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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 11 Comments

Everyone around me stood as the music changed.  Apparently this was a thing that happened at weddings when the bride walked in.  I stood with everyone else and turned to the back of the church, where everyone was looking, as I recognized the notes of “Here Comes The Bride.”  I had a vague sense that people who cared about fashion were probably studying every little detail of Amelia’s dress.  I did not care about fashion.  It was a wedding dress.  It was white.  But Amelia definitely looked nice in it, a different look from the jeans or denim overalls that I was used to her wearing.  Scott and his groomsmen stood at the front of the church wearing tuxedoes.  Amelia reached the front of the church, Scott stepped forward, and Dan Keenan, the college pastor here at Jeromeville Covenant Church, began the service.

I was now twenty-one years, ten months old, and as of today, I was now in the part of life when I was getting invited to friends’ weddings.  I had been to a few weddings of relatives as a young child, but Scott and Amelia were the first of my own friends to invite me to their wedding.  I contemplated this as Dan gave his message about marriage and how it relates to the relationship of Jesus Christ to the church.  I had been friends with Scott and Amelia since the beginning of sophomore year, and I knew them from three different places: Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, this church, and University Chorus.  Actually, I knew Scott a fourth way; the first quarter that I worked as a tutor for the Learning Skills Center on campus, Scott was a tutor also.

Scott and Amelia began dating shortly after I met them.  They were a year older than me, but each of them had taken five years to finish their respective degrees, so like me, they had just graduated from the University of Jeromeville a week ago.  Scott’s degree was in electrical engineering, and Amelia was headed to medical school at New York Medical College.  Our mutual friend Brian Burr had just finished his first year at New York Med, and I saw him across the room but had not gotten a chance to talk to him yet.

Dan continued, giving a sermon on love making four main points that formed the acronym L-O-V-E.  This was a trademark of Dan’s preaching, making an acronym of the main points of his sermon.  He did this in the college Sunday school class, he did this when he preached at church, and apparently he did this at weddings.  At least he was consistent.

When it came time to present the rings, Joe Fox, in his role as best man, reached into his jacket.  But instead of pulling out the rings, he looked confused.  “Hold on just a minute,” he said.  He motioned for the other groomsmen to follow him, and the four groomsmen walked out of the room to the back.  The repetitive clangs of metal being forged on an anvil played on the speakers.  Joe walked back to the altar, now carrying the rings, as the guests chuckled.  Apparently all of this was staged as a joke, as if Joe had to go make the rings from scratch.

“Do you, Scott, take Amelia to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better and for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part?” Dan asked.

“I do,” Scott replied.  Dan then asked the same thing to Amelia, and she responded likewise.  And with that, Scott and Amelia were married.  I was not sure what to do next; how did weddings work?  Specifically, when was I allowed to get up and use the bathroom?  The wedding party filed out of the church, two at a time, as music played.  After all were gone, Pastor Dan announced, “The bride and groom would like to invite you to celebrate with them at a reception, at the Midtown Grand Ballroom in Capital City.  Directions were on the invitation you received, or you can pick up directions in the back.”

After going to the bathroom, I mingled around and said hi to people I knew, but only for about five minutes, because I did not want to be late for the reception.  I did not realize at the time how long it took for a wedding reception to start.


The Midtown Grand Ballroom was an older building, right in the middle of Capital City.  At the time, since I had not been to weddings before, I did not find it unusual that the wedding and reception were in two different places fifteen miles apart, but in all the weddings I have been to since, I realized that this does not usually happen.

I brought my gift in from the car; I was told that there would be a table for gifts here.  I found the table and put my box on it, with a card tucked under the bow.  I got them a set of fancy wine glasses from Macy’s; I know nothing of wine glasses, but it was on their gift registry.  A sign listed all of the guests alphabetically with their table numbers.  My name said Table 17, so I walked around the room, and when I found the table, I saw a card with my name on it.  I looked around to see who else was at my table, and discovered to my delight that I was sitting with some of my closest friends: Pete Green and Caroline Pearson, Taylor Santiago, Noah Snyder, Liz Williams and Ramon Quintero, and Sarah Winters.  Only Liz, Ramon, and Sarah were there when I arrived.

“Greg!” Sarah announced when I sat down.  “How have you been?  Are you in Jeromeville for the summer, or back in Plumdale?”

“I’m staying in Jeromeville for most of the summer.  What about you?”

“I’m back in Ralstonville.  We’re going to start premarital counseling at church.”

“That’s exciting,” I said.

“Why isn’t he here?” Liz asked.

“He couldn’t get the day off work,” Sarah explained.  “And he doesn’t know Scott and Amelia at all.”  I realized at that moment that, while I thought of Sarah as one of my closest friends, I still did not even know her boyfriend’s name.  She was not wearing an engagement ring, so he had not formally proposed yet, but if she was thinking about her own wedding, she was probably expecting a proposal soon.

Nothing seemed to be happening for some time.  I watched as people filed in.  A tall young man who looked a little older than me, probably in his mid-20s, walked to a table on my side of the room. I remember noticing him at the church, because he was dressed very strangely.  He wore a black fedora, a white dress shirt, and a black tie that only went halfway down his chest, much shorter than a normal tie.  He wore pants that came far up his waist, with suspenders over his shirt.  I had never seen him before.

I had been sitting there for close to half an hour, bored out of my mind, when the wedding party finally arrived.  The master of ceremonies announced them one by one as they walked toward the long table in the front of the room, then he announced that dinner would be served soon.  Finally, this wedding was moving along, and I was hungry.

When my table got called to be served dinner, I stood up with my plate.  I heard a familiar voice say, “Greg!” I turned and saw Brian Burr sitting at his table.

“Hey, Brian,” I said.  “How’s life?”

“School is intense,” he replied.  “But it’s good. You graduated, right?”

“Yes.”

“What comes next for you?”

“Doing the teacher training program at UJ.  I’ll be student teaching at Nueces High.”

“Math?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s awesome.  That’s the same program Shawn was in, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.  A mutual friend and former roommate of ours had also been in the math education program; he did not get along with his master teacher, and he never worked as a teacher after that.  “Hopefully I don’t have a bad experience like he did.”  

After I finished eating, I walked around to say hi to other people I had not talked to yet.  Courtney Kohl and Cambria Hawley were sitting next to each other, at a table where most of the others had left their seat like me.  “Hi,” I said.

“Hey, Greg,” Cambria said.  “How are you?”

“Good.  Just relaxing.  What about you guys?  Anything exciting coming up?”

“Swing dancing tomorrow!” Courtney exclaimed.  “You should come!”

Swing dancing had suddenly become a fad recently, and I found the whole thing bizarre.  Some of my friends had become almost obsessed with swing dancing, seemingly talking about little else, and I always thought I wanted nothing to do with it.  But from what little I had seen of it, it also looked kind of fun.  “What time?  Where?”

“Seven o’clock at U-Bar.  There’s a free group lesson for beginners, then the actual dancing starts at eight.  We’ll be there for the lesson; we’ve been going off and on for a few months, but it helps to practice.”

“Who is ‘we?’  Who all is going tomorrow?”

“Us two, Brody, Erica, and Sasha.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“That would be fun!  There’s usually more girls, so we need guys to dance with.”

