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

July 10, 2022July 10, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 19 Comments

Hello, readers! I’m back! Welcome to Year 4!

“Excuse me, sir,” the flight attendant said. “Would you like to move up to first class?”

I looked around to see who this privileged flier was to whom this opportunity was being offered; I saw no one else nearby. “Me?” I asked.

“Yes,” the flight attendant replied. “The flight is really empty, so we’re letting people move up if they want. There’s plenty of room.”

“Sure,” I said, shrugging my shoulders and following the flight attendant to the front of the plane. We had been in the air for about ten minutes, and the first thing I had noticed was how empty the flight was. I understand why normal people would not want to wake up early on a Sunday morning to catch a six-o’clock flight, but if the airplane was this empty, why not just use a smaller plane, or not offer a flight at this time at all? The plane had around a hundred and fifty coach seats and twelve first-class seats, and with only nine passengers on the flight, we all fit in the first-class section.

I stretched my legs out, since I had more room to do so in first class, and began to nod off again, since I had only slept for four and a half hours. My first (and, to this day, only) first-class flight lasted around an hour and a half, and the announcement that we were descending into Portland woke me from my nodding-off for good.

The Portland airport appeared to be undergoing some sort of expansion or renovation; evidence of recent ongoing construction was everywhere. I managed to follow the signs to baggage claim with no trouble, however. After I got my bag, I found a comfortable seat and began reading, since my bus would not leave for another hour. I had just begun reading Needful Things by Stephen King; it was a fairly long book that should get me through a good portion of this summer.

About fifteen minutes before my bus was scheduled to leave, I followed the signs to ground transportation. A small bus that looked like it would hold about twenty passengers was parked among several others; the side of this bus said TONY’S AIRPORT SHUTTLE – GRANDVALE – PDX. I walked up to the Tony’s bus, and the driver asked me, “Name?”

“Gregory Dennison,” I replied.

The driver looked at his clipboard and said, “I’ve got you here. Go on in.”

Tony’s Airport Shuttle was a private company running buses several times daily between Portland International Airport, the largest in Oregon, and the university town of Grandvale ninety miles away. When I had been accepted into the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program for mathematics at Grandvale State, I was sent a packet that included travel information, including the telephone number for Tony’s Airport Shuttle. I had made a reservation for this bus trip over the phone while I was at my parents’ house in Plumdale last week.

I watched rolling hills pass by out of the bus window. Three other passengers were on this bus, and the ride lasted almost as long as the airplane trip did. This part of Oregon was much more green than the world I was used to. Back home in Plumdale, the green hillsides of spring were already starting to dry out, and in the hot inland summer of Jeromeville, where I went to school the rest of the year, the hills in the distance had been brown for a month already. It made sense that Oregon would be more green, since much of the Pacific Northwest was known for being rainy. One time several years earlier, I was playing a game on the Super Nintendo, stuck on a level where it was raining. The game played rain sound effects continuously in the background, occasionally punctuated by thunder, and my mother, who was within earshot but not paying close attention to me, said, “What is this level you’re on? Oregon?”

Today was a beautiful day, however, sunny with a few puffy white clouds sprinkled across the sky, and the temperature was just right when I got off the bus at the Grandvale bus depot. I had told Dr. Garrison, the professor in charge of the REU program, which bus I would be on, and he said that a mathematics graduate student named Karen would be picking up students from the bus station as we arrived. Dr. Garrison had emailed a photograph of Karen, so I would know who to look for, and I had a printed copy of this email with me. The photo was black and white, but I remembered enough of what the actual color photograph looked like to identify an oddly-shaped woman sitting in the waiting area as Karen.

“Are you Gregory?” Karen asked me as I approached her.

“Yes,” I replied. “You can call me Greg.”

“Hi! I’m Karen. It’s nice to meet you. Are you ready? You have all of your things?”

“Yes,” I said, following her to her car and putting my bags in the trunk.

Karen made small talk as we drove toward the campus. “Which school are you from?” she asked me.

“University of Jeromeville,” I replied.

“I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard it’s nice. That’s the school where everyone rides bikes, right?”

“Yeah. Jeromeville is a great place to go for a bike ride.”

“You might be able to find a used bike here. Grandvale is a college town with a lot of bikes too, but probably not as many as Jeromeville.”

