddie and I looked at our scratch work, then looked up at each other, the realization coming to us at exactly the same moment.  I looked back at the paper, unable to believe what I was seeing, but there it was, plain as day.  The numbers did not lie.  “Greg!” Eddie said.  “You’re in second place!  You’re the runner-up Man of Steel!”

“I know!” I replied.  “How did I do that?”

“Good job!” Eddie exclaimed, patting me on the back.

“I guess since no one was really strong in all three events, the top prizes this year went to people who were strong in two events and not horrible in the third,” I said.  “And I had a good poker game and improved my disc golf.”

Eddie and I went back to the living room, where the others awaited our announcement.  “In second place,” Eddie said, “Greg Dennison!”  I smiled as everyone cheered for me.

“It was fixed!” Lars called out.  “Greg was counting the scores!”

“I can show you the numbers,” I said.

“Nah, I’m just messing with you.  Congratulations, Greg.”

“And in first place,” Eddie continued, “your 1998 Man of Steel, the first freshman to win in as long as any of us can remember: Randy Smith!”  Everyone cheered more loudly as Randy pumped his fist and gave a celebratory yell.  Eddie then said, “And since I’m graduating, Randy, Blake, Tim, and 3 will be taking over next year as the hosts of Man of Steel.  They’ll be roommates in Pine Grove Apartments.”  Everyone cheered again.

I would participate in two more Man of Steel competitions, the official one at Pine Grove the following year, and an unofficial one which served as Eddie’s bachelor party in 2001.  Randy, Blake, Tim, and 3 were great hosts, but I never came closer to winning than my second-place finish in 1998.  The torch was passing, and my Man of Steel career would come to an end soon.

I was back at the De Anza house the following night for the Jeromeville Christian Fellowship senior banquet, proudly wearing my Man of Steel shirt.  In previous years, Man of Steel participants received a t-shirt, but this year, we decided to be more fancy.  Eddie and his housemates had ordered polo shirts, blue-gray in color, with the words “Man of Steel” stitched into the right chest.  Several people who had not been there asked how the competition went, and I smiled and shared that I came in second.

During that senior banquet, Janet McAllen from the JCF staff team said, “I remember, back when you guys were freshmen, I was thinking that it’ll be bittersweet when you graduate.  So many of you from your class were so active in this fellowship, and so active in doing work for the Kingdom of God.  But the good news is that I feel the same way about this year’s freshman class.  So I know that you will be passing the torch and leaving the fellowship in good hands.”

It was time to pass the torch.  I had another year at the University of Jeromeville, with my student teaching coming up next year, and I would continue to attend JCF when I could.  But I would have other priorities next year.  All of us at that senior banquet were growing up, going out into the real world, and others were coming to take our place leading this fellowship.  I was not sure exactly what the future would hold, but the time I had spent in JCF was preparing me for the future spiritually, and I had made some of the best friendships of my life during that time. 

Readers: Tell me about a time you did better in a competition than you expected to.

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.

June 5, 1998.  Sharing my story while wearing a funny shirt. (#176)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 6 Comments

I drove to campus that night feeling a little bit nervous.  I had been to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship almost every Friday night of every school year since October of sophomore year, but tonight was different for two reasons.

First of all, I was going to be speaking in front of the entire group tonight.

Three weeks earlier, Tabitha Sasaki was reading the announcements at JCF, and she asked all of us seniors to meet briefly afterward to plan our senior night.  Courtney Kohl, Erica Foster, and Sasha Travis were sitting behind me; I remember this because anything involving Sasha stuck out in my mind those days.  It was also the first time I had ever seen Sasha at JCF.  She was not a student at the University of Jeromevillle, she was still in high school, but she would be starting at UJ next year.  She knew me, and the girls she sat with, from church, and she was going to share an apartment with those girls next year.

I was making small talk with the girls after the last worship song and prayer ended.  About five minutes later, I said, “I should go to that senior meeting now.  Hey, Sasha, you should come.  You’re a senior.”

“Not the right kind of senior,” Sasha replied.  The three of them laughed.

I walked out to the lobby next to the lecture hall where JCF met.  After most of the seniors had arrived, we began to discuss the events for the upcoming senior night.  Three people would be sharing testimonies.  I had occasionally shared my testimony with small group Bible studies, and in individual one-on-one conversations, but I had never shared all of that with a large group.

“Anyone else want to share?” Tabitha asked after one person had volunteered so far.  Apparently she was in charge of planning the senior night.  “I think it would be good to hear from some people who haven’t shared a lot before.”

I looked around.  No one was raising their hand.  Maybe this was my chance.  I always wanted to be more of a part of this group, and since I was not in the inner cliques, I rarely got to share.  All I had to do was tell my story, and storytelling was something I was good at.  And maybe I had things to say that others might want, or need, to hear.  “May I share?” I asked.

“Greg!” Tabitha replied.  “Sure!”

“I think you have a great testimony,” Eddie Baker added.  “Thanks for volunteering.”

Now, three weeks later, even though I had volunteered for this, I was a little bit nervous.  I still wanted to share, and I was sure that I would do fine; it was just an unfamiliar situation.  And I was also nervous because I was wearing a silly t-shirt with Brent Wang’s face on it.

A few months ago, Taylor Santiago told me about a late-night conversation he had with Brent.  The two of them were talking about how most of the advice given in Christian youth and college groups regarding dating was, essentially, “don’t.”  I had heard a lot of preaching about dating with purpose, with an end goal of marriage, and of course about not having sex outside of marriage and setting boundaries to avoid this kind of temptation.  But, as Taylor suggested to me, these groups fell short of actually offering suggestions for Christians to form healthy dating relationships.  Taylor and Brent had had lengthy discussions among themselves about what such a group would look like.  As their idea began to take shape, they jokingly began referring to  the group as the Brent Wang Fellowship.

The group still had yet to plan any meetings, but Taylor had made T-shirts for the group.  I thought Taylor was joking when he first started talking about the T-shirts, but then a couple weeks ago he asked if I was still interested, and that he needed money if I was.  I said sure and paid him, and now I was wearing the shirt for the first time.  The shirt was white, with a picture of Brent’s grinning face, and the dark blue letters “BWF” at the bottom.

Brent was in the lobby of 170 Evans when I arrived.  He saw me and pointed at my shirt.  “Nice shirt!” he said.

“Thanks,” I replied, laughing a little.  I entered the lecture hall and looked around, noticing two other people who were friends with Brent and Taylor wearing their own BWF shirts.  I chose to wear this tonight, but I still felt a little silly.

Xander Mackey saw me approaching.  “Hey, Greg,” he said.  “What’s with those shirts?  Is this the Brent Wang Fan Club or something?”

“Brent Wang Fellowship,” I corrected.  “Brent and Taylor Santiago have this idea to start a group to talk about healthy Christian dating.”

“Shouldn’t you name your group after someone who actually has a girlfriend, then?”

“Ouch,” I said, laughing.  “Harsh.”

“Hey, you’re giving your testimony tonight, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I’ve never done this before, but I think I’ll be all right.”

“You will.  God wants us all to tell our stories.  And you know the story, because it happened to you.”

“That’s true.”

“Where are you sitting?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come sit with us,” Xander said.  I followed him to an empty seat next to where he was sitting; Raphael Stevens and John Harvey, also seniors, were sitting next to him.

When I heard music start to play, I looked to the front of the room, where Brent, Tabitha, and the rest of the worship team began playing.  “Welcome to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship!” Tabitha said into her microphone.  “It’s senior night!  You’re gonna hear some great testimonies from three of our graduating seniors.  But first, let’s worship the Lord.”  The band played three worship songs, all of which were familiar to me by now after having attended Jeromeville Christian Fellowship for a while.  “Lord Jesus,” Brent said into the microphone after the last song ended.  “I pray tonight that you will be with all of our seniors.  Give them the words that you want them to share, and open the ears and minds of those hearing their messages.  I pray that we will send off our graduating seniors with the knowledge that God is with them wherever they will go, and that they will be shining lights in the world.  Amen.”

Janet McAllen, who was on the paid staff team who ran JCF, along with her husband, came to the front next for announcements.  This was the last JCF meeting of the year, with final exams beginning in a week, so most of the announcements pertained to next year, signing up for Outreach Camp and small groups.  I already had a small group, and I would not be at Outreach Camp because I would be student teaching already by that time.  One announcement caught my attention: there would be a Bible study meeting this summer at the De Anza house, for anyone who would be in Jeromeville over the summer.  I would definitely be going to that.

“A few of our graduating seniors will be sharing their testimonies now,” Janet announced.  “First up, please welcome Greg Dennison.”  I walked up to the front of the room nervously as over a hundred students applauded, their eyes now all on me.  I pulled a note card out of my pocket, where I had outlined the major points of my talk, and placed it on a music stand that the worship team had been using.  I could refer back to this to make sure I did not forget any of the major points.  As soon as I turned to face the group, people began to giggle and chuckle.  “Is that Brent?” I heard someone nearby say.  They were not laughing at me; they were just laughing at the BWF shirt.

My shirt, I thought.  Suddenly I thought of a way to begin my talk that I had not thought of earlier.  “Hi,” I said.  “So I don’t really get up here in front of everyone very often.  I kind of think that maybe that’s from God.  Like, he knows that if I’m in the spotlight too often, it might, you know, go to my head, and I’d do something crazy, like put my face on a shirt.”  I paused as I heard laughter slowly rise from the crowd.  “I’m just kidding,” I said, laughing a little at my own joke.  “Brent is a great guy.  Anyway, I’m going to share my testimony now.

“I wasn’t involved in JCF at all my freshman year,” I explained.  “I grew up Catholic.  My mom’s family has been Catholic since before any of my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents came to the US.  Growing up, my mom went to Mass every week, but she didn’t usually force me to go all the time.  I went maybe once a month.  My mom’s church doesn’t really have much for kids, and when I did do their stuff for kids, the other kids teased and bullied me, so I didn’t want to go.  As I got older, though, I started going more often.  I had an unrequited crush on a girl from school who also went to my church, and I have to admit, that was one of the things that got me going more often.”  A few people chuckled as I paused.  I gestured in Sarah Winters’ direction in the crowd and continued,  “I told the crush story once to Sarah Winters, and she told me that that was God knowing how to get my attention and bring me back to him.  I had never really thought of it that way at the time.

“So I got to Jeromeville, and Mom told me to look for the Newman Center, the Catholic student ministry.  I went to Mass there every week and got involved with singing in the church choir.  I lived in a dorm, and I didn’t drink or smoke or party or anything, so I hung out a lot with other people who didn’t do that stuff.  And most of those people were Christians.  Sarah.  Liz and Ramon and Jason.  Caroline.  Krista.  Charlie.”  Also Taylor and Pete, I thought, but neither of them appeared to be here tonight.  They had become more involved with Jeromeville Covenant Church and less involved with JCF over the years.  “I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up, and it was nice to know that there were people who actually cared about me.

“One night, some of those people were sitting in the hall near my room, during quiet hours, and they woke me up at one in the morning.  I was really mad.  I picked up something to throw, it was a cardboard box, and I threw it into the hallway and almost hit Sarah.  Sorry, Sarah.”  I looked up at Sarah; she started laughing, and others in the room joined in.  “I had a lot of issues with outbursts like this when I was young, and I was so upset with myself that I had let my new friends see that side of me.  I ran outside and sat in my car for a while, contemplating quitting school and running away.  I finally decided I would just go back to my room, try to get some sleep, and apologize to everyone in the morning.  Just hope for the best, I guess.

“But I never got back to my room.  I walked into the lobby, and all of the people who saw me get upset, they had all been sitting in the lobby the whole time, praying for me.”  I paused for dramatic effect.  “This was the first time I can remember really having a meaningful experience of seeing Christians acting like Christians, and it blew me away.  I was so used to being scolded and corrected when I got upset like that, and it felt nice to know that some people were actually concerned for my well-being.

“The following year, sophomore year, I lived alone.  By the time I figured out that I had to hurry up and sign a lease for the next year, all my friends from the dorm already had plans.  So I was alone much of the time.  It wasn’t like in the dorm, where I could just wander around the halls if I felt like hanging out with someone.  I was depressed a lot.  My friends from freshman year had invited me to JCF before, so I took them up on their offer and started going to large group with them.  I wasn’t really looking for a deeper connection with Jesus yet; I just wanted to see my friends.  But the more I got to know people from JCF, I noticed something different about these people.  I kept hearing, and seeing, more and more that knowing Jesus meant something more than just going to church and not drinking and partying.

“A few months later, I had another experience with people caring for me on a bad day.  I was feeling down and lonely because all my friends were busy one night after large group, so I just sat there as everyone left.  Eddie and Xander found me while they were cleaning up, and we had a good talk about life and God and stuff.  They invited me to hang out with them afterward.  That was the weekend of the pro football championship, and two days later I was hanging out with them, watching the game.  The game was terrible, because the Texas Toros won.”  I heard a few laughs from the crowd, mixed with a few boos apparently coming from Toros fans.  “But I still had a lot of fun.