I walked back to my table.  As people spoke about Scott and Amelia and gave toasts, I thought about how weird it was that I was actually considering going swing dancing.  As recently as four days ago, I was telling people how much I did not like swing dancing.  But, although I would not admit it to anyone, I knew exactly what had changed in the last four days: Courtney said that Sasha would be there.  It was starting to feel like my interest in getting to know Sasha better was outweighing my supposed dislike of swing dancing.

After the toasts came the first dance.  Scott and Amelia looked very happy throughout their first dance as a married couple.  Soon afterward, other wedding guests were invited to dance as well.  I watched people dancing but did not dance myself; I did not know what I was doing.  I was not a dancer.

A few songs later, the DJ began playing swing music.  A murmur of excitement spread through the room as people who knew swing dancing crowded the dance floor.  Scott and Amelia knew how to swing dancing, but the oddly-dressed guy and the girl he danced with were truly impressive with their moves.  Apparently they knew this guy from swing dancing.  If people tomorrow night would be dancing like that, it would be fun to watch, at least.

A few hours later, it was time to wrap up the night, and we were told to all line up and blow bubbles as Scott and Amelia left the building.  The MC said something about them moving to New York this summer so that Amelia could attend medical school.  Brian Burr was standing next to me; he said, “All these people are saying goodbye to Scott and Amelia.  But not me!  I’m saying, welcome to New York!”

“Right,” I said.

I thought about Brian’s statement as everything quieted down and people began leaving.  Scott and Amelia had been my friends for three years, and now they were leaving, moving on to bigger things.  They ended up settling in New York and raising a family there; I have only seen them in person twice since their wedding, but we have stayed in touch to this day.


The University Bar & Grill was on the corner of Andrews Road and West Fifth Street, right across the street from campus.  I had been past this place hundreds of times in my car, on my bike, and on buses, but I had never been inside.  I wore one of the two dress shirts I owned and a pair of slacks, and I had a feeling I was going to get sweaty, since it was a warm night.

A man at the door checked my driver’s license and, after making sure I was twenty-one and could legally drink, stamped the back of my hand.  Since I did not drink alcohol or hang out in bars, this was my first time ever being carded, ten months after turning twenty-one.

I looked around the room.  A bartender in the back poured drinks from a tap and from glass bottles behind him.  A door to the left led to what was presumably the kitchen.  Booths lined the left side and the wall along the front, and tables from the middle of the room had been pushed to the corner and stacked, to make room for a dance floor.  People stood in a circle, some dressed in clothes from the swing era and some not, and a man who looked to be several years older than me stood in the center with a headset microphone.  He had slicked-back dark hair down to his shoulders and a bit of a confident swagger.  He introduced himself as Matthew, and announced that it was time for the lesson.  He told the leads to line up on the outside of the circle, and the follows on the inside.  I thought that men usually led the dance and women followed, and I noticed that the men all seemed to take positions on the outside, so I stood on the outside.  A girl I did not know lined up across from me.

“This dance we will be teaching is called East Coast Swing,” Matthew explained.  “The basic step looks like this.”  Matthew stepped to his left, then stepped to his right, then made a smaller step back and quickly stepped back forward.  “Step, step, rock-step,” he said as he demonstrated the step a few more times.  “Follows, you’ll be doing this on the opposite feet.  Leads, put your hands out, palm up, elbows bent a little like this.”  Matthew demonstrated with his own hands, then told the follows to take the leads’ hands with their palms down.  He then counted “step, step, rock-step” as we practiced the move.

Matthew told the follows to rotate, and a new partner walked up to face me.  Next, we practiced the step with music, and I quickly got confused.  The first “step” happened on beat 1, the second “step” on beat 3, and the “rock-step” on beats 5 and 6, starting over on the next beat.  But the music playing, and most of the music that I associated with swing dancing, was based on eight beats.  So, to me, the dance inherently became out of sync with the music.  But everyone else was dancing the same way out of sync with the music, so I tried to put that out of my mind.

Next, Matthew showed us two different turn moves.  We continued rotating partners every few minutes.  By the end of the hour, I felt fairly confident with these simple moves, but I did not feel particularly confident asking women I did not know to dance.  However, Courtney, Cambria, Erica, and Sasha walked in toward the end of the lesson, so at least I had people I knew that I could dance with.  Brody was with them too.  Someone said something recently that gave me the impression that Brody and Courtney were no longer a couple, but they were together often enough still that I could not tell.  I waved in their direction, and they waved back.

After the lesson was over, I walked to my friends.  “Greg!” Courtney called out.  “You made it!”

“Yeah!”

“Do you feel ready to dance after doing the lesson?” Cambria asked.

“I think so.  You want to dance now?”

“Yeah!”

Cambria and I walked out to the dance floor, as did Courtney and Brody.  I did not recognize the song, but I did the move that I learned from Matthew, adding outside turns and inside turns periodically.  It still felt unnatural to do a six-count dance to an eight-count song, but apparently this was just the way things were done here.  “That was good!” Cambria told me as we walked off the dance floor.

“Thank you,” I replied.  It was good to know that my dancing was not awful.

I stood on the side and watched for the next few songs. Courtney and Brody danced one more and joined me a minute later.  The others were dancing with people I did not know.  “So how do you like this so far?” Courtney asked.

“I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, but it’s fun,” I said.  Then I explained about the mismatch between the six-count dance step and the eight-count music.

“Don’t think too hard about it,” Brody suggested.  “Dancing isn’t math.”

“I know, but I just see everything in terms of math.  That’s just how I am.”

Brody laughed.  “I love that about you, Greg. You’re hilarious.”  I chuckled, but I did not find it so amusing.

During the next song, I walked around the room.  That song ended, another one began, and I noticed a pretty girl standing next to me not dancing or talking to anyone.  “Would you like to dance?” I asked her.

“No, thank you,” she replied.  I kept walking until I saw another girl not dancing.  She was not as attractive as the first one, but certainly not bad looking.  “Would you like to dance?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she replied.  I led her to the dance floor and began the move that I learned from the lesson.  “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jamie,” she replied.

“I’m Greg.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said.

I did the same moves with Jamie that I did with Cambria.  I felt like I was starting to get the hang of things.  Jamie seemed to know what she was doing better than I did.  When the song ended, she thanked me and walked back over to the people she apparently knew.

About halfway through the night, Matthew stood up in the middle of the dance floor and said that it was time for something called the Birthday Jam.  He asked people whose birthdays were this week to get on the dance floor.  Two people walked to the middle, and others took turns dancing with them for about thirty seconds each.  I recognized one of the dancers who jumped in as the oddly-dressed guest from Scott and Amelia’s wedding.  He and the birthday girl were doing something that was not the step I learned from Matthew, where they pulled close, swung in a circle, and then pulled apart.  Courtney was standing next to me; I pointed and asked her, “What’s that step?”

“Lindy Hop,” Courtney replied.  I did not know what that meant, but apparently that was a different dance.  And it looked fun.  I wanted to learn it too.

Later in the night, after the birthday jam, I heard a song I clearly recognized: “Zoot Suit Riot.”  I had heard this song on the radio; it was a recent hit, although it sounded much more like old swing music than most of what typically got played on popular radio stations.  I walked up to Sasha and asked, “Would you like to dance?”

“Yes!” Sasha replied.  I led her to the dance floor and did the moves I had learned earlier in the night.  “You said this was your first time?” Sasha asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“You’re doing great!”

“Thank you,” I said, smiling widely.

I danced several more times with my friends that night.  I also asked a few girls I didn’t know to dance, and two of them actually said yes.  When the DJ announced the last song, all of my friends went to dance with other people; I just stood on the side, watching, feeling a little discouraged from the times I was rejected, but not completely defeated.