“I’ll look into that.”

“You’re studying math? Do you know what you want to do when you’re done with your degree?”

“Not really,” I explained. “That’s kind of why I’m here, to figure that out, and see if math research is an option.”

“Well, I hope you have a great experience! This is my second year working with the program, and I really enjoyed it last year. Of course, I won’t be able to be part of it for the whole eight weeks, because this little guy will be coming sometime in July.” Karen patted her rounded belly, and I realized then why I had found her to be oddly-shaped earlier: she was pregnant. It was obvious now; I did not know why this did not occur to me when I first saw her.

Apparently, motor vehicles were allowed on more parts of the Grandvale State campus than on the Jeromeville campus, because Karen drove me through part of campus right up to a dorm called Howard Hall. “This is it,” Karen said. “The RAs are here handing out keys. They should be expecting you.”

“Thank you for the ride,” I replied.

“I’ll see you tomorrow in class. Nine in the morning.”

“Sounds good. I’ll see you then.”

I carried my bag and backpack into the lobby of Howard Hall, where a guy with long hair and stubble on his face sat at a table. “Are you moving in here?” he asked me. “What’s your name?”

“Greg Dennison. Room 312. I’m with the mathematics REU program.”

“I’m Mike,” he said, looking at a paper on a clipboard. “You’re in the right place. Let me get you your key.”

“Thank you,” I said as Mike handed me an envelope. I walked toward the elevator. The dorm I had lived in freshman year at Jeromeville, Building C, was three stories high and had no elevator. Howard Hall was five stories high, making an elevator more necessary. I pressed the button for the third floor, and when the elevator arrived, I walked down the hall to find my room.

Howard Hall was a brick building, and the outer wall of my room was brick, interrupted by a window in the middle. On the left wall were two large wardrobe-size cabinets, with drawers underneath, and in between them was a desk with a bulletin board above it. On the right side of the room were a bed and a small refrigerator and microwave. Howard Hall housed graduate students during the year, and this room looked like it was meant for one, but it was more spacious than my single room from Building C freshman year.

After I unpacked my clothes into the left wardrobe cabinet, I plugged in the telephone and called my mother, so she would know that I had arrived. She asked me all sorts of questions about the other students and professors in the problem, and what exactly I would be researching; I told her repeatedly that I did not know any of this information yet. Next, I decided to take a walk and get to know this campus better, since I had nothing to do the rest of the day. I brought a campus map with me on my walk and began walking east on Pine Street. The streets in Grandvale running east-west were named after trees, the north-south streets were numbered, and it appeared that most streets that crossed from the city into campus kept their names. I turned left on 27th Street and passed a building called the Memorial Union, with a grassy area called the Quad just past it. I thought this was curious, since Jeromeville also had a Memorial Union adjacent to a Quad. I walked diagonally across the Quad to Keller Hall, the building that housed the mathematics department, so that I would know how to find my class in the morning. It seemed easy to find.

Grandvale State was an older campus than Jeromeville, with more stately brick buildings, but with numerous other architectural styles represented. As I walked east past a few more buildings, I saw Maple Street, the northern boundary of campus, across a field to the left. I walked east along Maple Street, past campus buildings on the right and a mix of fraternity houses, businesses, and apartments on the left. As I headed farther east, approaching the end of campus and start of downtown, I noticed a Baptist church across the street with a sign showing the service times. They had a Sunday evening service at six o’clock; maybe I would have to try that tonight. I would only be in Grandvale for eight weeks, I would not have time to search exhaustively for a church, but I wanted to go to church somewhere. I attended an Evangelical Covenant church in Jeromeville, but there was not one in Grandvale; I had checked.

The blue sky that I had seen leaving Howard Hall had become cloudy, and just seconds after this thought registered in my mind, it began to rain. The rain came down hard, I was at the point of my walk farthest from the dorm, and I wore nothing but a short sleeve t-shirt and shorts. Go figure. There had been no sign of rain twenty minutes ago, and while I knew that this part of Oregon was rainy, I expected late June to be the dry season. Apparently I was wrong. I started walking back toward the dorm, first south until I hit Pine Street, then west toward Howard Hall, past the large brick library and numerous other buildings. By the time I got back to the Memorial Union, about ten minutes after it had started raining, the rain stopped just as suddenly. The sky was blue again by the time I got back to Howard Hall, with no sign anywhere of the massive downpour I had just experienced.