“The final piece of the puzzle came a few weeks after the football game.  It was a Thursday afternoon, February 15, 1996.  I was feeling discouraged again, and I ran into Janet while I was walking through the MU.  She asked how I was doing, I said I wasn’t having a good day, and then she asked the most important question anyone has ever asked me.” I paused.  “She asked, ‘Do you know Jesus?’  If she had said, ‘Are you a Christian,’ I would have said yes.  But, honestly, I really didn’t know Jesus, so I asked what she meant.  Janet explained to me about how we are all sinful, fallen human beings, and that sin separates us from God.  Jesus died on the cross for us, to bring us eternal life, and nothing we can do without Jesus can bring us back to God.  Jesus says that he is the way, the truth, and the life. Paul says that if you confess that Jesus is Lord, and believe that he rose from the dead, you will be saved.  Janet asked me if I believed this, and if I was ready to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior.  I was ready.  I said yes, and we prayed.

“Since then, life certainly hasn’t been perfect.  The Bible never says that things will be perfect.  But life has felt more hopeful.  I know that God is with me, and that he has a plan for me, even when I can’t see it all.  Janet gave me a few verses to memorize, and that night, I memorized my first verse, Romans 5:5.  ‘And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.’

“So, all of you, please remember.  If you have a friend who doesn’t quite fit in, if you know someone who is feeling alone, reach out to that person.  There are a lot of people out there who just need a friend.  Your actions reaching out to those people just might plant a seed that will make a difference in eternity, just like how my friends planted that seed for me.”  I paused, then closed awkwardly with, “Thank you, and God bless.”

I nervously took a breath.  It was over.  I had told my story.  The entire room erupted into applause.  I smiled.  These people, some of whom I did not even know, were all being supportive of me.  But this was not about me.  I was just telling them how God had worked in my life, and hopefully someone heard something that God needed to tell them.

I walked back to my seat, where Xander patted me on the back.  Raphael stood up and squeezed past Xander and me; he was scheduled to speak next.  He told a story about having fallen in with a partying crowd in high school, but Eddie was his freshman roommate, and he started attending the Bible study that met in their room.  Kelly Graham, who was there that first night I hung out with Eddie and Xander, was the third speaker; she spoke about having grown up in a Christian family, and how her involvement with JCF, along with a year of studying abroad in Hungary, strengthened her desire to do missions overseas in the near future.

After Kelly’s testimony, all of the seniors were invited to the front of the room.  We stood in a line, and each of the staff members prayed for us, along with a few others.  We then sat back down and sang along with everyone else as the worship team played one more song.  After the song, I stood up and looked at the guys sitting next to me.

“That was good,” Xander said.  “You really shared your story well.”

“Thank you,” I replied.  “And thank you for being there that night.”

“We kind of had a common theme of friends inviting us to JCF,” Raphael commented.

“Yeah.  It’s so important to be in community with the people around you.”

“Hey, are you going to Man of Steel tomorrow?”

“Of course,” I replied.  “I’ll see you there?”

“Yeah!  I love Man of Steel.  It’s so much fun.”

Later that night, as I was mingling with others in the room, a freshman whom I did not know well, but had seen before, came up to me.  “Thanks so much for sharing your story, Greg,” he said.  “It was perfect, because I invited my roommate tonight.  He’s been curious to know more about Jesus, but this is the first time he actually came with me.”

“Nice,” I replied.  “God knew he needed to hear these testimonies.”

I had no plans that night, but unlike the night I met Eddie and Xander, I was okay with going home early this time.  Tomorrow was the Man of Steel competition, and I was going to be hanging out with a bunch of the guys from JCF all day.  I had to be at the De Anza house at ten in the morning, and I did not want to be too tired.  I went home after the room had mostly emptied, feeling like God really was using my story to help people, and as I walked to the car, I prayed for that freshman who had come for the first time.

I got to share this story at JCF one more time, at Alumni Night in the spring of 2016.  The head staff at the time were former students whose years on campus overlapped with mine, and I had recently gotten together with them to catch up.  At one point, I told some of the stories leading to how I became a Christian, and how my friendships in JCF played a key role. They said that my story would be a good one to share at that year’s Alumni Night.  The theme for that night was “God Working Through the Generations,” and as part of the multi-generational theme, they scheduled testimonies from an older alumnus, a younger alumnus, an upperclassman, and a freshman.  I was the older alumnus, 39 years old at the time. Students at UJ in 2016 lived in a completely different world than the world I knew as a student in the 1990s.  But the point of my message, about reaching out to friends when they go through tough times, was just as true. A few students afterward came up and told me that they had either invited friends to JCF or had been invited by friends, and that my words meant a lot to them.

I had many more adventures over the years involving the BWF shirt.  But those are stories for later.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone would remember me if I were to suddenly disappear.  Have I really made an impact?  Have I changed the world at all?  I may not have made the same kind of impact that others may have, I may not have my face on a T-shirt, but nights like that one, when I got to share my story, remind me that I have made an impact in some way to some people.  

If Don’t Let The Days Go By were a TV show, this would have been one of those episodes where the writers get lazy, and they just slap together a story using clips from previous episodes.

Readers: Has there ever been a time when you told someone about things you had been through, and it made an impact on them? Or have you ever been impacted by hearing someone else’s life story? 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.

May 23, 1998.  The events of this day made the approaching end of my studies feel more real. (#175)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 3 Comments

I did not expect many people to be out and about at 8:44 on a Saturday morning.  Jeromeville was a university town, and many students would probably be sleeping off hangovers from the night before, or just generally sleeping in.  As I turned east on Coventry Boulevard, into the morning sun, I reached up and flipped the car visor down.  The sun rose early this time of year, so it was high enough now that the visor actually blocked it.

A ways down the road, I stopped at a red light at the intersection with G Street.  The Art Center, where I saw the now-defunct band Lawsuit play the summer after sophomore year, was to my right, with a large city park next to it.  I noticed a lot of cars parked along G Street, probably for youth baseball games at the park.  Maybe soccer too; soccer was huge in Jeromeville, but I did not follow soccer enough to know if this was youth soccer season.  I remembered those days back in Plumdale of watching my younger brother Mark play baseball, and working the scoreboard and snack bar with my mother.  I enjoyed watching Mark’s games, but some days the rest of the family would insist on staying at the park all day to watch every other game. I did not particularly want to watch kids I did not know play baseball, so I would go home after Mark’s game and play Nintendo by myself.

At the eastern edge of Jeromeville, about four miles from my house, Coventry Boulevard turned to the south and became Bruce Boulevard.  I drove across the railroad tracks and the adjacent Highway 100 on an overpass, heading south.  The road descended into a neighborhood of highway commercial services, the kind of symbol of corporate America that the Jeromeville City Council and their ilk would probably consider a stain on their precious little city.  Too bad for them.  I turned right past fast food restaurants and gas stations and pulled into the parking lot of a Denny’s adjacent to a Howard Johnson express motel.

I expected Denny’s to be mostly empty, but I was wrong.  The restaurant was about three-quarters full, with a number of older customers drinking their morning coffee at the bar and waiters bringing plates of greasy breakfast food to a group of students who looked to have been awake all night partying.  I inhaled the scent of bacon and pancake syrup and smiled.  I had not had a real breakfast like this in months.  That frat boy in my writing class may have a low opinion of Denny’s, but I enjoy a nice big greasy breakfast every once in a while.

“Table for just one, sir?” a middle-aged waitress asked over the din of speaking customers.

“I’m meeting someone here,” I replied.  “Do you mind if I look around to see if she’s here yet?”

“Go ahead,” the waitress said.  It did not take me long to walk around the restaurant and conclude that I had arrived first.  I asked for a table for two, and the waitress led me to a table and placed two menus on it.

I had gotten an email from Danielle Coronado about a week ago, the first I had heard from her in months.  Danielle was one of my closest friends freshman year; she lived right down the hall from me in Building C.  She was the one who first suggested that I sing in the choir at Mass at the Newman Center sophomore year, and in University Chorus junior year.  But I had not seen much of her this year.  I stopped going to Newman in October of junior year, instead going to the Evangelical Covenant church where many of my friends from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship went.  The last time I was in chorus was fall quarter of this school year, and Danielle could not fit chorus into her schedule that time.  Now we were both about to graduate, and Danielle sent me an email saying that she was trying to catch up with as many friends in Jeromeville as she could during her last month here.  I thought that was a great idea.  She had scheduled so many of these meetings that the best time that worked for both of us was now, breakfast on a Saturday morning.

As I waited alone at the table, my mind began running through all of the usual scenarios.  Maybe Danielle was still asleep.  Maybe Danielle had to cancel on me at the last minute, and I did not get the message because I had left the house already.  Maybe I went to the wrong Denny’s, even though I was positive that this was the only Denny’s in Jeromeville. Maybe sometime within the last week, Danielle got a boyfriend and decided never to speak to any of her old guy friends again.  None of these were true, though; Danielle walked in about ten minutes after I got there.  She still looked the same as I remembered her from the first day we met freshman year: a bit shorter than me, with shoulder-length curly brown hair and thick glasses.

“Greg!” Danielle exclaimed, putting her arms out to hug me.

“It’s good to see you,” I replied, returning the hug.  She sat at the table across from me.

“How are you?  I feel like we haven’t talked in forever!”

“Probably because we haven’t,” I said.  “But I’m doing okay.  Just busy with all the usual stuff.  What about you?”

“Same.  It feels weird that we’re about to graduate!”

“I know.”

“You’re finishing this quarter?”

“Yes.  Then staying in Jeromeville for the teacher certification program.  I told you I was doing that next year, right?”

“I think last I heard you were going to do a teaching program, but you didn’t know for sure where.  That’s exciting!  How does that work?  Will you be in a classroom?”

“We had a meeting earlier this week to learn more about the program and get our assignments,” I explained.  “I’ll be at Nueces High School in the mornings, helping out in two classrooms at first, then gradually taking over the classes as the year goes on.  And in the afternoons, I’ll have classes here at UJ.”

The waitress interrupted to take our food orders.  Danielle ordered scrambled eggs with fruit on the side; I ordered the big breakfast meal with pancakes, bacon, scrambled eggs, and hash browns.

“Nueces High,” Danielle repeated.  “How far is Nueces from Jeromeville?”

“About a twenty minute drive.  Not too bad.”

“What classes will you be teaching?”

“Geometry and Basic Math B.”

“What’s Basic Math B?”

“Basically, that’s the class for students who need another math class to graduate, but won’t ever be taking another math class.  I have a feeling I’m not going to enjoy working with those students as much as the geometry students.”

“Still, it’s exciting, though!  You’re one step closer to being a teacher!”

“I know!  What are you doing next year?  You’re going for a master’s in psych, right?”

“Yeah.  At South Valley State. Closer to home.”

“That sounds good,” I said.  “Good luck!  What else have you been up to this year?”

Danielle told me about her classes this quarter keeping her busy, so busy that she had not been able to do chorus at all this year.  I told her about the strange piece we had to sing for the ceremony when the drama building was renamed Waite Hall.  I also told her about working with the youth group kids at church and going with them to Winter Camp in February.  Our food arrived while I was talking about Winter Camp.

“I’m glad you like your new church,” she said.

“How are things at the Newman Center?  Are you still there?”

“Yeah.  It’s the same as it always is.  That’s one thing about Catholicism; you always pretty much know what to expect.”

“That’s true.  Keeping to traditions is good,” I said. 

“Are you still going to JCF?” Danielle asked.

“Yes.  They had a spring retreat this year, a few weeks ago.  It was good.”

“That’s good!  Where’d you go?”

“Muddy Springs, outside of Bidwell.  I’d been to retreats there before.”

“Is that the place with the old hotel?”

“Yeah,” I said.  I wondered how Danielle had heard of that, being from the other end of the state.  But I knew that she had other friends in JCF besides me; the people who got me involved with JCF in the first place all lived in Building C with me and Danielle freshman year.  She may have heard about a past JCF retreat from one of them.  Or maybe even from me.  “Taylor, Liz and Ramon, Pete and Caroline, and Sarah were all on that retreat too.  The seven of us took a group picture.  Friends since Building C freshman year.”  I suddenly realized that maybe I should not have said that.  Danielle and Pete dated for about a year, and Danielle and Caroline were roommates freshman year, so she might not exactly want to be reminded that Pete and Caroline were dating now.

“Aww, how sweet,” Danielle replied, smiling genuinely.  If she was bothered by my mention of Pete and Caroline, she did not show it.  “Speaking of JCF people, I heard that Tabitha Sasaki and Eddie Baker are dating?”

“Yes,” I said.  Danielle did not run around in the same circles as Tabitha and Eddie, but I assumed that she probably heard this, and knew them in the first place, because she and Eddie and Tabitha had many mutual friends.  After all, I also had met Tabitha through mutual friends before I got involved with JCF.

“Good for them!” Danielle said.  “Are they graduating this year?”

“Yeah.  They’re both staying in Jeromeville.  Eddie is going on staff with JCF part time, and Tabitha is going to do the teacher training program at Capital State, to be an elementary school teacher.”

“That’s good.”

“How’s Carly?” I asked.  “I never see her anymore either.”

“She’s good.  She spends all her time with her boyfriend these days.  I feel like I hardly ever see her anymore.  But they’re really happy together.”  I felt that familiar pang of disappointment when I heard the word boyfriend; Carly was now just one more cute girl I would not end up with.  I never considered her an option, though; I was close enough friends with Danielle that it would have just seemed wrong to try to get romantically involved with her better-looking younger sister.  I also remembered something Danielle said when Carly started at Jeromeville that suggested a history of sibling rivalry between them, especially being so close in age, barely a year apart.

“Tell her I said hi next time you talk to her.”  

“I will,” Danielle replied.  After a pause, she continued, “What do you have going on the rest of the weekend?  Any big plans?”