Courtney, Brody, and the others walked back to where I was standing when the song ended.  “So what did you think?” Courtney asked.  “Will you be coming back?”

“Probably,” I said.  “Are all of you here every week?”

“I’ll be home at my parents’ house for most of July and part of August.  And Cambria will be going home for a while too.  But Erica and Sasha and Brody are here most of the time.”

“You should keep coming!” Sasha said.

“I probably will,” I replied.  “When I’m around.  This really was fun.  I take back everything I said about how swing dancing people were weird.”  Sasha laughed.

We all dispersed in the parking lot, and I made the short drive home with the radio on.  Appropriately enough, Zoot Suit Riot came on shortly after I got in the car.  I would learn later that a lot of serious swing dancers did not particularly like this song, but for now, it was the song that I most associated with the current revival of swing dancing.

A lot had changed for me in just nine days.  I graduated.  Scott and Amelia, whom I had been good friends with since sophomore year, were married and moving away.  And I had gone from thinking of swing dancing as weird and creepy to trying it and enjoying it, and looking forward to going every week when I could.  And Sasha told me I was doing well.  All of this was making this summer seem very promising.

Readers: Do you dance? What’s your favorite kind of dancing?

One thing that worked out well from taking such a long hiatus: the story is now correctly synchronized to the time of year in which it is set. The real life Scott and Amelia just wished each other happy 26th anniversary on Facebook this week.

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 8 Comments

Surprise… I’m back! Welcome to season 5!

Once last year, while driving back to Jeromeville after visiting my family, I noticed a new road sign in Nueces, sixteen miles west of Jeromeville.  The sign said NUECES CULTURAL CENTER, NEXT EXIT.  I thought this was hilarious, because Nueces was a bland suburb not exactly known for high culture.  Also, Nueces means “nuts” in Spanish.  The name refers to walnuts and almonds historically grown in the area, but countless teenage boys, and others like me who never outgrew teenage boy humor, associate the word “nuts” with something else.

A few weeks ago, I made a joke among the other youth group leaders at church.  Adam White, the youth pastor, repeated the common joke that “military intelligence” and “jumbo shrimp” were oxymorons, phrases with self-contradictory meanings.  “You know what else is an oxymoron?” I said.  “The Nueces Cultural Center.”  Everyone laughed.  This silly joke would become a part of a new annual activity for The Edge, the junior high school kids at Jeromeville Covenant Church.

The activity was called the Mystery Trip.  The students were out on summer vacation, and this trip would welcome incoming students from the preteen youth group and send off the students promoting to high school with a final farewell.  Parents would drop off their students one morning and pick them up late the following night, with neither the parents nor the students having any idea what the students would be doing.  We leaders knew, but we were under strict instructions not to tell anyone.

When I arrived, Adam was sitting on the floor of the youth room with some of the other leaders going on the trip: Noah Snyder, Taylor Santiago, Erica Foster, and Martin Rhodes.  Courtney Kohl and Cambria Hawley arrived after I did.  “These are fake directions,” Adam announced as the leaders gathered in the youth room.  “Put them somewhere in the car for the students to find, but don’t say anything.”

“That’s brilliant,” I replied.  I skimmed the directions and laughed loudly when I saw the first destination.  “The Nueces Cultural Center?  That’s great!”

“I know,” Adam replied.  “Read the rest of it.”  Chuckles and eye rolls spread across the group as everyone read the fake itinerary, traveling from the Nueces Cultural Center to a garbage dump in Ashwood and a grueling hike up Yucca Mountain.

Courtney was sitting next to me; I heard her wonder aloud, “What’s Yucca Mountain?”

“A nuclear waste dump, in the middle of nowhere in Nevada,” I explained.

“Oh wow,” she replied, laughing.

“I hear people outside,” Adam said.  “Let’s pray for this trip, then we can start checking people in and loading the cars.  Noah, do you want to pray?”

“Sure,” Noah replied.  We all bowed our heads as Noah began to speak.  “Lord Jesus, I pray for safe travels today and tomorrow.  I ask that this Mystery Trip will be a meaningful experience for the students.  I pray for the new students coming into The Edge, that they will look forward to coming back and experiencing God’s love and fellowship.  I pray for those who will be starting high school in the fall, that this last junior high activity will remind them of how much they have grown, and how much you love them.  And I pray that all of us will have fun!  Amen!”

“Amen,” everyone else murmured.

We had instructed the parents to drop off the students at nine in the morning, with plans to leave at exactly ten.  That should give time to load the car and wait for stragglers.  As we waited, I noticed Courtney and Erica doing what appeared to be swing dancing moves in the nearly empty youth room.  Swing dancing and the associated music from the early 20th century had suddenly become oddly popular over the last year, with many bars, including one here in Jeromeville, holding swing dancing nights.  I thought the whole thing was dumb, and a bit creepy, considering how some of my friends had become obsessed with swing dancing practically overnight.

“What are they doing?” a student named Phillip Long asked me.

“Swing dancing,” I said.

“That’s dancing?”

“I guess.”

We left at 10:12, sooner than I expected given how crazy things can get while chaperoning a group of thirty-seven teens and preteens.  The church van was full of students, and a few leaders and parent chaperones, including me, had students in our own cars.  I drove my Bronco with Ted Hunter, Zac Santoro, Phillip Long, and Frank Krakowski.  I had known Ted and Zac for a long time; a year and a half ago, I had only been attending J-Cov for a few months, and they asked me to hang out with them after church and said I should be a leader in their youth group.  Noah always said he thought it was hilarious that the students chose me to be a leader, instead of the other way around.  Phillip and Frank had one more year in junior high.  Phillip’s mother attended J-Cov, but Frank’s family did not, and I got the impression that his family did not attend any church.  He found The Edge through friends at school.

“How’s your summer going so far?” I asked as we turned west onto Highway 100 .

“Good,” Zac replied.

After no one said anything for another minute or so, I tried again.  “Do any of you have any exciting summer plans?” I asked.

“Not really,” Ted said.

“Nope,” Zac added.  “Just hanging out at home.”

“Going to Disneyland,” Phillip said.

“That should be fun,” I replied.

“Yeah.”

After no one spoke for several seconds, I tried to engage them in conversation again, asking if any of them had any idea where we were going today.  No one did.  Somewhere between Silvey and Nueces, I put Edge Mix ’98, the mixtape that we made for all of the students who came to Winter Camp this year, ino the tape player.  Hopefully these kids would enjoy the same music we played at youth group.  The first song was “Suckerpunch” by Five Iron Frenzy.  I nodded my head along to the song.  Since I knew something about this song that the students in the car did not, I tried to notice their reactions, but no one said anything until about a minute into the song.  “What is this music?” Frank asked, loudly and disdainfully.

The others were not as negative as Frank.  “Five Iron Frenzy!” Zac exclaimed.

“They’re awesome!” Ted said.  He started singing along, getting a few of the lyrics wrong.  It was nice to know that someone was at least paying attention and on board with the music.  Frank stopped complaining.