I reached the elevator at the same time as a tall, thin Asian guy with glasses. “Looks like you got caught outside at the wrong time,” he said, observing my wet clothes.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I’m not used to this weather. I’m not from here.”

When he saw me press the button for the third floor, he asked, “Are you one of the math REU students, by any chance?”

“Yes. I’m Greg.”

“Me too. I’m Marcus. Nice to meet you.”

“You too,” I said. I recognized the name from the program information that I was sent in the mail, which included a list of the students and the schools we represented.

“You’re from Jeromeville, is that right?” Marcus asked, obviously also recalling information from this same list.

“Yeah! And you’re from somewhere in Minnesota?”

“Yes, Lakeview College, I’ll be a senior this fall, but I’m not from there originally. I grew in Los Montes, not far from you.”

“Oh! Yeah, I know where that is.” Los Montes was about an hour car trip down the Valley from Jeromeville, on highway 9 between Stockdale and Ralstonville.

“Jeromeville was actually my second choice, if I didn’t get into Lakeview. There’s an abstract algebra professor at Lakeview that studies exactly what I want to do in grad school eventually.”

“I see,” I replied. “I guess I chose Jeromeville because it was far enough from home to feel like I was on my own, but still close enough to go home on weekends. And they offered me a scholarship for my grades.”

“Where is home?”

“Plumdale. Santa Lucia County.”

“Oh, ok. So was this a Regents’ Scholarship you were talking about?”

“Yeah. And I was invited to the Interdisciplinary Honors Program. I got invited to a preview day for that, and I really liked what I saw.”

“I was there too. I would have been in the IHP if I hadn’t gotten into Lakeview.”

“Wow,” I said. “Funny.”

At this point, we were standing in front of Marcus’ door. “It was nice meeting you,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow in class?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “If not sooner.” I walked back to my room, thinking about this odd coincidence that Marcus and I were almost in the same dorm freshman year at Jeromeville, had he not gone to Lakeview, and yet we ended up crossing paths three years later in another state. Marcus had made it clear that he knew his future mathematics career path in great detail. I did not, and I wondered if that would make this program a poor fit for me. I tried to remember that I was here to explore career options, and that it was okay not to know at this point.

I walked outside again around 5:30, having changed into dry clothes and hoping it would not rain, in order to walk to Grandvale Baptist Church in time for the evening service. When I explained to the greeter who I was, that I was in town until mid-August for a research internship, she asked for my contact information and said that she would forward it to the pastor who ran the college and career group. I looked forward to getting involved with that. The music was a bit more traditional than what I was used to at Jeromeville Covenant, but I liked classic hymns as well as contemporary worship music. I liked this church well enough so far.

I had no food in the dorm room, and I had not purchased a meal plan, so I found a sandwich shop near the church that was still open, and ate the ham sandwich I bought from there on my walk back to my room. I would have to find a grocery store tomorrow, and I would only be able to buy enough that I could carry on foot back to the dorm.

A while after I returned to my room, at eight o’clock, I walked down to the end of the hall, where there was a common room with couches and a television. I was hoping to watch The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and The X-Files in peace, but two people were already watching television: Mike, the resident advisor I had met earlier, and a guy with a shaved head. “What are you guys watching?” I asked nervously.

“Simpsons,” Mike replied.

“Good,” I said, relieved. “Can I join you?”

“Sure,” the guy with the shaved head said. “I’m Ivan.”

“Greg. Are you the Ivan in the math REU program?”

“Yeah! Nice to meet you.”

“You too.”

The Simpsons was a rerun, as were most shows in the middle of June. In the show, the recurring villain Sideshow Bob was released from prison and sent to live with his brother. “Sideshow Bob episodes are always so ridiculous,” Ivan commented.

“Yeah,” I replied. I mimed stepping on a rake and getting hit in the face, a reference to an earlier Simpsons episode in which this repeatedly happened to Bob. “Whack! Uhhhh,” I said, imitating the rake sound effect and Bob’s grunt.

“I love that rake scene,” Ivan commented.

“So, is Bob’s brother played by a famous guest star?” Mike asked.