“Tonight I have an initiation ceremony for Phi Beta Kappa,” I said.

“Phi Beta Kappa?  That’s the organization for really smart people, right?  Not like a fraternity?”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling.

“Congratulations!  My grades have always been decent, but not good enough to get into Phi Beta Kappa.”

“I wasn’t expecting it.  I got a letter from them a couple months ago saying I had been chosen as a member.  I pay a fairly small membership fee, and I can put it on my résumé in the future.”

“How cool!  Good for you!”

“Thank you.”

Danielle and I continued making small talk as we finished eating.  Around quarter to eleven, she said, “I should probably get going.  I have some studying to do, then I’m having dinner with Theresa Arnold.  Do you ever talk to her anymore?”

“I haven’t seen Theresa in so long,” I said.  “Tell her I said hi.”

“I will!”

After we paid and left the restaurant, Danielle and I walked to the parking lot.  I said, “This was such a great idea on your part, to reconnect with all your old friends before you graduate.  Thanks so much for including me.”

“You’re welcome!  It was so good to see you!”

“You too!”  I gave Danielle a hug, then got into the car and drove home.


The Phi Beta Kappa Society was not the first honor society to invite me.  Last year, I had paid the fees to become a member of Golden Key National Honor Society, as well as Pi Mu Epsilon, an honor society specifically for mathematics majors.  I also was invited to join another one called Phi Kappa Phi, but I turned them down.  Their initiation ceremony featured a keynote speech about the promise of human cloning.  As a Christian, I believed that life began at conception and every soul had life breathed into it by God, and that cloning humans was immoral and unethical, so I wanted no part of that organization.  In hindsight, that may have been an impulsive decision, especially since I never told anyone in the organization why I turned them down.

Phi Beta Kappa was the oldest academic honor society in the United States, having been founded in Virginia in 1776.  I did not grow up among academics, and Phi Beta Kappa was the only honor society I had ever heard of before beginning university studies, so it must be prestigious.  The invitation said that the dress code was “not formal,” requiring only shirts, ties, and jackets for men.  Any group that considered wearing a tie and jacket “not formal” was far more upscale than anything I had ever experienced.  I did not own a dressy jacket, but it seemed too hot for a jacket this time of year anyway.  I hoped I would not feel underdressed in my shirt and tie.

The event was in a conference center on campus that I had only seen from the outside.  It was on the south end of campus on Old Jeromeville Road, on the other side of the Arboretum from Waite Hall and the music building.  I turned off of OJ Road into a parking lot and walked inside the building, looking a little overwhelmed.  I was not late, but apparently others more familiar with the world of higher academics knew to arrive early, because the room already seemed full.  Students mingled with adults and with each other; some of the other men wore full suits, and some were dressed like me.  “Welcome,” a middle-aged woman in a dress told me as I was looking around.  She handed me a program.

“Hi,” I replied.

“What’s your name?” she said.

“Greg,” I replied.  I noticed then that she had a box of large envelopes labeled with names, and that there would probably be one in there for me, but she would need my full name in order to find it.  “Gregory J. Dennison,” I said.

She flipped through the box of envelopes and handed me one.  It had my name on it, printed on a label.  “Here you go, Greg.  Inside you’ll find your certificate, and all the information you need about the Society.”

“Thank you,” I said.  The room was kind of loud with this many people in it.  There were well over a hundred people in the room, but this was still a small percentage of the population of this large university.  No one I knew well was here, although I recognized a couple of faces of people I had had classes with at some point.

A few minutes later, a gray-haired man standing in the front of the room spoke into a microphone and told us to sit.  The speaker proceeded to tell us about the history of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, from its founding as a philosophical society and its evolution into a selective honor society.  The society had chapters only at academically selective universities, and only the best students at these universities were invited to join.  Another speaker, the same woman who handed me the envelope when I entered, spoke next, explaining that Phi Beta Kappa was so much more than something to put on a résumé.  She encouraged us to get involved with local chapters, which hosted networking events and academic functions to promote lifelong learning.  A third speaker added that the Society sent a free publication a couple times each year, with another subscription-only magazine available as well.  Both included scholarly articles, reviews of academic publications, and information about the Society’s efforts advocating for liberal arts education.

At the end of the speech, we were all invited to stay for refreshments.  I looked through the envelope.  Inside was an order form for official Phi Beta Kappa insignia and merchandise, including the key that was the widely recognized symbol of the Society.  It was nice to be a member of this prestigious and selective society, but all of these extras cost money, and I questioned their value in my life.  I wandered over to the refreshment table and spent the next half hour people-watching, while consuming fruit punch and little cubes of various kinds of cheese, and also the occasional baby carrot to make myself feel healthy.  Some of the adults who were involved in the local chapter, including those who spoke, introduced themselves to me and encouraged me to get involved.  “I’ll look into it,” I said.

Although I felt out of place in an academic honor society, I felt proud of my accomplishments.  Not everyone could say that they were a member of a prestigious organization like Phi Beta Kappa.  Although I never got involved in the local chapter or any academic events, I did always skim through the free publications that showed up in my mailbox over the years, and about a decade later, I splurged and bought the cheapest possible Phi Beta Kappa key, engraved with my name, school, and graduation year on the back.

As I drove home that night, I realized how the events of this day made the approaching end of my undergraduate studies feel more real.  I was now a member of a group only open to high-achieving students from  select universities, and a month from now, I would be graduating, with honors, from the University of Jeromeville.  This was a big deal.  Life was changing, and while I would still be in school next year, it would be a completely different feeling, because next year would prepare me for a specific career.

Also, Danielle, one of the first friends I made in Jeromeville, had specifically sought out her old friends, because she knew that she would leave Jeromeville soon.  She wanted to see her old friends for what may be the last time in a while.  That day was in fact the last time I saw Danielle in person.  She got busy with graduate school the following year, and we lost touch.  She found me on Facebook when we were in our early thirties, but she stopped using Facebook soon after that, and we lost touch again.  I do not know where she is or what she is doing today.

I did not have many friends as a child, and I felt closer to the friends I had in Jeromeville than any other group of friends in my life so far.  But I knew that those friendships would be changing.  I had already grown apart from some of the people I knew as a freshman.  Many of my friends would be graduating this year, and I expected to lose touch with some of them, but I would do everything I could to try my best to stay in touch.  Fortunately, this transition would be gradual.  I was still going to be in Jeromeville next year, and I had friends who were not graduating on time who would still be here.  I also had younger friends who were still in school, and I had connections at church whose lives were not tied to school years.  Growing up was a part of life, and while it always hurt to grow apart from people, I knew that this was also necessary to make room for new, exciting things in life.

Readers: What is the most prestigious award or accomplishment you have ever received or completed? 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.

May 12, 1998. What I learned the most from sharing my story was not about writing. (#174)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 10 Comments

I sat in Fiction Writing class, both nervous and excited.  Each of us in the class had written a story and given a copy to each other student, and we were taking turns getting our stories critiqued.  My story, “August Fog,” would be the third one reviewed today, and as the discussion for the second story wrapped up, I kept anticipating in my mind what people would say about it.

Our stories could be about pretty much anything, and the stories my classmates wrote pretty much were about everything.  A guy named Gary wrote about a guy who broke into someone’s dorm room and got caught.  He said that he got the idea for the story while thinking about a time his dorm room was actually broken into, and picturing in his mind what kind of loser would do that, so he made the thief in his story a complete pathetic loser toward whom the reader would have no sympathy.  A girl named Ariana wrote a tear-jerker about a girl whose boyfriend died in a tragic accident.  I sincerely hoped that her story was not inspired by anything that happened to her in real life.  A guy named Mike wrote an unusual story where the character just goes about his life, but the point of view occasionally switched to that of various inanimate objects that the character interacts with.  I was still trying to wrap my head around that one.

After reading all of these over the last couple weeks, I thought that “August Fog” was pretty good.  No typographical or grammatical errors that I could find, and it did not have perspective shifts like Mike’s story that made it difficult to follow.  The setting and premise were fairly straightforward; a guy tries to work out his feelings for a girl, and he decides in the end that he is not ready for a relationship.  While I was a little nervous to share my work with the class, I anticipated someone saying that I had so perfectly captured the tension of being someone my age with conflicted feelings toward a romantic interest.

“All right,” Serena Chang, the instructor, announced as we wrapped up the discussion of the story before mine.  “Next up is ‘August Fog,’ by Greg.  What did you all think?”  The other students in the class shuffled the papers on their desks to their copies of “August Fog.”  Some turned the pages, looking for notes they had written on the stories themselves.  I felt a little like I was being put on the spot, but none of this was unexpected, since I had seen twelve other students have their stories critiqued over the last few class meetings.

“I’m a little confused,” said Ariana.  Uh-oh.  This was not a good sign, if that was the first thing someone said.  Ariana continued, “We get all this character development for Dan, he’s kind of awkward and confused, but none of that really explains why he decides not to go out with Allison.”

What?  I thought, how is this not obvious?  Dan realized that he was not ready for a girlfriend, just like he said.  And people who rush into relationships are stupid, so it was obvious that he would not want to be like that.

“I agree,” added another girl, Jenn.  “I like Dan.  He seems like the kind of character you’re rooting for.  He’s awkward, yes, but he’s lovably awkward.  The ending just seemed like a letdown to me.  I was really hoping he would get his happy ending.”

No, I thought, silently protesting in my mind.  The ending was perfect.  The right thing is not to rush into a relationship when you still have so many unanswered questions, like Dan does, and he avoids temptation and does the right thing.  Where was the letdown in that?  Why did Jenn not see this ending as happy?

“I don’t see Dan’s awkwardness as lovable at all,” said Gary, the guy who wrote the story about his room getting broken into.  I only knew Gary from this class, but I had gotten the impression all quarter that I did not particularly care for this guy.  He wore a sweatshirt with the letters of his fraternity on it, and he always showed up to class looking like he had just rolled out of bed two minutes before.  The thief character in Gary’s story, whom he called a pathetic loser in his response to everyone’s critiques, reminded me too much of myself, especially the part in the beginning of that story when the thief was talking to girls in chat rooms and getting rejected by them.

“Why didn’t you think Dan was lovable?” Jenn asked.

“He’s pathetic.  He can’t talk to girls.  And he’s weak.  He knows Allison likes him, and he still won’t ask her out!”

I looked down toward the floor.  I did not feel like having all of these eyes judging me so harshly.  Of course, Dan was just a fictional character to the others in the class, but with the inspiration for my story so personal, their constructive criticism still felt like personal attacks.

“I do think that Dan is portrayed accurately and consistently,” Tim Walton said.  Tim was my friend, I knew him from church and from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, and I very much appreciated that he seemed to be turning the discussion in a more positive direction.  “Even if Dan’s motivation for his decision at the end isn’t completely clear, the reader definitely knows who Dan is by the end of the story.”

“I agree,” Jenn replied.

“But I think we need to see the same for Allison,” Tim continued.  “We get a little bit of her personality.  Friendly and quirky.  But there’s so much more we could see with Allison.  She’s a really fun character to read, and if we saw more of her, especially more direct interaction with Dan, we might be able to understand the ending more.”  Finally, someone was saying something directly helpful.  I nodded.

“Yes,” a girl named Christie said.  “I agree. But I don’t quite get the title.  The whole thing with the fog seemed kind of forced.  I can tell why it’s there: the fog is supposed to be a symbol of Dan’s unclear mind, and then it goes away.  But there’s no fog in August.  So maybe the story needs to be set during a different time of year.”

Since my story was about Dan being home from school on break, I set the story in the summer, when school breaks happen, and in Santa Lucia County, where my own home was.  If Christie has never seen fog in August, she obviously has not spent very much time in Santa Lucia County.

A few others continued to weigh in on Allison’s missing character development.  I wrote down in my notebook that I would have to add more scenes with Dan and Allison together when I revised the story.  I was feeling a little better about the kind of constructive criticism I was getting when Gary, the frat boy, opened his mouth again.

“I did have one part of the story I loved,” he said.  “When he gets to Denny’s, and he says a prayer before he eats.  That was hilarious!  I laughed my ass off!”  I looked at him, feeling a little confused, not understanding the point he was making.  Gary continued, “But I kind of feel like that kind of joke doesn’t belong in a serious story.  Maybe the story needs more humor, so the tone is more consistent.”

I puzzled over Gary’s comments as others added their thoughts.  The part that Gary laughed so hard at was not a joke and not intended to be funny.  What was he talking about?  It took me a few minutes to make sense of Gary’s remarks: he thought that, when I mentioned Dan praying before his meal, I was trying to make a joke about the quality of the food at Denny’s.  Gary thought that Dan was praying that he would not get sick from eating at Denny’s.  Since the beginning of sophomore year, when I started going to JCF and my social circle shifted so that I was spending most of my time around Christians, I noticed that most of my friends prayed before eating a meal, and I had done so as well pretty much every day of my life for the last two or three years.  But the concept of praying before a meal was apparently completely foreign to someone like Gary.

Mike, who wrote the story with the unusual shifts in perspective, said, “When I read this story, I got the sense that the reason Dan decided not to go out with Allison was because he doesn’t want to be tied down.  He isn’t ready for a girlfriend because he wants to date around, he wants to party and be young and live his life, and he isn’t ready to give that up yet.  I mean, he was on a date with another girl when he found out Allison liked him.  Dan probably likes that other girl too.”

Totally wrong, I thought.  Dan and Lisa are obviously just friends; that was not a date.  And the whole purpose of dating was to find someone to marry.  Do other people really not understand that?

