December 26-29, 1997. I made another movie. (#157)

March 19, 2023March 19, 2023 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

Author’s note: I’m back.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to post weekly, like I’ve always tried to. I don’t want this project to become stressful. But I’ll do the best I can, and hopefully my small handful of loyal readers will stick with me even I take a week off here and there.

A month ago, when I went home to Santa Lucia County for Thanksgiving, I showed my family the Dog Crap and Vince movie that I had made with the kids from the youth group at church. I first created the characters from Dog Crap and Vince when I was still in high school, with a lot of input from my brother Mark, and I have always credited Mark as a co-creator of Dog Crap and Vince. They all enjoyed the movie. Mark said that when I came home for Christmas, we should get together with his friends Cody and Boz and make another movie.

We did not own a video camera. I had always wanted one growing up. I had tons of silly ideas for TV shows and movies, sometimes Mark and I and some combination of his other friends would even act them out and even record the audio, but we never had the capability to record video. Video cameras cost a lot of money back then, and it was never a priority for my parents to have one. But Mark said that Boz had one we could probably borrow.

It was now the Friday after Christmas. I was planning on driving back to Jeromeville either Monday night or Tuesday morning. I was getting bored at home. Three and a half years after graduation, I had lost touch with all of my high school friends. There was not much to do at home except hang out at home. The closest thing I had to friends at home were Mark, Cody, and Boz. I was going to graduate from the University of Jeromeville in six months, and they were sixteen, still in high school. This was less of an age difference compared to when I was seventeen and they were twelve, but they still did not feel like a primary social group for me.

Despite how bored I was, I had made no progress on this movie that Mark and I were supposedly going to make. I had not done much of anything the whole time I was home. We had our family Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa and the Lusks, who were in the area for the holidays. Jane Lusk was my aunt, my mother’s younger sister; she visited every Christmas with her husband Darrell and their children, nineteen-year-old Rick and seventeen-year-old Miranda. Uncle Darrell’s family was also in Santa Lucia County, so they spent a week going back and forth visiting both sets of their relatives.

Mark had a new game for Nintendo 64, GoldenEye. The game follows the story of the James Bond movie of the same name, which I had seen once. The most well-known feature of this game was a multiplayer free-for-all mode, in which two to four players battle each other. Rick and Miranda and Mark and I spent many hours of that winter break playing GoldenEye, as well as Mario Kart. In both games, Mark almost always won, and Miranda almost always came in last place.

In those days, Mark would often record what he was watching on television on a VHS tape, so he could watch it again. He watched Saturday Night Live regularly, because in the 1990s it was actually funny much of the time. Whenever the show would run a sketch that was not worth rewatching, he would back up the tape during the next commercial and record over it immediately. Whenever I would go home, Mark would share with me his Saturday Night Live highlights.

Saturday Night Live had been in the news recently because Chris Farley, a cast member on the show a few years earlier who was also in a few movies after that, had died of a drug overdose a couple of weeks earlier. Two months before his death, Farley had returned to SNL as the weekly guest host, and Mark saved that entire episode. Earlier that week, I had watched Farley reprise many of his past recurring characters. He also portrayed an exaggeratedly intoxicated Hank Williams Jr. and the weather phenomenon El Niño, acting like a professional wrestler. Throughout the whole time Mark and I watched the episode, Mom kept interrupting, commenting on Farley’s visibly poor health.

The next day, Mark and I watched other things he had recorded since then. We watched what was then considered the final episode of Beavis and Butthead, although unbeknownst to anyone at the time, the show would be revived in the 2010s and 2020s. After this, we watched another SNL in which a Bill Gates character announced that Microsoft had bought Christmas, and that Mac users were now Jewish. Bill Gates then proceeded to spy on Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who was dancing to the song “Tubthumping.” Oddly random, but hilarious.

Mark got home from basketball practice while I was eating dinner Friday night. Mark got all of the athletic talent in our family. He also had a great deal more artistic talent than me, and he and some of his teammates had begun a new tradition of drawing temporary tattoos on each other with permanent marker. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the tattoo that someone had drawn on Mark today.