“Bob is Kelsey Grammar, from Frasier,” Ivan explained. “And his brother is the actor who plays his brother on Frasier.”

“I don’t know if I knew that,” I said. I was impressed with Ivan’s Simpsons knowledge. He may even be more knowledgeable about the show than me.

When The Simpsons ended and King of the Hill started, Ivan and Mike got up and headed back to the hallway “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Greg?” Ivan said as he was leaving.

“Yeah,” I said. “Have a good night.”

I spent the next ninety minutes watching King of the Hill and The X-Files by myself; these were also reruns that I had seen once already. When the shows ended at ten o’clock, I went back to my room, where there was nothing to do but read. Mom had told me earlier to let her know if there was anything I needed her to send me. I could probably make do without a computer in my room, as long as I found a computer lab on campus, and a television was not necessary since there was one in the common room. But I definitely wanted my stereo and some CDs, if possible. I had no music here. I would call Mom again in the next couple days, after I thought of more things for her to send.

I read my Stephen King book for about another hour, then went to bed. As I lay on the bed falling asleep, I felt uncertain about the next eight weeks. I was definitely in an unfamiliar situation and place, and the thought of not seeing my friends in Jeromeville, or having the familiar comforts of home, made me uneasy. Hopefully I would be able to find a used bike for the next eight weeks. And I really hoped that today’s sudden downpour was not typical of the weather in Grandvale in the summer. Some people actually liked this rainy weather, and I would never understand those people. Gray skies made me sad, and water falling in my face getting things wet and dirty while I was just trying to get from one place to another made life more stressful and overwhelming than it already was.

On a positive note, I had already met two people in the math program, and Ivan and I shared The Simpsons as something in common. I also had a lead on a group at church to get involved with. Maybe the other math students, and any church friends I would make, would end up being lifelong friends, like the other students in the IHP my freshman year. Or, for that matter, maybe I would not end up liking these people; I did not know. The next eight weeks would be an adventure, and if the rainstorm this afternoon taught me anything, I would have to be prepared for the unexpected.

Author’s note: What are your thoughts about the story moving from Jeromeville to Grandvale for the next several episodes? What do you think will happen to Greg in Grandvale? Does anyone want to make any bold predictions for later in year 4?

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December 18-26, 1996. A time of firsts. (#112)

December 5, 2021December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 15 Comments

“What is that on the tree?” I asked, laughing, because I knew exactly what this new Christmas ornament was.

“Your brother made that,” Mom said, rolling her eyes.

Back in the 1990s, the tallest player in the National Basketball Association was seven-foot-seven-inch Gheorghe Muresan, of the team known then as the Washington Bullets. My brother Mark loved basketball and played on the school team, and he thought Gheorghe Muresan was fascinatingly odd-looking. Mark apparently cut a photo of Gheorghe Muresan out of a magazine, attached an ornament hook to it, and hung it on the Christmas tree.

“But why?” I asked.

“Why not?” Mark said, laughing.

“Good point. Hey, is that a Nintendo 64?”

“Yes,” Mom answered. “It was Mark’s early Christmas present.”

“Can I get a turn when you’re done?” I asked Mark.

“Yeah,” he said. “Whatever.”

I took my bags to my bedroom. I had finished final exams a few days earlier, and Christmas was about a week away. I spent a lot of time that week playing the new Super Mario game on Mark’s Nintendo 64. The previous Mario games had been two-dimensional platform games, in which Mario moved side to side and jumped on things. This one was three-dimensional, with a thumbstick controlling Mario from the first person, and I had more difficulty with it. It was still fun, though.

The week went by quickly. I got my dad a Grateful Dead calendar for Christmas, as I always did, and I got Mom the new book in Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series, M is for Malice. I got Mark a calendar of NBA players, which he put on his wall and then ignored. The calendar still displayed January 1997 well into 1999, and when I asked him about it then, he complained that he never used calendars. I never got Mark a calendar again.

We had fewer presents to open this year. Mark had already gotten his Nintendo 64, and a few days after I got home, Mom took me shopping for my early Christmas present. We bought a jacket, a beanie, and comfortable thick socks, since I was going to be spending the week after Christmas in a colder climate. On the ride home from the mall, Mom made small talk.