“So we need to see Dan’s actions more clearly showing that he doesn’t want to be tied down,” Mike continued.

“I agree,” Gary said.  “This guy is an immature weirdo, and the reader needs to see him being immature and weird.”

You will not see that, because that is not who Dan is, I thought.

“But I like Dan,” Jenn said, repeating her thought from earlier.  “I don’t think he’s a weirdo!  But if that’s the case, we need to see more of Dan and Allison interacting.  Because I still don’t understand why he decided not to ask her out.”

“Definitely,” Tim agreed.  “And we need more of Allison.  Her character development is off to a great start, she’s an interesting character, but I feel like I need to know more about her.”

After a few more comments, Serena closed the discussion, as she had for all of the previous discussions.  “Greg, do you have any response to any of these thoughts?” she asked.

I froze for a few seconds, not sure what to say.  Eventually I said, “That was humbling.”  A soft chuckle arose from some of the other students, and I continued, “This was the first time I’ve ever really shared a story with a large number of people who don’t really know me.  I have a lot to think about.”  I did not say anything else out loud.

Two more students had their stories critiqued after mine that day.  When class was dismissed, Tim and I walked out of the room at the same time.  “That was interesting,” I said to Tim, dejectedly.  “I feel misunderstood.”

“Don’t take it personally,” Tim said.  “You basically wrote a Christian story for a secular audience.”

“Yeah.  I guess I did.”


After class, I walked out to the bench in the Arboretum that I thought of as my Bible Bench.  During winter break of junior year, I went to the Urbana conference in Illinois with thousands of other Christian young adults, and all of the attendees had been given a plan to read through the Bible in a year by reading a few chapters every day.  I had followed that plan, but usually only four or five times a week, so that I was now in my seventeenth month of reading the Bible in what should have been a year.  But I was finally nearing the end.

After I did today’s readings, which were supposed to be for December 19, I looked out at the tall trees surrounding me, thinking about what had happened today.  I really did see the world very differently from my peers, at least those outside of church and Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  This was not necessarily a bad thing; I knew that the Kingdom of God would win in the end.  But having spent most of my socializing time the last few years around Christians, and without ever having had much of a secular social life before that, I was not often confronted with this difference in worldview as directly as I was today when people misunderstood my story.  The Bible was full of messages about how God’s people were set apart from the rest of the world.  But it was important for me to have experiences like this.  If my mission as a Christian was to spread the message of Jesus to the rest of the world, I needed to understand how the rest of the world worked.  I prayed about this, asking God to use this experience to teach me something about others, and about where I belonged in the world.  If Gary was so flummoxed by the concept of someone giving thanks to God before a meal, I wondered what he would think about me praying now between classes.

A little bit later, I sat in the Memorial Union reading the comments that others had written about “August Fog.”  Each student had a copy of my story.  They wrote comments on the story as they read it, along with a sentence or two summarizing their thoughts about the story.  After we discussed “August Fog” in class today, everyone gave me back their copies of the story, so that I could read their thoughts.  Most of the comments paralleled what they said in class.

At the end of Tim’s copy of my story, he wrote, “The reader needs more character development with Allison, because she has a lot of depth from what I see so far.  I like this character; she seems like someone I would want to meet and be friends with.”  Allison’s personality was modeled after Sasha Travis, whom I knew from church. Tim went to that church too, but I did not think that Tim knew Sasha.  Tim’s involvement at church seemed mostly confined to the college group, and Sasha was currently a senior in high school.  But Sasha was staying in Jeromeville next year, so she would be part of the college group soon.  I wondered if Tim would recognize that Allison was based on Sasha next year, when Tim and Sasha would both be in the college group.  But I never said anything, because I did not want to reveal that Allison was based on Sasha, or that I liked Sasha.

We had a second story due in three weeks.  We would be doing all the critiquing in one class period, in small groups, so I only needed to bring four copies of that one.  I wrote another story about awkward social interaction; I called it “Try Too Hard,” because the character was trying too hard, and failing, to fit in with the cool group of friends.  I had much lower expectations for people’s reactions to that story, since “August Fog” was so heavily criticized and misunderstood, and the others who read my story had the kind of reaction I expected.  The character in the story dreads seeing his friend because of something terrible that happened at a party the night before.  The others who read the story told me that I did a great job of building suspense, keeping the reader wondering what was so awful about the night before, but when I finally told about the actual awkward interaction at the party, it did not justify the huge buildup or the character’s intense frustration.

What I learned the most from sharing my story was not about writing.  It was more about seeing firsthand how my perspective on many things was quite different from that of others.  I had spent the last three years hearing messages for Christian students encouraging us to be intentional with dating and relationships, not to rush into things too fast, and to keep the end goal of marriage in mind.  Most university students did not approach dating this way, so the message of “August Fog” was lost on them.  And awkward moments, such as those in “Try Too Hard,” were devastatingly embarrassing to me, given my past, but no big deal to many others.

The final exam for the Fiction Writing class, due a week after “Try Too Hard” was due, was to revise the first story we had written.  I took everyone’s suggestions for “August Fog” and expanded the flashback scenes to show more interaction between Dan and Allison.  I wrote more humorous things for Allison to say, to establish that part of her personality more clearly.  And I removed the line about Dan praying before his meal; the audience of this story did not necessarily consist of people who actually do such things, and that quote that Gary had so grossly misunderstood did not add much to the story.

For the final exam, there would be no sharing with peers; I just turned in one copy to Serena.  She said that we could get our stories back, with her thoughts and our final grades, by stopping by her office during finals week.  Serena said that in my revised version of “August Fog,” the characters were much more well defined.  Dan was still the awkward young man confused by love, but the reader had much more of a sense of Allison’s character, which was missing from the first draft.

Serena’s suggestion for further revision, if I chose to continue developing this story, was to make more tension with Allison, and make the interactions between Dan and Allison more awkward.  According to Serena, the information in the story still did not justify Dan’s decision not to pursue a relationship with Allison.  The interactions between them seemed perfectly normal for this stage of friendship, so Serena suggested I needed to show exactly what made Dan so hesitant to dive into the relationship.  She suggested, for example, making Allison a bit more overbearing, making her loquaciousness contrast more with Dan’s introversion.  That makes sense, but that was not the reason I had in mind why Dan decided not to pursue the relationship.

At the end of Serena’s response to my revision, she wrote, “Your writing and your sense of fiction have improved a great deal over the last few months.  I hope you continue writing.  Good work!”  My final grade for the class was an A-minus.  I considered this a major victory, considering that Serena had made it clear on the first day of class that this was not going to be an easy class.  She said that she had only given one A the last time she taught this class.  Also, I had a mental block against English classes that went back to a teacher in high school whose teaching style clashed with my learning and writing styles.  Since then, any time I did better than a B in an English class was cause for major celebration, so to me, an A-minus was a success.

I did continue writing, as Serena hoped.  Over the course of the twenty-five years since I took that class, writing as a hobby has come and gone from my life, but it never went away completely.  I have forgotten much of what I learned in that class, though.  My major problem with “August Fog” and “Try Too Hard” was that I did not know enough about social interactions and relationships in the real world to write convincing fictional interactions and relationships.  I do not know that I ever consciously improved this aspect of my writing.  As I got older, though, I have learned more about others’ perspectives on socializing and dating, which I think automatically helped my writing.

I never did share “August Fog” with Sasha or any of her close friends.  Tim said that he would want to meet someone like Allison.  To this day, I do not know if Tim ever realized that Allison was based on Sasha, or if he even remembered my story by the time he met Sasha.  But they did meet eventually; Sasha ended up married to one of Tim’s best friends, and Tim was a groomsman in their wedding.  But that is a story for another time.

Readers: What is something you feel others often do not understand about the way you see the world? Tell me about it in the comments.

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May 6, 1998. “August Fog”: a short story to share with the class. (#173)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

I clicked Print and watched as the pages began sliding out of my inkjet printer.

Gregory J. Dennison
English 5-04 Chang
6 May 1998

August Fog

Dan sat by the telephone thinking of Allison.  He wondered if she was home tonight, or if instead his message would sit forever unanswered on her machine.  Allison was not always easy to reach, although she and Dan had had some interesting conversations in the past.  The last time Dan wrote to her, he said he would call the next time he visited the area.  And Dan was a man of his word.

He picked up the phone and hung up again before dialing.  He thought about what he wanted to say to Allison and how to do so without looking foolish.  He picked up the telephone again, took a deep breath, and dialed Allison’s number.  His heart began to beat faster as the phone rang.  After five rings a machine picked up.  “Hi!  You’ve reached Allison,” the recorded voice on the other end said.  “I’m not around right now, but leave a message, and I’ll get back to you.”

Dan took another breath as the machine beeped.  “Hi, Allison, this is Dan.  I’m home now, and I’ll probably be around a couple weeks.  I just wanted to say hi and see if you wanted to hang out sometime.  I hope things are going well.  Talk to you later.”  He hung up, thinking about how he sounded like a fool.  He hoped that the recorded greeting was telling the truth, that she really would get back to him.  He wondered where she was.  The fall term had not started yet, so she would not be in class.  She was probably working.  Dan had nothing to do for the next two hours; his parents had not returned from work yet and his two brothers were both at basketball camp.  He decided to take a short walk.

Dan felt a cool wind blowing as he walked under the overcast sky.  It was a mild day in the Gabilan Valley, and the pleasant afternoon sun had given way to a cool fog blowing in from the coast.  He would be leaving the area and returning to school in two weeks where, he hoped, the weather would be warmer.


Dan knew Allison from high school, but she was younger, a freshman when Dan was a senior.  Dan and Allison had mutual friends, but they had never really talked until the year after graduation.  Dan came home from college for Homecoming weekend in the fall of his second year away, and he went to the football game at his old high school, sitting by himself.

Two girls sat down next to him a few minutes later.  One of them, the one directly adjacent to Dan, smiled at him, as if to acknowledge that she recognized him yet did not know him well enough to say anything.  Dan gave the same smile back.  The girl stood average height, with straight brown hair and glasses.  He thought he remembered her name, so he decided to take a guess.

“You’re Allison, right?” he said.

“Yeah.  I remember you, you graduated a couple years ago…” Allison thought, trying to remember his name.  “Dan?”

“That’s right,” Dan said.  “You’re a junior this year?”

“Yes.  I can drive now!  I got my license last month.  The day after I got my license, my friend played this trick on me.  She made a big sign that said, ‘Stay off the road!  Allison Thomas has her license!’ and put it right outside my house.”

Dan laughed.  He looked at her and smiled, enjoying her sense of humor so far.  He wanted to talk to her, to get to know her better; he hoped that he was not just setting himself up for rejection.  “So what are you up to this weekend?” he asked.

“Tonight I’m going to hang out at my friend’s house.  It should be fun.  We’ll probably watch some movies.”

“Sounds like fun!” Dan said.  Allison seemed friendly.  Dan and Allison talked about school and life and other things off and on throughout the football game.  As Dan watched the game, he tried to understand the meaning of this encounter and this new friendship.


Besides Allison, Dan had one other high school friend he still talked to, a girl named Lisa.  Dan and Lisa had at least three classes together every year they were in high school. Lisa had called him earlier that week, and they had made plans to have dinner at Denny’s that night.  Dan looked at his watch; he still had plenty of time before then.  He turned the corner and continued walking.

When he got home, he checked the answering machine.  No messages.  Allison still had all night to call back.  Dan paced around the living room, wondering what this all meant, what he meant to Allison, and why she had to be so hard to reach.  He thought about the possibility of spending time with her that week.  He was not sure exactly what he wanted to do with Allison; he would ask her what she wanted to do, if she ever called back.  If they did start seeing each other regularly, they would have to work something out once Dan returned to school, but Dan would worry about that later. She had to call back first.

Dan sat down and watched the five o’clock news on television.  He looked at the telephone next to him, wondering if he should try calling Allison again.  He decided against it; he had left a message already, and that was all he could do for now.  He hoped she would call back before he left to meet Lisa; that would get one thing off his chest.  He left after the news to go meet up with Lisa at Denny’s.

Dan drove south under a graying sky.  He had a choice of two routes to get to Denny’s.  He chose the one that took him past Allison’s house.  When he got to her street, he looked down the street to see if she was home.  He did not see her car parked on the street.  He looked ahead to see if Allison’s car was approaching, then he looked behind.  He was remembering a time, during spring break a little over a year ago, when he had been walking in front of Allison’s house just as she drove up.


Unlike this evening, that day had been bright and sunny, and Dan had been on foot.  Dan squinted to make sure that it was in fact Allison who had been behind the wheel of the car turning into the Thomases’ driveway.  She was, but she had not seen him at first.  Dan overcame the sense of nervousness and anxiety that was washing over him and waved to her.  “Allison!” he called out.

Allison turned around.  “Dan!” she said.  “Hi!  How are you?”

“Doing well.  I’m home for spring break.”

“Your break is earlier than ours.”

“I know.  It usually is.  How’s school going?”

“Great!  I got straight As last quarter.”

“Congratulations!”

Dan and Allison continued talking for over half an hour, so long that Dan lost track of time.  They covered a wide range of subjects, such as Allison’s pet frog, her plans to attend Creekside Community College in the fall, and the many uses of Spam.

Eventually Mrs. Thomas came outside looking for her daughter, and Dan took this to mean that it was time to go home.  He said hello to Mrs. Thomas and left.  He wished that he and Allison could continue talking.  He wanted to sit down with Allison and talk about life, but frogs and Spam had just seemed more interesting at the time.  Maybe next time they could talk about something else.