Either no one had found or paid attention to the fake directions, or no one noticed road signs outside the car window, because no one asked any questions when we passed the Nueces Cultural Center sign without turning off.  We drove for two and a half hours, through Pleasant Creek, Los Nogales, Sullivan, Irving, San Tomas, and other smaller suburbs in between.  South of San Tomas, Highway 88 climbed steeply into thickly forested mountains.  After twenty miles through and over the mountains, with many sharp curves, Highway 88 ended  in the middle of downtown Mount Lorenzo.  Traffic was heavy because Mount Lorenzo was a popular tourist destination, nestled between the beach and mountains.  I grew up just thirty-five miles from here, and I associated Mount Lorenzo with hippies, of which there were many here.

After we parked at the beach, I led the four boys to the place where Adam had told us to assemble.  “This is our first stop,” Adam announced after everyone had arrived.  “Mount Lorenzo Beach.  We’ll put down some picnic blankets, and you can eat your lunch now.  We’ll be here until five o’clock.  If you want to go on rides, make sure you stay with a leader.”

Next to Mount Lorenzo Beach was an amusement park with roller coasters, thrill rides, a carousel, and carnival games.  Admission was free, so guests could walk through the park and get tickets for individual rides if they did not want to buy a day pass.  “I love the Giant Wave,” I said to the nearest person who would listen, which was Mrs. Willis, a parent chaperone.  “One of my favorite roller coasters.  I hope I can get some kids to go on it with me.”

“My daughter probably won’t be one of them,” Mrs. Willis said.  “Samantha isn’t all that into rides.  She just wants to hang out with the girls today.”

“That makes sense.”

“You just graduated this weekend, right?” Mrs. Willis asked me.

“Yes.  And I’m staying at UJ next year for the teacher training program.”

“Congratulations!”

“Thank you!”

After we ate and had time to digest, I asked the boys in my car if they wanted to ride the Giant Wave.  Ted, Zac, and Phillip did, but Frank said, “The Giant Wave is dumb.  It doesn’t even go upside down.”

“It doesn’t go upside down because it’s historic,” I replied.  “The ride was built in the 1920s.  And it’s still one of the best roller coasters.  But you don’t have to come with us.”

I walked with Ted, Zac, and Phillip to the Giant Wave, leaving Frank with the students and adults who stayed on the beach.  “When I was in eighth grade,” I said, “we had our honor roll trip here.  I was afraid to ride the Giant Wave, and my friend kept bugging me to go on it.  Finally, he said that if I went with them, he would tell the girl I liked to sit next to me.  So I went on the Giant Wave with them, and I loved the ride so much that I didn’t even care about my friends or that girl for the rest of the day.  I just kept riding it over and over.”

“That’s funny,” Ted replied.  No one else responded.

We all rode the Giant Wave once, and it was just as thrilling and wonderful as I remembered.  I waited behind while Ted, Zac, and Phillip went on a few other rides.  When we returned, I could not find the rest of the group.  I eventually spotted Adam, some of the other students and leaders, and our stuff about two hundred feet away.

“Is this where we were before?” I asked.  “Or did you move?”

“We had to move,” Mrs. Willis said.  “Some naked people started dancing in front of us.”

“Wow,” I replied, not entirely surprised because of all the hippies in Mount Lorenzo.


In the early evening, we loaded everything back in the car and ate at a diner near the beach, some place apparently famous among tourists.  I was very full after eating a double cheeseburger, French fries, and a vanilla shake with whipped cream and a cherry on top.  Frank complained that his food looked disgusting, but he still ended up eating it.

After dinner, we drove back over the mountains.  As I pulled into the parking lot of our next destination, Frank loudly read the sign on the building.  “Iranian Christian Church of Sunnyglen,” he said.  “We’re going to an Iranian church?”

I could not tell if the disgust in his voice was mild racism, surprise at a church being part of a fun trip, or something else that I misinterpreted, so I explained the best I could in a neutral tone.  “We know the youth pastor of this church,” I said.  “He used to go to J-Cov.”  I started to explain more, how he volunteered with the high school group, and how this Iranian church in Sunnyglen was such a perfect fit for him as the child of Iranian immigrants, but I stopped, knowing that nothing I said would make Frank feel any better.

“Who is it?” Zac asked.

I almost said “Kevin Tabari,” but then remembered that this was the Mystery Trip, so instead I just said, “You’ll see.  It’s a surprise.”

The students who knew Kevin were pleased to see him.  “Greg!” Kevin said when I walked in, shaking my hand.  “How are you?”

“I’m great,” I replied.  I had not seen Kevin in about a year.  “I graduated.”

“Congratulations!  What comes next for you?”

“Doing the teacher training program at UJ, and student teaching at Nueces High.  And staying with The Edge another year.”

“Nice!  My sister is going to UJ next year.  You’ll probably see her at J-Cov.”

“That’s awesome.”

Once we got settled, Adam led a short Bible study with the students, then we stayed up for a bit playing with the games in the youth room of Kevin’s church.  Bedtime was ten o’clock, and we all slept in sleeping bags on the floor.


We stayed at Kevin’s church until mid-morning, eating breakfast and playing more games.  Zac and Ted challenged Phillip and me to a game of foosball; Phillip and I lost badly.

Next, we all drove north to Bay City and took a walk in a park, up a hill with beautiful views of the Bay.  We ate lunch at Dock No. 7, an old shipping dock on the Bay that had been converted to a well-known tourist trap with restaurants and shops.  After lunch, we had some free time to shop; I bought a key chain of the Bay City Captains football team.  It broke a few months later.  For dinner, we drove across the bay to Noah Snyder’s parents’ house in a rural area in the hills outside of Los Nogales.  The Snyders had a large yard, where the students ran around and threw Frisbees and footballs while Mr. and Mrs. Snyder grilled hot dogs for us.

After dinner, we headed south to our final destination, a large, modern-looking church in Sullivan with two buildings on its campus.  I overheard some of the students wondering why we were going to another church, and why so many people were at this church on a Tuesday night.  I noticed some students in our group asking people not from our group what was going on.

“The concert is that way,” a man said, pointing toward the building that was not the church’s main sanctuary.  The students began murmuring about the concert and ran to Adam to ask him who was playing.

“Just a minute,” Adam replied.  “I’ll pass out the tickets once everyone gets here.”  I just smiled, knowing who we were about to see, while the students speculated who would be playing a concert at a church.  The rest of the cars arrived within the next ten minutes, and Adam passed out the tickets.  I read mine: “FIVE IRON FRENZY with special guest THE W’S.”

“Five Iron Frenzy?  The W’s?  Who are these people?” Frank shouted loudly.

“You know Five Iron Frenzy,” I said.  “We play them at youth group.  And we listened to them in the car yesterday.”  Frank had no response to that, and I was glad he did not keep asking questions, because I had no answer to the other thing.  I had never heard of The W’s.

Eventually, we entered the building, twenty minutes before the show was scheduled to start.  The venue was standing only, with no seats, and our students were instructed to stay close to the leaders.  We stood together in one group facing the right side of the stage.

When the show started, I watched The W’s take their places on the stage. I assumed that this was a ska band, from the way that they were dressed and the number of people playing horns, and the fact that they were touring with Five Iron Frenzy, known for their blend of ska and punk rock.  But about a minute into The W’s’ first song, I could tell that this was no ordinary ska band; the rhythm and sound were a little different.  People in the crowd started dancing, differently from the typical frenetic flailing at ska shows.  To my right, Courtney, Erica, and Cambria were dancing, and on my left, Phillip was looking at me.  He asked, screaming loudly over the music, “Is this what I think it is?”

I made an exaggeratedly horrified face and replied, “Swing dancing!  Noooooo!”