“How many people do you know who will be at Urbana?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Quite a few. But it’s such a huge convention, and I don’t know where everyone will be. Eddie Baker told me we might not even see each other.”

Next, Mom started naming specific school friends whose names she remembered. “What’s Brian doing for Christmas?” Mom asked.

“Going to his parents’ house in Valle Luna, then going to Urbana. Since he’s a staff member, he has to work there, but I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“Okay.”

“He left the apartment on Sunday. When he left, he said, ‘I’ll see you at Urbana!’”

“What’s Eddie doing for Christmas? Seeing his family too?”

“Yeah. In Sunnyglen.”

“Did he tell you, ‘I won’t see you at Urbana?’”

“No,” I laughed.

Usually, the evening of December 25 was a time to relax and unwind after a long day of being around relatives. But this year was different; Mom and I spent the evening packing. I would need a minimum of six changes of clothes besides the clothes I would put on in the morning, so I put seven changes of clothes in my suitcase just in case. I also packed my new jacket, beanie, and socks. In my backpack, I put a notebook, a few pens, and my Bible. Mom suggested that I move one change of clothes to the backpack and use it as carry-on luggage, just in case I got stranded in an airport somewhere. I was not familiar with this concept of carry-on luggage, but I figured out what she meant.

It was close to midnight by the time I finally got to bed and set my alarm for 4:30. Tonight was not looking like a restful night. I was too excited and overwhelmed to fall asleep quickly, and I got less than four hours of sleep that night. Hopefully I would be able to sleep on the plane, but since I had no concept of what an airplane trip was like, how uncomfortable or noisy it would be, I was not sure.

We left the house a little after five o’clock, which got us to the Bay City airport around seven. The flight left at 8:30, and although going through airport security did not take nearly as long in 1996 as it does now, I still wanted to be there in plenty of time.

I did not know how to plan an airplane trip. Tabitha Sasaki had said a few months ago that she wanted to get a few people to go in together on a flight and hotel room, and she had done all the planning; I just gave her money. The convention did not start until the morning of the 27th, so today, the 26th, would be a travel day, ending in a stay at a hotel.

The Urbana convention, hosted by Intervarsity, the parent organization of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, was named after its location in Urbana, Illinois. Thousands of Christian young adults would descend on Urbana this week to learn about opportunities to serve Jesus around the world. Shuttle buses for Urbana attendees would pick up students from the airports in Chicago and Indianapolis, each about a two-hour drive from Urbana. We were scheduled to arrive in Indianapolis in the early evening, after changing planes in St. Louis. I had never been that far east before. I also had no memory of ever having been in an airport, so basic airport concepts like checking bags, going through security, waiting at the gate, and showing a boarding pass were completely foreign to me. Mom says that I was on an airplane once as a baby, but I was too young to remember that.

“Which airline are you taking?” Mom asked as she turned off the freeway to the airport entrance. Bay City International Airport was very large, with different airlines served by different terminals.

“TWA,” I replied. Mom followed the signs to the terminal for TWA and found a place to park in a short-term parking garage. Mom followed me inside the terminal, then asked, “Who are you supposed to be meeting here?”

“Tabitha said to meet near check-in. Is that there?” I asked, pointing toward the long desk and longer line of travelers waiting to check bags and get boarding passes. As we approached, I noticed a round-faced Asian girl with chin-length black hair standing not too far off and said, “There’s Tabitha right there.”

Tabitha saw me as I walked toward her. “Hey, Greg,” she said. “We’re still waiting for Leslie and Lillian.”

“Mom, this is Tabitha,” I said. “Tabitha, this is my mom, Peggy.”

“Nice to meet you,” Tabitha said, shaking Mom’s hand.

“You too,” Mom replied.

“Do I have to get in that line?” I asked. “I’ve never done this before.”

“You’ve never been on an airplane?” Tabitha replied.

“Once when I was a baby. But I don’t remember it.”

“Oh, wow! Yeah, we’ll have to check our bags there. I figured the line doesn’t look too long, so we can wait until everyone gets here and all stay together. There’s Leslie.”

“Hey, guys,” Leslie said, walking toward us. “Is everyone here?”

“We’re still waiting for Lillian,” I said.

After I introduced Mom and Leslie, Mom said, “I still have to drive all the way back to Plumdale and work today.”