“Hey, Dan!” Lisa said as she walked into the waiting area at Denny’s.  Dan stood up, and Lisa hugged him.  “How’ve you been?”

“Pretty good,” Dan said.  “Just hanging out with family while I’m home.  How are you?”

“Same.  Studying for the MCAT and getting ready to send applications.”

The server noticed Lisa’s arrival and led Dan and Lisa to their table.  Another server came to take their orders, and they continued making small talk while waiting for the food to arrive.

“One of my roommates last year was applying to medical school,” Dan said.  “It seems like an intense process.  Good luck.”

“It is intense.  And I’m going to have to send a lot of applications.”

“Yeah.”

“So you still have one more quarter?”

“Yeah.  I need three more classes.”

“Are you going to stay there or move back home after you’re done?”

“Probably stay there.”

Dan and Lisa continued talking for a while.  After the food arrived, Dan said a prayer and began eating.

“I wanted to tell you,” Lisa said.  “My sister told me something the other day that you might like to know.”

“What’s that?”

“Allison Thomas likes you.  She said she would go out with you.”

Dan dropped his fork.  The sudden noise startled the elderly couple dining at the adjacent booth.  “Allison likes me?  Really?”

“Yeah.  She thinks you’re a really great guy.”

“I tried calling her this afternoon.  She didn’t call back yet.”

“Well, she’s a busy girl.  But if she likes you, I’m sure she’ll call you back.”

“Yeah.  It’s exciting to know she likes me,” Dan said.  His face, however, expressed something less than excitement.  Dan looked down at his food, not sure quite what to say or think.  He started thinking again about a possible relationship with Allison.

After about thirty seconds, Lisa broke the silence.  “What’s wrong?” Lisa asked.

“It’s just that this happened so suddenly.  A lot of things to think about.”

“Yeah.  I know.  But I think you should go for it.  Allison’s cool.”

“I really like hanging out with her.  She’s funny.  I like her sense of humor.  The distance thing might be a problem though.”

“You’re only a few hours away.  You can work it out.  I’ve known long-distance couples that stay together a long time.”

“I guess.”

“It’s ultimately your decision, Dan, but I always thought you and Allison could make a good couple.”

“Really?” Dan asked.  “How come?”

“Whenever I see you with Allison, you’re always smiling and laughing.”

“I guess you’re right.  She is pretty funny.”

“See?  You and Allison will be great together.  Go for it!”

“I don’t know.”

“I do.  Just ask her out.”

“Hmm,” Dan said, staring out the window at the overcast sky.


Dan got into his car and started it.  He left the Denny’s parking lot a few minutes after Lisa did.  He was developing a plan in his mind.  He would call Allison and ask if she wanted to do something that weekend.  He was not sure what they would do.  He did not quite know what Allison did and did not like to do, so he would leave it open to her.  After that they would go out for ice cream or coffee or something, somewhere where they could have a serious, meaningful conversation.  For once, Dan thought.  He would mention the possibility of them being more than friends, without letting on that he knew anything.  It would not be that hard to say because he knew how she felt about him.  Yet something still seemed wrong.

He thought about what he wanted their relationship to be like.  They would spend a lot of time together before he had to leave for school.  After that, he would call Allison as often as he could; maybe if they were dating, she would be around to pick up the phone more often.  He planned to visit home a lot next year too.  They would have long, deep, serious conversations with each other at least once a week, hopefully more.  He would be there to console her in hard times, and she would be there for him.  He tried to imagine quality time with Allison.  In his vision, he sat on a couch in his apartment at school, alone, as if he were waiting for a telephone call.  He tried again, but now the only picture that came to his mind was a frog jumping over a can of Spam.

Dan suddenly realized what was wrong.  It felt as if he had been hit over the head with a two-by-four.  He pulled into an empty parking lot to sit and think for a few minutes.  He felt like screaming, or perhaps crying; he did not know which.  He looked up at the sky.  It remained foggy, but the fog was thinning in some places.  The moon shone through in one place, lighting the clouds around it with a beautiful silvery glow.

Dan got home and walked slowly up to the door.  He opened the door to see his brothers eating dinner in front of ESPN SportsCenter.  He continued into the dining room without saying anything to them, going to his parents at the dinner table.  “Hi, Daniel,” his mother said.  “Allison Thomas called for you about fifteen minutes ago.  She said to call back.”

“Okay,” Dan said.  He took a deep breath.  He walked slowly up the stairs and prepared to do what he felt he needed to do.  When he got to his room, he started to dial Allison’s number, but felt a sudden urge to pause and think, to wonder if he had made the right decision.  But he knew he had.  He dialed, and Allison answered on the third ring.

“Hello?” Allison said.

“Hi, Allison?  It’s Dan.”

“Hey.  How are you?” she asked.  Dan and Allison talked for a few minutes.  Dan talked about his time at Denny’s with Lisa, and Allison talked about an annoying co-worker.  Eventually Allison mentioned one of her ex-boyfriends, and Dan saw an opportunity.

“Are you seeing anyone now?” he asked.

“No, I’m not.”  Dan thought he detected a change in Allison’s voice as she continued.  “No one special in my life at the moment.  And what about you?”

“No,” Dan said.  He followed with a deep breath and continued.  “I don’t know if I’m ready for a girlfriend right now.  I need to build stronger friendships first and really get to know people.  It’s so important to be friends before you can know if a person is right for you.”

“Yeah.  I understand.”  After an awkward five-second pause, Allison said, “So what else have you been up to?”

“Not much,” Dan replied.  “Are you busy this weekend?”

“I have to work tomorrow morning.  It really stinks.  Some guy can’t come in tomorrow, so I have to cover his shift and open the store at 8 a.m.  But other than that, I don’t know.  Did you want to hang out?”

“Sure.  Is there anything you want to do?”

“Hmm,” Allison said.  “Why don’t I call you tomorrow and let you know what my schedule will be like?”

“Okay.”

“Sounds good.  I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then.”

“Okay.  Bye,” Dan said.  He hung up the telephone and looked out the window.  The fog had continued to relent, and he could see the moon clearly now.

This week and next week, in my Fiction Writing class, we were critiquing each other’s stories.  Each of us had to write a story and share it with everyone else.  The twenty of us in that class were randomly assigned one of four days to have our stories critiqued, and I was going on the third day, next Tuesday.  All week, I had been reading other students’ stories, preparing to critique them.  We discussed the first group of stories yesterday, and we would discuss the second group tomorrow.  I needed to bring enough copies of “August Fog” tomorrow for every student and the instructor to read before next Tuesday’s class.

Back in those days, the major chain store of copy and print shops in the western United States was Kinko’s.  The local politicians here in Jeromeville always made a big deal of supporting local small businesses over the corporate chains, which they portrayed as evil and greedy.  I did not vote for any of those aging hippie politicians, I did not share many of their views, and most of the owners of the local businesses did share their views.  So, although I knew of one locally owned print shop, I chose Kinko’s out of spite.  Ironically, Kinko’s was founded in the 1970s as a local business in a countercultural college town before it grew into the corporate chain that it was by now.  Several years after the night I went to Kinko’s to make twenty copies of “August Fog,” Kinko’s would be bought by an even larger corporation, eventually changing its name to FedEx Office to reflect the new ownership.

Making twenty copies of a five-page story was not exactly cheap, but all of us had been warned on the first day of class that we would have to do that when we got to this project, so I knew this was coming.  As I watched the Kinko’s employee bring me the stack of collated and stapled packets, I felt confident about my story.  Some of my classmates’ stories that I had been reading this week had grammatical errors and awkward formatting, and others were just difficult to follow and understand.  I honestly believed that “August Fog” was superior to those other stories in every way, and that I would breeze through this assignment. I was ready to hear compliments from my classmates on having written the best short story ever, capturing the struggles of searching for love in young adulthood in a clear and beautifully relatable way.

I was very wrong, of course.

(To be continued…)

Readers: Have you ever been excited to share an artistic creation with others, only to find that it was not as well-received as you had hoped it would be? Tell me about it in the comments.

I am working on a behind-the-scenes post about this week’s episode . I will post a link when it’s ready, probably later today or tomorrow.

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.

May 3, 1998.  The strategy that works one time might not work another time. (#172)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 11 Comments

I stepped outside the church building and looked around for friends to talk to.  It was 12:15 on a sunny, warm Sunday, and the rest of the day would be relatively free of stress.  The only homework I had to work on was to work on a project that was not due for another week, a project that I was expecting to be more fun than most major assignments.

I looked over and saw Courtney Kohl and Cambria Hawley.  “Hey,” I said.

“Hi, Greg,” Cambria replied.  “What’s up?”

“Not much,” I replied.  “Just going to work on an assignment for English this afternoon.”

“You’re a math major.  I don’t think of you as taking English.  That’s kind of weird.”

“The teacher training program for next year requires a certain number of English units beyond the writing classes that everyone takes.  But it can be any class, and I needed one more.  So I took Fiction Writing, because that one looked like the most fun.”

“That does sound fun!”

“How is that class?” Courtney asked.  “I know someone who took it last year.”

“I like it,” I replied.  “I’ve learned a lot about myself as a writer.”

“That’s good.”

“Guess what?” Cambria said.  “We got an apartment!  And,” looking directly at me, she continued, “I think it’s the same apartment complex where you lived last year.  Sagebrush Apartments, on Maple Drive.”

“Yes, that’s it,” I said.  I was surprised at first that Cambria knew that, but then I remembered that she had been to my apartment once last year, when she interviewed me for an assignment.

“Was yours a three-bedroom or four?” Cambria asked.

“Three,” I said.

“We got a four-bedroom.  There’s five of us, so two of us will be sharing the big bedroom.”

“Who all is living with you?”

“Us two,” Cambria said, gesturing to indicate herself and Courtney.  “Erica.  Sasha.  And my friend Kirsten.  You probably don’t know her.  She was on my floor freshman year.”

“That’s cool,” I said.  “Glad you found something.  I’m sure I’ll see your place at some point next year.”

“Yeah!  Speaking of which, we need to go find Erica and Sasha.  Have you seen them?”

“They were here today, but I don’t know where they went.”

“Oh, okay.  Have a good afternoon!”

I waved at the two girls as they walked away.  A few seconds later, Pete Green and Taylor Santiago walked up to me.  “Hey, Greg,” Taylor said.  “What are you doing tonight?”

“Tonight?” I said.  “Just X-Files at the De Anza house at 10.”

“I have this new board game that I want to try out,” Pete explained.  “I saw my sister and her husband over spring break, and I learned it from them.  You can play with up to four people, so Taylor and I were trying to get two more.  You interested?”

“What time?”

“I was thinking 7.  At Taylor’s house.”

“How long does the game take?” I asked.  I remembered when Pete, Taylor, and I were freshmen, Pete taught me the board game Risk, and that game took forever.

“Probably about an hour,” Pete answered.

“Sure.  I’m still going to go to X-Files at 10, so that should be time to get a couple games in, right?”

“Yeah.  That works.”

“See you then,” Taylor said.


In the Fiction Writing class, the class often began with a brainstorming exercise.  A couple weeks ago, I had to write, completely unedited, for ten minutes on one of three given prompts.  I chose the prompt “My parents lie.”  I wrote about how my parents say that it is okay with them that I have never had a girlfriend, and that they do not want to interfere with my life.  But they must have been lying about that, because of what happened with Allison.  Mom introduced me to Allison, a teenage girl from a family she knew at church, because Allison was having trouble in her math class and I might be able to help.  From the way Mom was acting, the likely explanation was that Mom was trying to set me up with Allison.

I wrote a total of three pages by hand about the Allison situation.  Of course, there was no requirement in these brainstorming exercises that I be truthful, and Allison was a fictional character.  There was some truth to what I wrote, though.  During winter break sophomore year, my mother introduced me to Monica Sorrento, who, like Allison, was a high school student from a family at my church back home.  But, in the writing exercise, when I went on to describe Allison’s appearance, I did not describe Monica Sorrento.  Instead, I described Sasha Travis, a girl from my current church in Jeromeville, one of Courtney and Cambria’s future roommates.  “I don’t know what it is that so fascinates me about Allison,” I wrote.  “She isn’t bad looking by any means, but I barely know her.  We live in different worlds; she is a 17-year-old high school student, and I am a college student getting ready to graduate.”  All of that was currently true about Sasha.  I even wrote a poem about her recently.

Serena Chang, the instructor for the writing class, had responded to my assignment, “This brainstorming seems to have taken off for you.  It might be worth it to explore this voice and this Allison character more.”  I did explore Allison more, in another writing assignment where we had to focus on describing a setting, and showing other things through the description.  I described Allison’s bedroom in great detail, being as specific as I could.  Serena pointed out that details like which CD was in her stereo were extraneous, although I thought it said something about her taste in music, which may be important to her character.

Serena did approve of some of the other details.  She liked the contrast when I described the two posters in her room, one a print of Monet’s Woman with a Parasol and the other a picture of a can of Spam.  In real life, I had once overheard Sasha say that she loved that painting, and I could also imagine her having something silly in her room like a poster of Spam.  Serena also noted two details I wrote that created tension that could be explored further: an unreturned message on Allison’s answering machine from a male friend who was away at school but in town for a few days, and an unfinished letter on her desk to a child in Mexico whom she met on a church trip there.