The W’s’ set continued, and I realized that I did find their music a bit catchy.  It was not exactly the classic big-band swing sound, more like somewhere in between swing and ska.  But I was predisposed to dislike swing music and swing dancing so much, because of how my friends all acted so weird with swing dancing these days.  I did not understand the appeal, although that was probably because I lacked dancing ability in general.  And my friends certainly seemed to be having fun, so I ignored them and did my best to enjoy the music.

The W’s played for about forty minutes.  Five Iron Frenzy took the stage shortly after that; I cheered, loudly anticipating music I actually knew.  Reese Roper, the lead singer, was dressed as Captain America.  When I discovered Five Iron Frenzy about a year and a half earlier, I liked their sound, but I did not like all of the lyrics.  Some of the songs were excessively critical of Americans and the shallow, materialistic nature of American culture.  The criticism was certainly warranted in some cases, though. I wondered if Reese’s costume was intended to make a satirical point, but I did not think about it too much.  I had learned not to overthink Five Iron Frenzy’s strange sense of humor.  They opened the show with “Handbook for the Sellout,” from their most recent album, appropriately titled Our Newest Album Ever.

“Here’s another song from the same album,” Reese said next.  “I hope you hate it.”  Five Iron Frenzy had a self-deprecating sense of humor, calling their own songs dumb and stupid and the like.  The next song was “Suckerpunch”; I liked that one, because I could relate to its lyrics, about a nerdy, awkward school kid whom God loves anyway.  I leaned over to Frank and said, “This song was on this year’s Edge Mix,” hoping that he could engage with the music.  He did not respond.  I could not tell if he was enjoying himself.

I looked around.  Courtney and Erica and Cambria were no longer swing dancing.  Some people were doing the weird, uncoordinated dance movies associated with ska, including Adam.  I supposed that a youth pastor who is just twenty-six years old could get away with that, without looking dumb.  I turned my head behind me, where I could see a stocky, dark-haired man running the sound board.  Something looked familiar about him, and it took about a minute for me to remember that this was Masaki Liu, the band’s producer.  I met him at the 1997 National Youth Workers’ Convention, where I had seen Five Iron Frenzy play before. Masaki ran a table for their record label at that convention, and he was in a band called Dime Store Prophets that I had seen twice.  I would learn later that he also produced The W’s.

This Five Iron Frenzy show was every bit as much fun as the other time I saw them.  That other show was what made me a fan of the band after my mixed feelings about their first album and the anti-American lyrics.  They closed the show tonight with Every New Day, one of their most prayerful and worshipful songs.  For an encore, they sang the contemporary hymn As The Deer, with no instruments or microphones.  Many people in the audience sang along, including me.

“That was so good,” Ted said as we walked back to the car.

“So good,” Zac repeated.

“I know!” I said.  “That was my second time seeing them.  Both shows were so good.”

“I’d never seen them before,” Phillip said.  Frank did not say anything, but he seemed to be in a good mood.




I put the Edge Mix tape on as we drove home, but the boys all quickly fell asleep.  We did not arrive back at church until close to midnight.  The parents had been instructed to pick up their students at 11:30; I was glad that so many parents were willing to pick up the kids so late, entrusting their students’ late night to us.

I do not know whatever happened to Frank.  He showed up at The Edge off and on over the course of that year, but I never saw him after that.  He did not come to church on Sundays, and I did not know if he stayed involved with the high school group.  It was the nature of a large youth group such as The Edge that students would come and go over the years.

I went to bed that night still on a high from the concert.  My relationship to Five Iron Frenzy had more ups and downs over the years.  I stopped listening to them in the early 2000s after a disappointing album, then started listening to them again during their farewell tour in 2003 and through their 2011 comeback.  They recorded another disappointing and overtly political album in 2021, and I unfollowed all of the Five Iron Frenzy social media fan groups I was part of at that time.  But I still listen to all of their older work.  I have also had some personal connections to this band, starting in 2003 when I attended a church where the worship leader coincidentally happened to be Masaki, the producer. This made my relationship to them more complicated over the years, but all of that is a long story for another time.

I wanted nothing to do with The W’s after that show.  I thought swing dancing was stupid and weird.  But life has a funny way of changing very abruptly, and I had no idea on that night what the rest of 1998 had in store for me and what changes were coming very soon.

Readers: Tell me about a band, or a song, or a genre of music that you didn’t like at first, but it grew on you.  How did that happen?  Tell me in the comments!

Also, just so you know, real life is kind of overwhelming right now, so I might not be posting season 5 weekly like I used to. But I’ll do my best.

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.

(February 2024. Year 4 recap.)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

If this is your first time here on Don’t Let The Days Go By, welcome. DLTDGB is a continuing story set in 1998 (currently), about a university student making his way in life. I am currently on hiatus from writing; the story will continue eventually at some unspecified time. This break is taking a lot longer than I expected; real life in 2024 is kind of overwhelming right now.  Today’s post is a recap of the highlights of year 4.

(Also, in case you need it, click here for the recaps of year 1, year 2, and year 3.)

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

I was not in Jeromeville or at my parents’ house for most of the summer of 1997.  I was hundreds of miles away, doing a math research internship in Oregon.  I applied to this program on the suggestion of Dr. Thomas, one of my favorite professors.

June 22, 1997. My arrival in Oregon. (#135)

I met the other students in the program, found a church, and borrowed a bicycle so I could get around.  I did not have a lot in common with the other students in the program, other than mathematics itself, but I did my share of social activities with them.

June 28 – July 4, 1997. Outings with my new classmates. (#137)

I got to see my great-aunt and uncle a few times that summer; they lived not too far from me in Oregon.  My parents came to see me and other Oregon relatives one weekend.  I missed home terribly, but I made the most of my time in Oregon.  The most life-changing thing that happened during that summer was the realization that I did not want to do mathematics research as a career.

August 12-15, 1997. My final week in Oregon. (#142)

After a couple weeks at my parents’ house, I returned to Jeromeville and moved into a house with Josh McGraw, Sean Richards, and Sam Hoffman.  Josh had been my roommate the previous year as well.  I went to two retreats back-to-back just before school started, one for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship and one for the youth leaders at Jeromeville Covenant Church.

September 15-19, 1997. Seeing my friends again at Outreach Camp. (#145)

Late September, 1997. The retreat with the youth group leaders and a step outside my comfort zone. (#146)

I did chorus again that fall, and we performed at a ceremony for the renaming of a building on campus.  My future plans also solidified at the start of that school year.  With math research off the table, I put all my efforts into becoming a teacher, and I figured out that I would be able to graduate on time in June.  I made a silly movie, based on my Dog Crap & Vince stories, with the kids from the youth group at church.

Late October-early November, 1997. I made a movie. (#150)

I did a lot of things with the youth group at J-Cov that year.  Some of the leaders pulled a memorable prank on the kids, toilet-papering seventeen kids’ houses on the same night.  We also took a nine-hour road trip to San Diego for the National Youth Workers’ Convention.  I saw a lot of Christian bands play there.  Although most of my experiences at J-Cov over the years were positive, I saw a darker side when someone I knew there began harassing and almost stalking me.  He eventually had his church membership revoked; I was not the only one whom he had done this to.

November 30 – December 8, 1997. But he won’t admit he has a problem. (#155)

I had my eye on a few girls that year.  Carrie Valentine was two years behind me; I knew her from JCF.  She was nice, and she was easy to talk to.  I finally got brave and spoke up, and things did not turn out as I had hoped.