“I think you can go now,” I said. “I’ll be okay.”

“Are you sure?” Mom asked.

“Yes.” I knew that Mom was going to worry the whole time I was traveling, but she also seemed to be subtly complaining about having gotten up early. I had found my traveling companions, though; I was ready to continue on my own.

“Okay,” Mom said. “Call me from the hotel room when you get there.”

“I will.” I gave Mom a hug and watched as she walked away.

Lillian arrived a few minutes after Mom left, and we boarded the flight to St. Louis without incident. We rode a very large aircraft, with ten seats in each row broken into three sections by aisles. The four of us were all near each other, although not immediately adjacent. We had one window seat among the four of us, on the left, and being a map and geography geek, I was quite interested in seeing the United States from thousands of feet in the air. I reminded everyone that I had not been on an airplane in almost twenty years, and that I was too young to remember my other airplane trip, so they were willing to let me have the window seat. I decided that I would be nice and not push for the window seat on the return trip.

We took off over the Bay, and I could see Oaksville and other sprawling suburbs spread out on the other side of the Bay against the hills. It took only a few minutes for the airplane to fly over the hills, and by the time we reached the Valley on the other side, I could spot Jeromeville in the distance, although it was too far away to identify any landmarks.

Beyond the Valley, the land below the airplane became mountainous. Vast stretches of this terrain was high enough in altitude to be covered with snow. It was beautiful; I had only seen snow up close twice in my life at this point. After we had been in the air for about forty-five minutes, a layer of clouds appeared between the airplane and the ground. I had never seen this perspective, with clouds stretched out below like a puffy carpet, but I soon got bored at staring at the clouds, since there were no features to identify. I began dozing; I was still tired from having awakened so early this morning.

When the clouds cleared, I could see a highway interchange on the brown land below me, but I had lost all my bearings by this point and had no idea where I was. The land was mostly featureless, and the trip was not close to being over yet. I still looked out the window for a long time, seeing an occasional road or building below, before nodding off again.

Our plane touched down in St. Louis in mid-afternoon, although it felt like lunch time since we lost two hours because of time zones. “Which way are we going now?” I asked Tabitha as we emerged into the airport gate.

“Follow me,” she replied, looking at her boarding pass. We walked down a row of gates and found the one for the next leg of our flight. It was not far from where we were, and our next flight did not leave for an hour and a half, so we went to find overpriced fast food for lunch.

“Did you say someone else we know is going to be at our hotel?” Lillian asked.

“Yes!” Tabitha replied. “So many people from Jeromeville will be at our hotel. We’ll probably hang out with them later tonight.”

“That’ll be fun,” I said. With so much around me at the moment that was unfamiliar, in light of Eddie’s comment about how we might not see anyone we know at Urbana, I definitely felt relieved that others I knew would be at the hotel.

Boarding the flight to Indianapolis was much like the experience of boarding the other flight from Bay City to St. Louis, but the inside of the airplane was much different. This plane was smaller, with only six seats across and one aisle down the middle. The flight itself was also much shorter, so I did not have time for a nap. I sat in a middle seat, so my view out the window was not as clear as on the first leg of the flight, but as the plane headed east, I noticed more and more snow appearing on the ground. By the time we landed in Indianapolis, the entire ground was covered in a few inches of snow for as far as I could see in any direction. I wondered if the ground in Indiana and Illinois was continuously covered in snow all winter. I mentioned to the others while we were waiting to get our luggage that I had never seen so much snow in my life.

“Really?” Leslie asked.

“We’re definitely not home anymore,” Tabitha said.

We caught a shuttle bus to the hotel. The driver seemed completely unfazed by the snow. I would have been panicking, driving in the snow like that, wondering if I needed to put chains on the tires, but people who lived in this climate apparently knew how to drive in snow. There did not seem to be snow accumulating on the roads, probably because the snow was not currently falling and cars had been driving on the road all day.

I was the only guy in our travel group, so Tabitha had booked me in a separate room. After we checked in, I went to my room and lay on the bed. I spent the next hour or so attempting to nap again. Although the clock said it was dinner time, I was not hungry, since I had just eaten a fairly large lunch, and my body was still on West Coast time and felt like it was earlier.