When I started thinking of ideas for the first full story I would have to write for this class, I kept coming back to Allison.  I already had two pre-writing assignments about her, and the real Sasha already occupied many of my thoughts those days, so it made sense to transfer some of those existing thoughts to the story I was creating.  In most of the fiction writing I did, the main character was like myself, and I was not sure if I could write a convincing story with Allison as the main character.  So I decided to tell a story from the perspective of the guy who left the message on Allison’s answering machine.  That detail from the pre-writing assignment came not from Sasha, but from Allison’s original connection to Monica back home, and my attempts to stay in touch with Monica for a while.  Regardless, it seemed like something I could connect to a male main character based on myself.  I typed a brief outline of this new story, then began writing until it was time to go learn Pete’s new game.


Taylor lived on the corner of Andrews Road and West 15th Street, just six minutes from my house walking, but I drove since I would be leaving straight from there to the weekly X-Files watch party that some other friends hosted.  Taylor’s house and my house were both halves of duplexes attached to the next door neighbor on one wall, with essentially the same floor plan, but reversed left to right.  Adam White, the youth pastor from church, lived here too, along with two other guys from church.

I knocked on the door, and Taylor answered.  “Hey, man,” he said.  “Come on in.  Pete’s setting up the game on the dining room table.”

“You said you can play it with four people?  Do we have a fourth?”

“Noah is on his way.  He was hanging out with the Hunters this afternoon.”

Lucky, I thought.  The Hunter family lived in an old nineteenth-century farmhouse about three miles outside of the Jeromeville city limits.  I knew some of their children from being a youth group volunteer; they were fun to hang out with.

“Hey,” Pete said when he saw me.  I looked at the open red box that Pete’s new board game came in.  The game was called The Settlers of Catan, an unwieldy but intriguing name for a game.  Pete had arranged thirty-seven hexagonal tiles in a roughly round pattern.  The tiles were illustrated differently, representing different kinds of geography and terrain.  Tiles which looked like forests, mountains, and fields were surrounded by a ring of water tiles, apparently representing an island.  Four piles of game pieces, made from wood and painted in four different colors, were piled on the table around the terrain tiles, with stacks of cards next to the tiles.  This game looked like no other game I had played before, and I was curious how this worked.

The three of us made small talk for a while until Noah arrived.  He walked in unannounced without knocking.  “Hey, guys,” Noah said.  “Sorry I’m late.  I hope you didn’t start without me.”

“We waited,” Taylor said.  “You ready?”

“Yeah.  So how do you play this?”

“The object is to be the first to get to ten points,” Pete explained.  “You build settlements and cities, connected to each other with roads, and those give you points.  These cards here are resources.  Wood, brick, wheat, sheep, and stone.  You use those to build things.”  Pete gave each of us a reference card that explained which resources are needed to buy different things.  The resources worked a bit like money, I thought to myself.  You spend a wood and a brick to build a road.  Makes sense.

“So how do you get resources?” I asked.

“Each tile is going to have one of these number tiles on it,” Pete said, gesturing toward a stack of small tiles the size of coins.  “Let me show you an example.”  Pete placed a settlement at the intersection of a forest, mountain, and field tile.  He placed a number 3 tile on the forest, an 8 on the mountain, and a 10 on the field.  “Settlements go on the corners, like this.  At the start of every turn, the player will roll the dice.  Whatever number gets rolled, anyone with a settlement touching that number takes that resource.  So, for example, any time an 8 gets rolled, I would get stone.”  Pete pointed to the mountain with the 8 tile; it was the same color as the stone cards.  Then he pointed to the 3 on the forest, and said, “Any time a 3 gets rolled, I would get wood.  And,” Pete continued, pointing to the field, “when a 10 gets rolled, I would get wheat.”

“I see,” Taylor said.”

“So when you start the game, it’s important to pay attention to what numbers you start on.  Because, with two dice, some numbers get rolled more often than others.  Numbers near the middle are more common, and the extremely low and high numbers, like 2 and 12, are the least common.”

“Yes!” I exclaimed.  “That’s math!  It’s a simple probability exercise.”

“Right,” Pete said.

“So will Greg be at an advantage because he’s a math major?” Noah asked.  I rolled my eyes.

“Not if you understand what I just explained about some numbers being more likely,” Pete replied.  “That’s the most advanced math that happens in this game.  And these dots on the number tile tell you how likely each number is to get rolled.”

“That makes sense!” I exclaimed.  “There are two dots below the 3, because there are two ways to roll a 3, and five dots below the 8, because there are five ways to roll an 8.”

“Ways to roll?” Noah asked.

“Yeah.  Two ways to roll a 3.  Roll 2 and 1, or 1 and 2.  Five ways to roll 8.  6 and 2, 5 and 3, 4 and 4, 3 and 5, 2 and 6,” I explained, counting on my fingers the ways to roll 8.

“Oh, okay.”

Pete went on to explain several other important parts of the game.  How to grow settlements into cities, by spending additional resources.  Playing the robber whenever 7 is rolled, and the risk of getting robbed for players who hoard too many resource cards.  Development cards, which included soldiers to protect players from the robber.  Trading resources.  Bonus points for the longest road and the largest army of soldiers.  I understood the resource production that Pete had explained first, but by the end of everything else, my head was spinning.

“Do we want to just start playing, and we’ll figure it out as we go along?” Noah suggested.

“That’s probably the best idea at this point,” Pete answered.

“I’m still a little confused,” I said.

“Just remember this.  Roll the dice, then trade, then build.  Every turn goes in that order.  And you have the reference card to show you how much it costs to build things.”

“Okay,” I said.

Pete placed randomly selected numbers on each tile of the island.  “That’s the great thing about this game,” Pete said.  “By shuffling the tiles, the board is different every time you play, so it’s always a new game.  And the strategy that works one time might not work another time.”

“Yeah,” Noah said.  “I was just thinking that.”

Pete explained how to start the game.  Each player took turns placing a settlement and a road, then the players placed a second settlement and road in reverse turn order.  Reversing the order for the second round kept the game balanced, so that the player who got the last choice for the first settlement, after the best spots had been taken, placed the second settlement first.  I placed my first settlement on a wood tile with number 6, a brick with number 4, and a sheep with number 10.  I figured that starting with wood and brick would be important, so that I could build roads and expand the part of the island I was settling.  Wood and brick were also required to build settlements, which would produce new resources.  And my wood tile was a number 6, so it was likely to get rolled often.

My strategy paid off at first.  I quickly built more roads and another settlement.  Then Noah rolled 7, which moves the robber instead of producing resources.  Noah placed the robber on my wood tile.  “Sorry, Greg,” he said as he stole a card from me.  “But you’re in the lead.  I had to.”  With the robber in my forest, I was no longer getting wood when someone rolled 6 on the dice.  The others quickly caught up to me.

“Thank you!” I said several turns later, when Taylor finally rolled a 7 and moved the robber to Noah’s most productive tile.  I got my source of wood back, but it felt like too little too late.  The others’ had much larger networks of settlements now, and they were buying multiple development cards and upgrading their settlements to cities that produce more resources.  My only wheat producing tile was an 11, which had not been rolled often, and I could not build much without wheat.  Later in the game, I began negotiating with the other players, trading what I had for wheat, but the other players only made trades that gave them something they needed in return, so my trading helped them in the long run.  Pete won when I had only five points.

“Want to play again?” Pete asked.

“Sure!” Taylor replied.  “You guys in?”

I looked at my watch.  “Yeah,” I said.  “The guys at the De Anza house don’t start X-Files until 10.  We have time for another game.”

“Same board, or want me to shuffle this one?” Pete asked.

“Shuffle,” Taylor said.  The rest of us nodded.

Pete shuffled the tiles and the numbers and dealt out a new board.  This time, the spaces for brick were spread out; the three brick spaces had numbers of 2, 3, and 11, all unlikely numbers, so brick would be rare this game.  I began with settlements on two of the brick spaces, but no stone.  I figured I would be able to trade for stone, and I could work toward building a port settlement on the coast, which made trades with the bank less costly.  I planned to negotiate trades more aggressively this time.

My brick numbers rarely got rolled, unsurprisingly.  Pete focused his strategy on development cards, using wheat, sheep, and stone to buy the cards that gave him soldiers to protect himself from the robber and other ways of acquiring resources.  Noah focused his strategy on trading, like me, but he built on the port location that I wanted first, putting me at a disadvantage.  Pete won that game also, but Noah came in a very close second.

“I need to get to X-Files,” I said after the second game.  “But this was interesting.”

“We’ll play again sometime,” Pete said.  “Thanks for coming over.”

“Have a good one, man,” Taylor added, shaking my hand.

“Bye, Greg,” Noah said.  I said goodbye to everyone again and walked out the door.


This week’s episode of The X-Files was a standalone episode not connected to any of the continuing storylines.  There was a huge crowd of around twenty people at the De Anza house, and I had to sit on the floor.  I liked that these X-Files watch parties were becoming more popular; I always had fun there.

After the show, I got in the car and headed home.  Hootie and the Blowfish was playing on the radio.  I felt kind of frustrated at having lost both games of The Settlers of Catan.  I had mixed feelings about the game.  Although I had not done well, it was fun to play.  I liked the idea that the board could be arranged differently every time.  I wanted to play again, and I hoped that I would get better.

Although it would be several weeks until I played The Settlers of Catan again, I did play many times that summer, and over the following years.  I bought my own copy a few months after that night when I learned the game.  New expansion games, incorporating new features into the game, came along in the next few years, and the game, whose title was officially shortened to just Catan in 2015, would grow to become one of my all time favorite board games.

Pete said that, with every Catan game having a different board and different numbers, every game was different to the point that a good strategy in one game may not work in the next.  I did not realize at the time what a profound statement that was about life in general, with implications reaching far beyond Catan or any other game.  Hootie and the Blowfish certainly knew that, for example.  The quartet from South Carolina had the best-selling album in the US in 1995, standing out in the world of grunge rock with a more bluesy Southern sound, but their similar sounding follow-up disappointed fickle music aficionados, and their popularity quickly faded.  They never went away completely, recording three more albums over the next decade and one more in 2019, but their lead singer Darius Rucker enjoyed a major career renaissance in 2008, leaning deeper into these bluesy Southern influences and reinventing himself as a country singer.  Everyone is different, every time period is different, and one strategy for success and prosperity may not work for others in different places and different times.

Readers: What’s your favorite board game, and why? Tell me about it in the comments.

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

April 24-26, 1998. My lasting friendships had been captured in that group photo. (#171)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

Although this was only my fourth trip to Muddy Springs for a retreat with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, the routine was starting to feel familiar.  Meet at the parking lot by the North Residential Area Friday afternoon after I was done with my classes.  Find out who had been assigned to my car.  Head north on Highway 117 until it merges with Highway 9.  Stop at Wendy’s in Bidwell for dinner, then continue ten miles into the foothills to the Muddy Springs Retreat Center.  Once we reached Highway 9, the rest of the drive was very familiar to me, since my family drove that way many times to visit my dad’s relatives in Bidwell.

One thing was different about this retreat, though: it was spring.  I had been to two Fall Conferences here and a winter retreat, but I had never been here in spring.  The hills surrounding the retreat center were green, and more water rushed through the stream running through the canyon compared to my previous three trips here.

A week ago, as I stood around waiting for JCF’s weekly large group meeting to begin, I overheard a group of students who were student leaders with JCF talking about plans for the upcoming retreat.  “I like that we’re going to keep people in the same Bible study together at the retreat,” Tabitha Sasaki said.

“Wait, what?” I asked.

Eddie Baker jumped in to explain.  “For your small group at the retreat, you’re going to be with people from your Bible study.”

“Hmm,” I said.  My first opinion of this arrangement was unfavorable.  These retreats had in the past provided opportunities to meet new people, or at least to get to know people better whom I had not interacted with much at JCF’s weekly gatherings.  But I already knew all the people in my Bible study.  In some ways, JCF operated in ways that perpetuated cliques that I was not a part of.  I heard this would be changing next year, but the current way that Bible studies were organized and handpicked kept those cliques in place.  With only people from my existing Bible study in my small group on the retreat, I would not be in a group with anyone from any of those cliques.

I would never admit this out loud, but I had another reason to want a heterogeneous small group.  Freshmen typically lived on campus and had separate on-campus Bible studies, which met in dorm rooms on campus.  With the people in my small group only coming from my off-campus Bible study, there would be zero chance that my girl crazy self would be in a small group with any of the cute girls from this year’s freshman class, like Brianna Johns or Chelsea Robbins.  Of course, I may find opportunities to connect with people outside of my small group, but the small group provided a natural way to connect with someone new, and now there would be no one new in my group.

 As I heard the music begin, I went to find a seat, and I saw an unexpected trio sitting together: Taylor Santiago, Pete Green, and Noah Snyder.  These three had not been to JCF at all this school year.  For that matter, I could not ever remember having seen Noah at JCF, at least not since I started going sophomore year.  I knew all three of them from our church, Jeromeville Covenant, and even before that, I knew Taylor and Pete from my freshman dorm.  Taylor and Pete had regularly attended JCF their first couple years at the University of Jeromeville, but they had become more involved at J-Cov instead as time went on.  I met Noah through mutual friends shortly before I started going to J-Cov, but Taylor and Noah had gone to the same high school and been best friends since their early teens.