December 9-12, 1997.  Not everything follows consistent rules the way math does. (#156)

Over winter break, I made another movie with my brother and his friends, and I took a trip to my old roommate Brian Burr’s New Year party, where I got to see some of our older friends who had graduated.  When I returned to school for the new quarter, I interned in a high school classroom, to get more experience to prepare for my future career as a teacher.  I had recently discovered how much I loved In-N-Out Burger, and a location opened in Jeromeville that quarter.  I was there on the day it opened.

January 16, 1998.  A fresh cheeseburger, and a fresh take on relationships. (#160)

That winter, I went to Winter Camp with the youth group kids.  I started spending my Sunday nights at the De Anza house, where the guys hosted weekly watch parties for The X-Files.  That was already one of my favorite shows, and now I got to enjoy it with a large group of friends.

February 8, 1998. A new weekly tradition. (#162)

Sadie Rowland was another girl I was interested in at the time.  She was, like Carrie, two years younger than me, and she went to JCF.  She was the kind of girl whom I could sit there and talk to for hours, and it would feel like no time had passed at all.  She was preparing to leave the area for six months to do an internship, and we made plans to see a certain movie that was popular at the time.  The plans fell through, I never saw the movie, and Sadie for the most part disappeared out of my life.

March 5, 1998. My heart will not go on. (#165)

The University of Jeromeville men’s basketball team won the national championship for their level, one of the greatest accomplishments in Jeromeville Colts history.  Spring quarter started with an unexpected surprise: Carrie Valentine was in two of my classes, despite being in a major very different from mine.  I was able to let go of any lingering awkwardness, and we got to be friends again.  Besides, a new girl had caught my eye: Sasha Travis from church, even though she was only seventeen.

Early April, 1998. Trash. (#168)

With Josh and Sam planning to move out over the summer, I managed to find two new roommates to move in with Sean and me for the following year: Brody, another youth leader from church, and Jed, a freshman from JCF who would be moving out of the dorm at the end of the year.  JCF had a spring retreat that year.  Taylor, Pete, and Noah, who had been more involved with church than JCF the last few years, all went on the retreat, knowing it would be their last JCF retreat.

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

I did a lot of creative writing that year, and I took a Fiction Writing class that quarter.  We had a project to write a story and share a copy with everyone in the class.  I wrote a story about an awkward guy and a girl he liked, inspired by Sasha.  It was the first time I had ever shared my writing with an audience of people who did not know me well, and the experience was humbling.

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

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

A lot of other things happened that year.  My parents came to the Spring Picnic, and I decided that I enjoyed it better without them.  Noah and Taylor taught me to play Catan.  I was inducted as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.  I shared my testimony at JCF’s senior night, wearing a shirt with Brent Wang’s face on it.  I came in second at the Man of Steel competition, my best finish ever.  And I made a board game based on Dog Crap and Vince.  But the most important thing that happened was graduation.  I was finished with my Bachelor of Science degree, and ready to start the teacher training program next year.

June 20, 1998. Life was beginning to take shape. (#180)

Here is the complete year 4 playlist:

Let me know how you’ve been the last few months!

(December 2023. Interlude and blogiversary.)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 11 Comments

I haven’t posted here in over a month. I’m pausing my hiatus today because it was five years ago today, December 9, 2018, that I posted the first episode of Don’t Let The Days Go By. In the fictional universe, it was July 5, 1993, character-Greg had one year of high school left. The Dennisons had been visiting extended family, and on the 250-mile road trip home, they drove around every university campus on the way so that Greg could see the schools up close and get ideas about where to apply. Now, after five years and 180 episodes, Greg has graduated from the University of Jeromeville, and he has a plan for the next step.

This hiatus has been planned. I always take some time off every six months in the fictional timeline. I have a feeling that this hiatus is going to be longer, though. I even considered not coming back at all and just ending the story here. Graduation would make a good stopping point to the story, and in the last few months, writing was feeling more like a chore than something I enjoyed. And I’ve just been dealing with a lot of lack of motivation issues in general.

I wonder sometimes why I’m still keeping this story going. Very few people actually read it. I wonder, does anyone really care what happens? Does anyone get involved in the characters’ lives, anxiously wondering what will happen in the next episode, as one might for the characters in a popular TV series? At the same time, though, I’ve never been doing this for popularity. I guess my main purpose in writing DLTDGB is to keep these memories alive. The world has changed a lot in the last quarter-century, and while it’s not healthy to live in the past, there is a lot of nostalgia that is quickly disappearing that I want to preserve in my own specific way. And it has also been helpful to look back on my actual memories from those days and reflect on how I have grown since then.

As of now, I’m still planning on sticking with the original plan, to keep going up until January 1, 2000 in the fictional timeline, then possibly having a few more episodes, skipping more quickly through 2000 and 2001, to tie up loose ends and tell the story of how Greg moved away from Jeromeville.

If you are new here, welcome; it’s nice to meet you. Don’t Let The Days Go By is a continuing episodic coming-of-age story set in the 1990s, about a student at the fictitious University of Jeromeville, in the western United States. Start here at episode 1, and then keep clicking “next” to read the whole story in order:
(click) July 5, 1993. Prologue: my first visit to Jeromeville. (#1)

I wanted to do some other non-DLTDGB writing during this hiatus, but that hasn’t happened yet. I have an unfinished story that I started in October, and another unfinished story that I started in the spring of 2022. Those might still get done eventually, but in general, I’m trying to juggle a lot of things in life right now, and I feel like I’m spinning my wheels and not getting anywhere. I might need to step back from some things so that things that are supposed to be fun don’t start to feel like chores or obligations.

If I do finish those other stories, they’ll probably be on my other blog, where I post very occasionally, so go subscribe: (click) gregoutofcharacter.wordpress.com

How are all my readers, the few of you who are still around, doing? Let me know what’s going on in your lives. And feel free to ask me questions about DLTDGB and the fictional Jeromeville universe too; I’ll answer them to the best of my ability without giving away spoilers. And for those of you who don’t want to read all 180 episodes, you can click here for the year 1 recap, year 2 recap, and year 3 recap. I’ll be posting the year 4 recap soon, and updating some other things on the site.

June 20, 1998. Life was beginning to take shape. (#180)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 17 Comments

“Your gown is still in the package?” Mom exclaimed incredulously.  “It’s gonna be all wrinkled!”

“I don’t know!” I replied loudly.  “I don’t think about these things!  I’m a guy!”

“Well, when you’re a teacher, you’ll have to dress nicely, and that means ironing your clothes so they aren’t wrinkled.”

“That doesn’t help me right now,” I said.

“I have an iron,” my roommate Sean said, sitting on the couch and overhearing our conversation.  “Would that help?”

“Yes,” Mom replied.  We had about half an hour until I had to assemble for my graduation ceremony.  Mom, Dad, and my sixteen-year-old brother Mark had driven up from Plumdale yesterday, arriving in the early evening.  They stayed at a motel in Woodville, about ten miles from my house, on the assumption that it would be difficult to find a room in Jeromeville the weekend of graduation.  Mom put a bed sheet on the dining room table, since there was no ironing board, and got most of the wrinkles out of my gown using Sean’s iron.