At around quarter to eight, Tabitha knocked on my door; Leslie was with her. “We saw Scott and Amelia in the lobby earlier. We’re all going to meet now to watch Friends. You wanna come?”

I was not expecting to have a major quandary on this trip. In an effort to keep from alienating myself from all of the people I had met at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship and Jeromeville Covenant Church, I had hidden from them the fact that I did not watch Friends. Since I was on a school holiday, it had not even crossed my mind that today was Thursday, and that Friends would be on tonight. I had never actually seen the show, so I could not really say that I hated it, but the show was extremely popular, and I got the impression from commercials and hearing people talk about the show that it was not my thing. However, could I really have a well-formed opinion of the show without having watched it? I also did not want to pass up an opportunity to see my actual friends here in this unfamiliar, snow-covered landscape, so I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Sure.”

I followed Tabitha and Leslie upstairs to a hallway that looked identical to the one on my floor. They knocked on a door, and Amelia answered. “Hey,” she said. Then, noticing me, seeing me for the first time in two weeks, she said, “Hi, Greg! How are you? How was your Christmas?”

“Good,” I replied. “Just the usual stuff with my family. My brother got a Nintendo 64, so that was fun. How was yours?”

“Nice. But I spent most of yesterday packing, so I wasn’t around my family as much.”

I walked into the room, where about a dozen people had packed in on the beds and floor, including Amelia’s boyfriend Scott, Lillian from our flight, Melinda Schmidt, Joe Fox, Alyssa Kramer, Autumn Davies, Leah Eckert, and others. I made small talk with some of the people in the room for a few minutes until the show started.

As I watched the six New Yorkers on the screen talk about their lives, careers, and sexual partners, I realized exactly why I disliked the show. I found all of them completely unrelatable. The show had some moments that made me chuckle, but so much of the plot revolved around relationships and sex, for which I had no frame of reference. They reminded me of the stereotypical cool kids who excluded me and got what they wanted through morally questionable means. I wondered why so many of my Christian friends were so attached to a show with characters behaving in a way that contradicted the Bible’s teachings about sexuality. I hoped that the others in the room did not live like Rachel and Ross and Joey and all the annoying people on the screen. But I kept quiet and watched the show; now was not the time to start an argument. And now that I had watched the show, I knew for sure that I did not like it.

I looked out the hotel window before I went to bed that night and watched snow fall lightly on the parking lot for a few minutes. When I woke up in the morning, the snow was clearly deeper than it had been yesterday. I bundled up, wearing my new jacket and beanie, and met Tabitha and the others in the lobby at the time we had discussed, to wait for the shuttle bus. After we boarded the bus, it took a little over two hours to travel west through the snow-covered rolling hills to the campus.

I was excited for what was coming. This winter break had been a time of firsts. Back home with my brother was my first time playing Nintendo 64. Now, this trip was my first time being on an airplane, at least in my memory; my first time in a different time zone; and my first time in Missouri and Indiana. This morning, as I saw a sign out the bus window that said “ILLINOIS STATE LINE,” I added a third new state to this trip. It had also been my first time watching Friends, an experience I had no particular desire to replicate. Once I arrived on the campus and stood in line for registration, receiving a bracelet as a convention attendee, I knew that this would be a unique experience opening my eyes to new firsts that God would show me in the upcoming years.

(To be continued…)

*The actual wristband from 1996. Photo recreated using my 2021 wrist.*

Author’s note:

Hi, friends! I’m back… my break from writing was a little longer than I thought it would be, mostly just because life got in the way. During the break, I started another blog (click here) to write about other things, or to write about writing, or to share other creative works besides my continuing story. I’m not planning to post there on any schedule, but you can subscribe if you want updates from me. Also, I wrote a couple of guest posts for other blogs; I will share the links here when they get published.

This Urbana trip was the farthest I had been from my home in the western US at the time, but as of 2021, the farthest I have been from home is Kittery, Maine, on the US East Coast about an hour drive north of Boston. The story of that trip will be told in Just Take The Leap, a sequel to Don’t Let The Days Go By that I plan on writing someday, years from now.

What is the farthest you have been from home?

Disclaimer: Urbana is a real event (urbana.org), but it has since moved, and is not actually held in Urbana anymore. Intervarsity was not involved in the composition of this story, and this is not a sponsored post.