Caroline Pearson, who had also been in our dorm, sat next to Pete; I found out a few months ago that they were dating now.  Interesting how some couples know each other for years before they realize that there is mutual romantic interest, while others, such as Liz Williams and Ramon Quintero, get together almost immediately.  In that freshman dorm, Liz and Ramon were in a serious relationship by the end of our first month; they were together for two years, broke up for about a year, and were now back together.

“Hey, Greg,” Taylor said, reaching his hand out to give me five sideways.  I lightly slapped his hand.

“What are you guys doing here?” I asked.

“We had to turn in our money for the retreat next week,” Pete explained.

“You guys are going?  That’s cool.”

“Yeah,” Noah said.  “We figured it’s our last year, so we may as well go to one last retreat with JCF.”

“Nice.”

Shortly after that, the worship team began playing.  During the opening song, my mind began to wander back to the thought of the small groups on the retreat being people from the same Bible study.  Whose small group would Taylor, Pete, and Noah be in?  They were not in a Bible study with JCF.  And since my Bible study was so big, big enough to split into three smaller groups every week, would my group be much bigger than the others at the retreat?  And what of Bible studies where few people were able to come on the retreat?  This plan just did not seem ideal, even for reasons that do not involve myself being secretly girl crazy.


The retreat center at Muddy Springs was built around an old building from the early 20th century that was once a resort hotel.  The building fell into disrepair decades later and was purchased by a Christian organization, with the intent to remodel it into a retreat center.  We began the night meeting together in a medium-sized meeting room attached to the hotel building.  Cheryl from the JCF staff team acted out a skit along with a few students which incorporated all of the important announcements for the weekend.

At one point, Cheryl told a student character played by Tabitha Sasaki, “So after this we’re going to meet in small groups.”

“I don’t know who’s in my small group,” Tabitha explained.

“Oh.  Your small group is your small group.  The people from your Bible study back in Jeromeville are your small group for the retreat.”

“Oh!” Tabitha exclaimed enthusiastically as I grumbled to myself at this arrangement.

After the skit, we met in small groups for the first time.  I noticed that both of the logistical problems I had thought of last week had also been considered by whomever assigned the small group.  My very large Bible study had been split into two groups; with each of the two leaders, Joe Fox and Lydia Tyler, taking one group.  I was with Lydia, along with Courtney Kohl, Colin Bowman, and Kendra Burns.  Taylor, Pete, and Noah were also in our small group.  That worked out perfectly.  Someone probably knew that those three guys knew me and Courtney from volunteering with the youth group at J-Cov, so they put them in the same group as me and Courtney.  Smart.

Janet McAllen, half of the couple who was the head staff of JCF, made an announcement as soon as we had all broken into small groups.  “We’re going to do an icebreaker,” she said.  I was unclear on the need for icebreakers since all of us knew the people in our small groups, but whatever.  This could be fun.  Janet continued, “I’m going to say a word, and all of you are going to think of a song with that word in it, and then you’re going to sing a little bit of the song.”  Okay, I thought, slightly less fun.  Although I had been in chorus for part of my time at UJ, the idea of singing unrehearsed with a small group of people was slightly less appealing.  But I would just go with it.

For the first round, the word was “love.”  That was an easy one; every group quickly thought of a song with the word “love.”  After we finished that, Janet said, “Your next word is ‘blue.’” This seemed more difficult.  A song immediately came to mind, and I sat contemplating for about ten seconds whether or not it was too silly and embarrassing to share with my group.  I eventually decided to share.  “‘The Water Buffalo Song’ from VeggieTales,” I said.  I sang, “‘Everybody’s got a baby kangaroo, yours is pink but mine is blue…’”

“That’s great,” said Noah, who was responsible for the fact that I knew that song in the first place.  VeggieTales was a series of computer-animated videos, sold in Christian bookstores on VHS tapes, with a cast of anthropomorphic vegetables acting out stories with morals from the Bible and singing silly songs.  The kids from church loved VeggieTales, and I had borrowed many of those videos from the youth media library.  Noah hosted a five hour Sunday afternoon VeggieTales marathon in the church youth room a few months ago.  While watching all of the videos, I noticed that only about a third of the attendees of this movie marathon were children in the target market of VeggieTales; the rest were high school students and young adults.

“Wait, what is this?” Colin asked, looking confused.  Noah explained VeggieTales to him, and I added the part about the silly songs.  “I’ve never heard of that,” Colin said.  Fortunately, the song was simple enough that he picked it up quickly.

After everyone had had five minutes to choose their song, the small groups took turns singing brief snippets of the songs they chose.  Groups sang “Blue Christmas,” “Behind Blue Eyes” by the Who, and “Counting Blue Cars” by Dishwalla (which surprised me at a Christian retreat because of the slightly blasphemous lyrics) before our turn came.  We all stood up and sang, “‘Everybody’s got a baby kangaroo, yours is pink but mine is blue…”  About half the room laughed and cheered, and the other half looked confused, like Colin had.  Clearly not everyone on this retreat was familiar with VeggieTales, but I smiled at the sight of my group using my silly idea.


The serious part of the retreat focused on the beginning of the Old Testament book of Joshua.  In this book, Moses has recently died, and the time has arrived for Joshua to lead the people of Israel into the Promised Land.  As the guest speaker talked about these verses, I kept thinking how timely this was for my life.  In a little over a month, I would graduate from the University of Jeromeville.  Although I would still be enrolled at UJ next year for the teacher certification program, my life would look considerably different.  I would spend mornings in classrooms somewhere at a school that had not yet been determined.  I was hoping for Jeromeville High; I was familiar with that campus from interning in classrooms there before, and I knew some kids there from church.  But this was unlikely.  The UJ Department of Education typically sent its student teachers to Woodville, Silvey, Nueces, or across the Drawbridge to Capital County, since the highly educated upper middle class families of Jeromeville were demographically atypical for this state.

Late Saturday morning, I sat outside thinking about this as I admired the beauty of the hills across the stream, with puffy white clouds slowly sailing across the blue sky.  I would still have classes on the UJ campus in the afternoons, and I would still have Friday nights free to attend Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, so I would still see my friends around.  But many of my friends were also graduating, so I would not see them.  I would still see my younger friends, and some from my year were not leaving Jeromeville right away.  Taylor, for example, needed one more quarter before he finished his degree, and Eddie would be joining the staff of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  But many others, including Liz and Ramon, and Sarah Winters, all of whom I had known since the beginning of freshman year in Building C, were moving on.

Next year would be a transition for me; I would take on some of the responsibilities of a teacher, but I would still be in Jeromeville.  Life after I completed the teacher certification program was far more uncertain.  If all went according to plan, in August of 1999, just sixteen short months away, I would be working full time as a teacher somewhere unknown.  I would have no day-to-day connection to the UJ campus anymore, and it was likely I would not even be living in Jeromeville.  I would certainly be living somewhere else if I took a job more than thirty miles away.

But I had no need to be fearful of the future.  As God’s people prepared to enter the Promised Land thousands of years earlier, Joshua spoke the word of the Lord to them: “As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you or forsake you… Be strong and courageous.  Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”  I would grow apart from friends, I may have to leave Jeromeville, but God will still be there.  I could trust God to lead me to a new church and a new group of friends, and maybe a wife and a family of my own someday.

By the time I finished going through the reflection questions that we had all been given, it was time for lunch.  I was one of the first ones in the cafeteria, and when I was about halfway through my meal, Sarah came and sat next to me.  “Hey, Greg,” she said, smiling.  “What’s up?”

“Just thinking,” I replied.  “About how we’re about to graduate, and life is going to look totally different.”

“I know!  I move home the last week of June, and my boyfriend and I are going to start looking at rings.  I feel so grown up.”

“Nice,” I said.  I knew that Sarah had a boyfriend back home, and I had been good friends with her for long enough that I did not think of her as a potential romantic interest.  But it still made me sad to know that she was off the market, another woman whom I would not ever end up with.

“So I was thinking at the group meeting this morning,” Sarah said, “there are seven of us here this weekend who were all in the IHP in Building C as freshmen.  We should all get a picture together before we leave.”

“That’s a great idea!”

“If you see the others, tell them.  I will too.”

“Yeah.  I will.”


In our small group time Saturday night,  I told Taylor and Pete about Sarah’s idea to take a group picture; they were on board.  Caroline came over to join Pete at some point, and she was excited about the picture idea as well.

We had one more study on the first chapter of Joshua Sunday morning.  When our group finished discussing the assigned question, I mentioned my thoughts about the future, how the next few years would look very different.  “This has been a good reminder that God will still be there, no matter what changes,” I said.  “He will show me where he wants me next, and he will be there.”

“I think it’s important to remember, though, that God sometimes gives you choices,” Taylor replied.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, for example, what if you’re applying for jobs next year, and you get two good offers.  What if God isn’t clearly leading you to one instead of the other?  There isn’t always one clear path that God will lay out for you.  Sometimes God will give you a choice.  And whichever one you choose, he will be there.  Just like the verse said tonight, God will be with you wherever you go.”

“Hmm,” I replied.  “That actually makes sense.  I like that.”

“That’s not to say you shouldn’t pray about the decision when you’re in a situation like that.  Just that sometimes it isn’t so clear cut, and that’s okay.  It doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

“Yeah.  I get it.”

A couple hours later, after I had packed and loaded the car, and made sure that the rest of my carpool had done the same, I walked around, looking for the others who had been in the Interdisciplinary Honors Program with me as freshmen.  Near the building was a flagpole, flying the United States flag, with a few other countries’ flags around it, to symbolize that the Gospel of Jesus Christ was for all nations.  Taylor, Pete, and Caroline stood near the flagpole at the front of the building.  “Hey, Greg,” Taylor said.  “We thought this would be a good place to take our picture.”

“Sounds good,” I replied.

“We’re still missing Liz, Ramon, and Sarah.”

“There’s Sarah,” Caroline said, pointing at Sarah walking toward us.  “I’ll go find Liz and Ramon.”

Sarah joined us as Caroline walked off to find Liz and Ramon.  Group pictures were a great source of priceless memories, but they sure were a hassle to organize sometimes.  “Did anyone tell Liz and Ramon about the group picture?” I asked.

“Caroline and I did,” Pete replied.

I saw Liz and Ramon walk across the parking lot about a minute later.  I made eye contact and waved them over to us, but by the time they arrived, ready to be photographed, Caroline had not come back yet.

“Who’s gonna take the picture?” Taylor asked.

Eddie and Tabitha walked past a minute later.  “Eddie? Tabitha?” Sarah asked.  “Can you take our picture?  We were going to get a group picture of all of us who came from Building C freshman year.”

“That’s a great idea!” Tabitha said.  “Six of you from Building C, all on this retreat?”  

“Seven,” Pete corrected.  “Caroline went to find Liz and Ramon, but they found us first.”

“There’s Caroline,” Eddie said, waving her over as all of us who brought cameras handed them to Eddie and Tabitha.

“I’m back,” Caroline announced.  “How are we doing this?”  She and Pete stood in front of the flagpole.  Taylor got behind Pete, with Sarah to Pete and Caroline’s left.  I stood behind Taylor and Pete, being significantly taller than each of them, and Ramon stood behind Sarah.  Liz climbed onto the pedestal at the bottom of the flagpole and held the pole with one hand.  Just as Eddie and Tabitha began to take the pictures, Taylor awkwardly tied his arms around Pete’s head, causing both of them to start laughing.  We held our smiles and poses as Eddie and Tabitha took photographs with all of our cameras.

“Perfect,” Taylor said.

“This is going to be a great picture,” Liz mused, smiling.  “All of us still together after four years at Jeromeville.”

“We’re almost done!” Sarah exclaimed.  “We’re graduating soon! We did it!”

“Some of us not as soon as others,” Taylor replied, laughing.

“I need to hurry up and finish this roll of film,” I said.  “I really want to see this picture.”

As I drove home, with the rest of my car napping and the group picture fresh in my mind, I thought back to that February morning, now over four years ago, when I got up early to drive to Jeromeville with Mom and Dad to learn about the Interdisciplinary Honors Program.  At that presentation, a hippie-looking guy named Crunchy had spoken about the lasting friendships he had made as a student in the IHP.  My lasting friendships had been captured in that group photo.  These people had also shown me what it really meant to follow Jesus, and we had lasting memories that would stay with us for decades to come.

Of course, we are not as close now in our 40s as we once were.  Taylor is still a close friend, and we communicate fairly often, mostly because he is active on social media.  Pete and Caroline ended up getting married about two years after we took that group picture.  They live far away now with their two teenage children, but I see them every few years when they visit their friends and family in the western states.  I am occasionally in touch with Liz and Ramon through Facebook comments, but neither of them is on Facebook often.  Sadly, I completely lost touch with Sarah in our early 30s.  By then, she and the guy who would soon be taking her to look at rings were raising a child, and life just got in the way, as it tends to so often.

Life moves on.  Memories fade.  One cannot always return to where one was before.  I realized that in a very real way in 2014 while walking around campus at the Spring Picnic, when I saw that Building C had been torn down.  A new building with a completely different name, appearance, and floor plan was under construction in its place.  But the people and events in these memories have lasting effects in the present and the future, and maybe my memories can become stories that inspire others.

Readers: Do you have anyone whom you’ve been friends with for a very long time? 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.

April 18-22, 1998. Another disappointing Spring Picnic, and upcoming changes. (#170)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

Author’s note: My birthday is this week in real life :)

“Greg!” I heard an enthusiastic male voice say as I stood outside the sanctuary at Jeromeville Covenant Church, looking for someone to talk to after church got out.  The voice belonged to Darius Curtis, who was quickly becoming a familiar face in my social circles.