Graduation day at the University of Jeromeville was more accurately graduation weekend.  The university held five different graduation ceremonies in the Recreation Pavilion, divided by major, with additional separate ceremonies for graduate students and the various professional schools such as medicine, law, and veterinary medicine.  A month or so ago, I had sent an email to my old roommate Brian Burr, who was now on the other side of the country, finishing his first year at New York Medical College.  I mentioned my upcoming graduation, and he said to sneak in a Game Boy, because the ceremony was long and boring.  I had my Game Boy at the house, but it felt disrespectful to sit there playing video games during the most important celebration of my educational career.

After I put on my cap and freshly ironed gown, we all got in the car, and Dad drove the mile south to campus.  The Campus Parking Services department charged full price to park on campus for graduation, which felt like a massive ripoff to me, but graduation was not an everyday occurrence, so I would just suck it up and deal with it this time.  After all, back in 1998, full price was only three dollars, and Mom and Dad were paying.

“I’m supposed to go over there,” I said, pointing to the opposite side of the building from where we were.  I then pointed toward the main entrance and continued, “You get in over there.”

“Okay,” Mom replied.  “We’ll see you afterward.”  Mom hugged me.

“Congratulations,” Dad said, shaking my hand.  “Dad loves you.”

“You too,” I replied.  Mom, Dad, and Mark walked toward the main entrance, and I walked to the other side of the building.  I saw a few people I know, and I said hi and congratulated them.  The informational packet I received a few weeks ago told me to assemble on the south side of the building by 9:45.  I looked at my watch; I was right on time, but after finding my assigned position, I stood there for almost half an hour before the line of graduates began moving forward.  By then, my feet were starting to hurt.

I walked into the Pavilion and looked around.  I was walking on what was usually the basketball court, but it had been covered with over a thousand folding chairs.  The highest level of seating, collapsible bleachers which I had only seen in use during a few heavily attended basketball games, were filled to capacity with family and friends of graduates, as were all the lower levels of seating.  Including the graduates on the floor, there were probably at least ten thousand people in the building.  I had no idea where Mom, Dad, and Mark were, and it was hopeless trying to find them.  I stood at my seat on the floor, as I had been instructed to, listening to the marching band play Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1.  They repeated the same section from that piece over and over and over again, as was tradition at graduation ceremonies, as all of the graduates filed in.

Next, some official-looking person in a suit whom I did not recognize walked up to the stage and told us to be seated.  I took a deep breath.  My feet hurt. This was going to be a long day.  I fidgeted in my seat, trying to get comfortable.  The man in the suit introduced himself as the Dean of Something-or-other, and he took several minutes to welcome us all to the ceremony, using big words to make himself sound good.

Two more bigwigs from the university administration spoke next.  I continued fidgeting in my seat, trying hard not to fall asleep as the speaker droned on and on about the challenges we would face in the future.  Her speech was saturated with left-wing buzzwords about the environment and cultural diversity.  The next speaker was even more boring; halfway through his speech, I had really wished that I had followed Brian Burr’s advice to bring a Game Boy.

The valedictorian, a girl named T’Pring Miller who double majored in physics and English, spoke next.  A few weeks ago, I had received a large envelope in the mail with information about the graduation ceremonies, and when I saw the name T’Pring Miller listed on the program, I wondered what language her first name was from.  Years later, I would learn that the name T’Pring came from Star Trek.  I tended to dislike the idea of naming children things based on popular culture, and I hoped that any future children I had would have more traditional names.  Popular culture changes so often that names like this lose their meaning.  I wondered if T’Pring Miller was ever teased about her name growing up, and if that was what drove her to choose such a challenging educational path, double-majoring in two unrelated subjects.

I was bored.  T’Pring Miller was speaking about the challenges she had to overcome in life, but she did not mention her unusual name as one of the challenges.  I was sure that she had a lot of interesting things to say, but I found myself starting to nod off.  I sat up and started wiggling my feet up and down, trying to stay awake.  I did not want to be disrespectful, but I was tired of sitting.  I was ready to walk across the stage and receive my prop diploma.  I knew that my actual diploma would arrive in the mail several months later, but this was not publicly announced to everyone watching.

After what seemed like an eternity, the dean who spoke at the beginning announced that it was time to receive our diplomas.  In the sea of graduates, I was slightly behind the middle, so my turn would not come for a while.  In addition to being uncomfortable and bored, now I also had to pee.  I could see the end in sight, though, as people sitting near the front were gradually moving forward to receive their prop diplomas.

I wondered if Mom and Dad and all of the parents and family members in the audience were as bored as I was.  Mark was probably complaining by now.  I knew some people who were graduating this year but skipping the ceremony entirely.  At first I did not understand why people would not want to celebrate their momentous accomplishments, but now, after seeing how long and boring the ceremony was, I understood.  I finally reached the stage, after waiting for hundreds of people in front of me.  I shook hands with the dean, and someone else handed me a folder that was blank on the inside.  Someone took a photograph of me, which I could buy for an additional fee if I wanted to.

I returned to my seat and waited for the rest of the graduates to walk across the stage.  Finally, almost three hours after the ceremony began, the time came for us to turn our tassels to the other side of our caps, to show that we had graduated.  We then filed out of the Pavilion one row at a time while the marching band played the school alma mater song, the same one I sang with University Chorus at the Waite Hall dedication ceremony last October.  As soon as I was out of sight of the audience, I headed straight for the nearest bathroom.

To the south, between the Pavilion and Davis Drive, was a large lawn, used during the year for intramural sports.  This was where we had assembled a few hours ago before we filed in.  My parents and I had the foresight to pick a general direction to meet after the ceremony, so that we would not get lost in the giant crowd.  When I got there, I spotted a couple of other people I knew and said hi: old classmates, people from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, and one guy from my freshman dorm.  I eventually found Mom and Dad right where I told them to be.

“Congratulations,” Mom said, giving me a hug.  Dad shook my hand, and so did Mark.

“That was long,” I said.

“I know,” Mom replied.  “But graduations are always like that.”

“So where are we going next?” Dad asked.

“A reception for the math department, in the West Barn.  I’ve actually never been inside the West Barn.”

“And you said you’re getting an award or something?”

“Yes.”

“Can we walk there from here?” Mom asked.

“Sure.  It’s not too far.  Are we ready?  I’d like to get away from these crowds.”


The four of us walked across the lawn and turned east on Davis Drive, toward the core campus.  We passed the turn that led to the South Residential Area, where I lived freshman year.  We continued walking past a brand new science laboratory building on the left and several small buildings on the right.  These so-called temporary buildings were permanent enough to have been there for a few decades.  I then led my parents across the street to the Barn, the student union on this end of campus that was inside what was once an actual barn.  We crossed through the building and exited to a courtyard on the other side of the building, away from the street.

The West Barn Café and Pub, on the west side of this courtyard, was a fancy restaurant that could be reserved for receptions and other formal dinners and luncheons, such as this one for the graduating mathematics students.  It was well-known as the only place on campus where alcohol was served, although none would be at this function.  I had never had a reason to go here, so this building was entirely new to me.  I saw an outdoor patio with tables and umbrellas to my left as I entered the building, with my parents behind me.

“Hi,” someone I did not know, apparently a student assistant, said from behind a table full of programs and name tags.  “What’s your name?”

“Greg Dennison,” I said.

The student assistant handed me a program and my name tag.  “Welcome, Greg,” she said.  “Take a seat anywhere.”

I turned around and asked the rest of the family, “Where do you want to sit?”

“Wherever,” Mom replied.  Dad and Mark seemed equally noncommittal.

I walked to a table near the middle of the room that had four empty seats together.  Jack Chalmers and his parents were at the table next to us.  Jack leaned over and said, “Hey, Greg.  Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” I replied.  “You too.  Mom, Dad, this is Jack.  We’ve had a bunch of classes together over the years.”

“Nice to meet you,” Mom replied.  She and Dad both shook Jack’s hand.

“Greg, these are my parents,” Jack said, gesturing toward the people sitting with him.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking Jack’s mother’s and father’s hands, one at a time.

“Are you the Greg that’s getting this award?” Jack’s mother asked.  I looked on her program where she was pointing; it read Department Citation – Gregory Dennison.

“Yes, that’s me,” I answered, smiling.

“Congratulations,” Jack’s mother said.

I turned back with Mom and Dad as more people filed into the building.  Mom asked if I knew anyone.  “Of course I know people,” I replied.  “I’ve had classes with them.”

Dr. Alterman, the department chair who had taught my Number Theory class the previous fall, called the reception to order.  He pointed out the food line, where we would be served out of trays by restaurant employees.  We all lined up for food, and I got chicken, pasta salad, regular salad, and buttered bread.  I returned back to my seat and looked around the room to see who else was here.  I recognized a lot of faces of other mathematics majors who had been in classes with me, and I knew some of their names.  Katy Hadley, the cute redhead, was there, but I did not know her particularly well, and she was never all that friendly, so I did not go out of my way to speak to her.  Alan Jordan sat across the room; the first thing I always noticed about him was that he resembled the actor Norm MacDonald, not only physically but also in his deadpan voice.  Andrea Wright sat with her husband, as well as other family.  Andrea was my first crush at UJ, when her name was Andrea Briggs, and I was disappointed to meet her boyfriend a few months later.  They got married last summer.  Sarah Winters, one of my best friends for our entire four years at UJ, was here with her mother.  I knew that her parents were no longer together, and I did not know whether or not her father was at graduation.  I did not know how that kind of family dynamic worked, and it was none of my business.

Dr. Alterman spoke for several minutes on the importance of mathematics in a connected society.  He used many trendy buzzwords that had arisen in the past few years with the emergence of the Internet into the mainstream, such as “information superhighway.”  Dr. Thomas, a woman of around forty who was one of my favorite professors, spoke after Dr. Alterman.  “Next,” she said, “I would like to present this year’s Department Citation.”

That’s me, I thought, suddenly a little bit nervous.

“This award goes to the undergraduate mathematics major with the highest grade point average in mathematics classes.  This student had straight As in all math classes.  I had the pleasure of teaching this student two years ago in Combinatorics,” Dr. Thomas said, “and he was one of the top students in the class.  I also know him from my work with the Math Club, and I have seen him grow and explore different futures in mathematics as he continues to perform at a high level in the classroom.  The recipient of the 1998 Department Citation in Mathematics is Gregory Dennison.”

Everyone applauded as I walked to the front of the room.  Dr. Thomas shook my hand and handed me a certificate.  “Thank you,” I said.

“Next year,” Dr. Thomas continued, “Greg will be right here at the University of Jeromeville, in the teacher certification program.  When a student of Greg’s caliber chooses a career in education, our young people have a bright future ahead.”

I smiled as I walked back toward my seat.  I felt humbled that Dr. Thomas believed so much in my ability to be a great teacher.  Dr. Thomas had once encouraged me to pursue mathematics research.  She was planning to start a summer research internship at UJ, and she encouraged me to apply to similar programs elsewhere; this was how I ended up in Oregon last summer doing math research.  Sometimes I wondered if Dr. Thomas was disappointed that I did not choose research as a career, but today it certainly did not sound like it.  I sat back down next to Mom, Dad, and Mark; Mom looked at me, smiling proudly.

The other professors at this event took turns announcing recipients of other awards, and recognizing students who had been accepted to particularly prestigious graduate schools.  I sat and listened and applauded politely.  This was more interesting than the graduation ceremony in the Pavilion, since I knew some of these people and recognized most of their faces.  In the past, I would have been envious of these students and the fancy letters that they would have after their names in a few years.  But at this point, I was okay with the path I was on.  I had received my award, and after the events of the last two school years, I now knew that I enjoyed teaching much more than mathematical research.

After the individual awards, Dr. Alterman read the names of all of the mathematics graduates as we all stood up to be recognized collectively.  He then gave a brief concluding speech and congratulated us all once again.  When it was clear that the event was over and people were getting out of their seats, I got up to find Sarah.  Alan found me first.  “Hey, Greg,” he said as he walked by.  “Congratulations on the award.”

“Thanks.  Alan, this is my mom, dad, and Mark, my brother.”  I turned to my family and said, “This is Alan.  He’ll be in the student teaching program next year too.”

“Nice to meet you,” Alan said.  He continued walking toward wherever he was going, and I continued walking toward Sarah.

“Greg!” Sarah exclaimed, giving me a hug.  “Congratulations!”

“Thank you,” I replied.  “You too.”  Sarah introduced me to her mother, and I introduced Sarah and her mother to my family, as I had already done several other times today.  “Sarah lived downstairs from me in C Building,” I explained to my family.  “And I know her from JCF and church.”

“Oh, yeah,” Mom replied.  “I’ve heard Greg talk about you.”

“Next year,” I explained, “Sarah is moving back home to Ralstonville, to do the student teaching program at Ralstonville State.  Is that right?” I asked, turning back to Sarah.

“Yes,” she said.  “But I’ll be up here visiting a few times.”

“Good.  Will you be at church tomorrow?”

“Yeah!  I’ll see you then.”


After the reception, the four of us walked back toward the car.  As soon as we were out of earshot of others, Mark said in his usual exaggerated, sarcastic tone, “I didn’t know you went to school with Norm MacDonald!”

“I know,” I replied. “I noticed that right away when I first met Alan a couple years ago.”

We drove back to the house, and Mom, Dad, and Mark said their goodbyes and left for Plumdale about an hour later.  Later in the summer, I would be back in Plumdale for a week, although I had not decided on the exact dates yet.

I went back to my room to check my email.  I did not feel all that different now that I was a graduate of the University of Jeromeville.  And my life would not look that different over the summer.  I would continue volunteering with the youth group at church and going to Bible study.  I planned on going for bike rides around Jeromeville while the weather was warm and dry.  I also had some special events this summer, including Scott and Amelia’s wedding a week from now and Josh and Abby’s wedding in August.

My life had changed so much in the last four years.  When I graduated from Plumdale High School, I was excited to get out of Santa Lucia County and make a new start somewhere else, because I was tired of the same old thing and ready for something different.  But I did not know what my future would look like.  Today, though, life was beginning to take shape.  And instead of being excited to get away, I was ready to stay in Jeromeville for a long time.  Through the influence of friends, including Sarah, I had learned over the last few years what it really meant to follow Jesus Christ.  I had become more involved in church, which gave me a sense of community here.  And I had a plan for my future: I was going to teach high school mathematics.  I would be good at it, according to Dr. Thomas.  My Christian values felt out of place at times in a university town like Jeromeville, but Jeromeville was now my home, and I hoped to stay here and raise a family here someday.  Of course, as is often the case, my future did not end up looking like that at all.  But at that moment, I had a plan, and I was ready for what came next.

I’ll be taking a few months off before I start season 5. I need time to plan too (in writer lingo, I’m a plotter, not a pantser). But I will post on here a few times; I need to do a summary of the year at some point, and I may have a few other things to say.

Tell me anything you want in the comments. Anything at all.

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 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.

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 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.