Unlike most of the regulars at the college-age group at J-Cov, Darius was not a student at the University of Jeromeville.  He was not taking classes at all right now.  Until a couple months ago, Darius was living with his parents in a rural area outside of San Diego.  He had recently found Jesus and wanted to get away from his old lifestyle of excessive drinking and partying, so he started looking at options for new surroundings.  He moved to Jeromeville, five hundred miles from where he was before, because his older sister Krista lived here and was well-connected at her church.

Krista was not much older than Darius; the two were only seventeen months apart.  I had been friends with Krista for three and a half years, since we were in the same dorm as freshmen at UJ, and her church was my church, so I was becoming friends with Darius as well.  Darius was one of those friendly people who naturally drew others to himself, and being involved with church was the perfect environment for Darius to build a new, more positive social circle.

“Hey, Darius, what’s up?” I asked, turning to face him.

“Krista brought me to the Spring Picnic yesterday.  It was so much fun!  Were you there?”

“I was.  My parents came up for it too.”

“That’s awesome!  Did they like it?”

“Hard to tell.  Nothing against them, but it was kind of stressful having them around.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” Darius said.  “Family can be stressful.”

“I just like wandering around at the Spring Picnic,” I explained.  “And I felt like they were getting bored with that.  And I wasn’t sure what to show them.”

“Did you see the dachshund races?  That was so cool!  I think that was my favorite part.”

“We didn’t.  We spent two hours at the track waiting to watch my cousin; he’s on the track team for North Coast State.  My aunt and uncle have a dachshund, and they said it would be fun to enter him in the races next year.  If you ask me, though, I don’t see their old, slow dog as the type to win a competition.”  Darius laughed as I continued.  “I wish I had known exactly what time my cousin’s races were, so I could have just watched him instead of spending two hours being bored watching people I didn’t know race.”

“Yeah.  That makes sense.  Good that you got to see family, though.”

“That’s true.”

“What are you doing today?” Darius asked.

“I have homework and studying to catch up on.  I didn’t get to do anything this weekend yet.”

“Yeah.  Good luck with that.  I’ll see you next week?”

“Definitely.”


The Spring Picnic was an annual festival on campus at the University of Jeromeville, an open house for the university featuring exhibits, performances, activities, and much more.  Apparently it was a big deal in the Capital Valley region, but its popularity did not extend south as far as Santa Lucia County, where I grew up, because I had never heard of it until I came to Jeromeville.  Some of my friends had their parents come up for the Spring Picnic, and when I would walk around Spring Picnic and see people  with their parents, everyone seemed to be having a good time.  So this year I invited my parents to come, and I realized fairly early on that this would make Spring Picnic significantly less enjoyable for me.

My parents and my sixteen-year-old brother Mark arrived yesterday morning around 9:30, after leaving their house before 7:00.  We got to campus before the parking lots all filled up, and I started walking toward the Quad, past where the parade participants had lined up, with the other three following me.  I stopped across the street from the Memorial Union, and the others stopped too.

“Here we are,” I said.

“Okay,” Mom replied.  All of us just kind of stared at each other, until Mom finally said, “So, what do you want to show us?”

“I don’t know.  What do you want to see?  I usually just wander around.”

“What all is there?”

“The parade will be starting soon right here,” I said.  “Let me go get a program.  There’s an information booth right there.”

I walked to the information booth and brought Mom a program.  She began looking through it as Dad and Mark found room on the curb for the four of us to sit among others who had started gathering for the parade.  “Wow, you weren’t kidding when you said there was a lot going on,” Mom said, flipping through the program.  Academic exhibits, agricultural exhibits, animal exhibits… There’s even a petting zoo.”

“An evil petting zoo?” Mark asked sarcastically, impersonating and quoting Dr. Evil from the movie Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.  I laughed and high-fived Mark; Mom and Dad, who had not seen the movie, looked confused.

About half an hour into the parade, Mark started complaining that he was bored.  We went to the math department exhibit next, since we were close to where the exhibit was set up.  Students from the Math Club were leading the same mathematical activities that they did every year.  I walked up to the display of the Monty Hall problem and explained that, when guessing which of three doors has a prize behind it, it is more advantageous to switch guesses after being shown one of the wrong doors.  The students running the exhibit kept track of whether or not people switched their guess and whether or not they won. I switched my guess but still lost. I also explained the Towers of Hanoi, the recursive algorithm to move a stack of discs from one of three towers to another without placing a larger disc on a smaller disc.  None of Mom, Dad, or Mark seemed particularly interested.

After a couple hours of wandering around aimlessly and not finding anything that the others found interesting, we had burritos from the Memorial Union Coffee House for lunch.  Mark did not like them and complained several times.  After that, we walked over to the track.  Some of the Jeromeville Colts interscholastic athletic teams have games on campus during the Spring Picnic, as part of the event. The track and field team held a meet with several other schools during the Spring Picnic.  My cousin Rick ran for North Coast State, and their team was at our meet today.  Mom had never seen Rick run, and I had only seen him run once, at this meet last year.

We had to wait at the track for over two hours in order to see Rick’s two events.  Rick’s mother, Aunt Jane, was my mother’s sister, and the two of them did a lot of their usual thing, talking about people I didn’t know.  Rick’s father, Uncle Darrell, occasionally chimed in with a sarcastic comment, and my father mostly stood quietly.  Mark complained that he was bored, and this time, I completely agreed with Mark’s complaints.

By the time Rick was done running, most of the events at the rest of the Spring Picnic had closed for the day.  The rest of the family followed me down to the grassy area in the Arboretum near Marks Hall.  The University of Jeromeville Marching Band and five other university marching bands from across the state held a Battle of the Bands here, beginning in mid-afternoon and lasting into the night.  The bands mostly played marching band arrangements of popular and contemporary songs, and Mom and I, being trivia buffs, tried to identify each song.  Mark complained a few more times about being bored.  By the time my family left Jeromeville at six o’clock, I realized that, for the second time in a row, I had been disappointed with this Spring Picnic.  This sounds mean, but I discovered that day that I would enjoy future Spring Picnics much more without my family, just wandering around campus looking at whatever I found interesting.  Others do not find this campus so inherently interesting and fascinating like I do.


The next few days were relatively routine.  I watched The X-Files with my friends at the De Anza house Sunday night.  I went to class.  I did homework.  And Wednesday night, I walked the short distance to church for The Edge, the junior high school youth group for which I was a volunteer leader.

Courtney, Brody, 3, Marlene, Taylor, Martin, and Noah were already there, and the youth pastor, Adam, was talking about a recent activity that he had chaperoned for Next Generation, the preteen youth group.  “We’re gonna get those kids in The Edge next year,” Adam said.

“Well, you will,” Marlene said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not gonna do The Edge next year.  I’m going to lead a Bible study on campus with JCF,” Marlene explained.

“Oh,” Adam replied, sounding surprised, as if this was the first he had heard of this.

“Me too,” 3 added.

“And I’m doing one off campus,” Courtney said.  I knew this, because Courtney and her co-leader, Colin Bowman, had already asked me to be in their Bible study next year.  Judging from Adam’s reaction, though, this was the first he had heard of any of this.

“Wow.  I just lost three of my leaders for next year,” Adam said.  “And Martin is moving up to do high school group instead.  We’re really going to need new leaders.  Let’s pray that God will raise up new leaders.”

Something about this whole discussion rubbed me the wrong way.  I like Marlene and 3, I was enjoying having them on the Edge staff with me, and I thought of Courtney as one of my best friends by now.  And none of them would not be around next year.  Of course, I would still see them next year at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, and around campus, and at church on Sundays.  But I felt a little bit closer to most of the Edge staff, since we were a small and relatively tight-knit group, and I wanted our group to stay together.

A couple hours later, after youth group ended, the leaders were putting things away, and all of this was still on my mind.  The three leaders who were leaving would be leading Bible studies with JCF next year, and although I had been part of JCF for two years now, I did not always approve of the way they did things.  I was not questioning their Biblical foundation, but too many of their ministries operated around cliques and fads.  All the cool kids who were currently freshmen would be leading Bible studies sophomore year, so Marlene and 3 had to be cool and lead a Bible study too… at least this latest turn of events came across that way to me.  It was nice that JCF would not be doing Kairos groups any more next year; those were Bible studies that were set up in a way that supposedly prepared students for leadership, but in reality perpetuated cliques.  But that also made the Kairos ministry feel like another fad that all of the JCF leaders had run to a few years ago, and were now abandoning.

“Hey, Greg,” Adam asked me.  “What’s up?”

“Not much,” I said.  “I was just thinking about everyone leaving.  I knew about Courtney, because she asked me to be in her small group next year, but I didn’t know Marlene and 3 were leaving too.  I like our staff group this year, and I wish we could stay together for next year.”

“I know what you mean.  On one hand, maybe you’ll end up getting along great with next year’s leaders too.  But Marlene and 3 and Courtney are already involved in ministry with us, and JCF should be encouraging students who aren’t doing anything to get involved, instead of taking students away from other ministries.  I might have to talk to the McAllens about that.”

“Exactly,” I said.  “That’s a good way to put it.  And just know that I’m probably going to be sticking with the Edge staff for as long as I’m in Jeromeville.”

“Thanks,” Adam replied.  “I appreciate having you here.”


After I got home from The Edge, I went to my room and checked my email.  Sean was not home, so I was alone in the room.  I had a message from Melody, a girl in Texas whom I had met on Internet Relay Chat a couple weeks earlier.

From: “Melody Medlin” <mlm016@ueasttexas.edu>
To: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 20:44 -0500
Subject: Re: hi

Hi Greg!  How was youth group?  That’s so cool that you’re a youth group leader!  I went to a church youth group when I was in high school.  It was so much fun!  I haven’t really done stuff like that since I started college, but last year when I was home for the summer, I went with my home church to a camp in Colorado for a week.  I’d never been to Colorado before, it was so beautiful!  The camp was way up in the mountains.  One day we climbed this mountain, there was a beautiful view from the top, and one of the camp counselors started singing this old hymn of praise, and when we got back to the camp, someone told the camp director about that, and he said that many years ago, the first guy who ever climbed that mountain sang that exact same song!  And none of us knew about that… weird!

What else did you do today?  How were your classes?  I still don’t understand that quarter schedule you were telling me about where you have midterms coming up, and you don’t graduate until June.  We’re starting to get ready for finals already, and school gets out in a few weeks.  Hope you had a great day!

-Mel

I chuckled at Melody’s inability to understand the quarter system, even though I thought I had explained it clearly.  But the part about the mountain climbing intrigued me more, because I had heard the exact same story before.  Could it be that Melody was at that same camp last year?  Might I know someone else who knows Melody?  That would be a bizarre coincidence.  I clicked Reply and began typing.

To: mlm016@ueasttexas.edu
From: gjdennison@jeromeville.edu
Subject: Re: hi

Okay, this is going to sound weird, but by any chance, was there a camp counselor there in Colorado named Adam White?  Tall skinny guy with a big toothy grin?  He’s the youth pastor at my church here in Jeromeville, and he spent last summer as a camp counselor in Colorado, and he told that exact same story about climbing the mountain and singing the same hymn as the guy who first climbed the mountain years earlier.  It was the Doxology, the one that starts “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.”  Was that the song?  Maybe the same kind of thing happened in two different places in Colorado, it’s a big state, but it sounds like you might have been at the same camp where Adam was.

The quarter schedule… the year is divided into three terms instead of two.  Late September until winter break, January through mid-March, and end of March through June.  So it really should be called trimesters instead.  Some classes last for one term, some last two, and some last the whole year.  You take finals at the end of each quarter, in December, March, and June.  The year starts and ends later so that the break for Christmas and the New Year still comes at a quarter break, but since there are three terms, that has to come at the 1/3 point of the year instead of the halfway point.  Does that help?

Youth group was fun tonight.  But I did find out that three of the leaders aren’t coming back next year.  That was a little disappointing.  I like them, and we’re a pretty close group, and I don’t want to grow apart.  I’m sticking around next year.  I’ll still be in Jeromeville; in this state, you have to do a fifth year to get a teaching certificate.  What are you up to the rest of the week?

-gjd

I never did find out if Melody was at the same camp as Adam last year.  That would certainly be strange if she was.  We stayed in touch for several months, but she ignored that part of my email in her reply; she just talked about how the quarter system was weird and told me about her plans for the week.

I kept my informal promise to Adam and continued to work with the Edge as long as I was in Jeromeville.  However, I started to scale back my involvement in the spring of 2001.  I had already made plans to move out of Jeromeville that following summer when the Edge switched from being a weekly large group to only meeting twice a month, with leaders and students meeting in small groups on the other weeks.  Since I already knew that my time in Jeromeville would be ending soon, I asked Adam if I could only help out with the twice-monthly large groups and not take a small group, and he agreed to this.  I have never formally worked as a youth leader since then; life has just kept me busy, and I spend enough time around youth as a teacher.

I did stay close with Courtney for quite a while.  I stayed friends with Marlene and 3 for as long as we were all in Jeromeville, but I did not stay in touch with them after that.  I wondered if we would have been closer had they continued working with the Edge.  I do not know if Adam ever had a talk with the McAllens, the leaders of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, about not taking away student leaders from other ministries, but I do not remember this being a problem in any other year.  I still have some issues with the way JCF runs things in general, to this day, but those are stories for another time.

Readers: Have you ever been part of a group but disagreed with the way they did things sometimes? 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.