“A polar bear,” Mark explained. “John McCall drew it.” The polar bear on Mark’s arm was floating on a piece of sea ice, with the letters POLAR BEAR underneath in a style imitating the Old English blackletter font.

“And why do you have a tattoo of a polar bear?” I asked.

Mom and Dad were in the room with us. “That’s the nickname the others on the team have come up with for Mark,” Mom said.

“And why is Mark’s nickname ‘Polar Bear?’”

Dad answered this time. “Because he’s big and white!”

I laughed. “That does make sense.”

Later that night, Mark and I were playing Mario Kart, and Mark said something that reminded me of something from Dog Crap and Vince. As my brain started thinking of related things, I said out loud, “We never made that movie we were going to make while I was home. Do you still want to?”

“I don’t know,” Mark replied. “Do we have time? How long are you gonna be home?”

“I’m leaving probably late Monday night or early Tuesday morning. So we’d have about 72 hours.” As I continued steering Luigi around the course, throwing banana peels behind me, I got an idea. “I think this sounds like a challenge. We have 72 hours to make a movie. And we’ll call our production company ‘72 Hour Films.’”

“Sounds good. I’ll ask Boz in the morning if we can go get his camera. Boz was probably going to come over this weekend anyway.”

“Great! And if Rick and Miranda are around, we can get them in our movie too! So what’s it going to be about?”

“I don’t know. This was your idea.”

“Well, you’ve been saying this whole time that you want to make a movie.”

“I do, but I don’t know what it’s about!”

I saw the GoldenEye cartridge sitting next to the Nintendo console. “What about a spy movie? Like GoldenEye?”

“Maybe, but it seems like that might be too hard if we only have 72 hours.”

I thought about other things I had done at home during previous school breaks, and suddenly it came to me. “Moport,” I said. “Let’s make a sports movie about Moport. Like, maybe, there’s a Moport team that’s terrible, they finish last in the league, so they get the number one draft pick, but the player they draft ends up just making things worse.”

“That could work.”

“Ooo. Better idea. They accidentally draft the wrong player. Like, the general manager gets the name wrong at the draft, and the player they pick is this weird crazy goofball.”

“But all the goofy stuff he does is so crazy, they still end up winning!” Mark said.

“Yes! Perfect!”

“As long as we get Boz to play the goofy guy. He’d be great in that role.”

“Definitely.”

Moport was a game my brother and I invented, based on a game I played in PE class in high school. The game I learned combined elements of football and soccer; Mark and I added hockey sticks to the mix, and Moport was born. For the last few years, we had held a two-on-two Moport tournament in the front yard with Cody, Boz, John McCall, and some of Mark’s other friends.

By the time Mark and I went to bed that night, we had a workable script, and we had decided to title the movie #1 Draft Pick. I suggested that the team in the movie have a geographically appropriate, yet ridiculous-sounding name, like many actual low-level sports teams. The Gabilan Valley in Santa Lucia County is known for growing vegetables, so we named our team the Gabilan Fighting Salads. The movie would open with the Salads losing badly, finishing in last place again, giving them the number one draft pick for the following year. After drafting the wrong player, as we had previously decided, we would show scenes of this player, whom we had named Evan, practicing and playing and still somehow finding ways to score. We added implied references to Evan being on drugs. I suggested that Evan played college Moport for North Coast State, because that was a well-known hippie stoner school, and it was also where Rick went, although Rick was not at all a hippie or stoner.

After the Salads’ first win, the team practiced the next day, and Evan accidentally kicked a ball that left the field and hit a supervillain-like bystander in the face. The villain vowed to get revenge on the Salads and sabotage their season. He sent a henchman to break into the locker room and plant drugs on Evan. When Evan’s name was cleared, the villain hired another henchman to shoot Evan. Mark and I both agreed that Rick should play this other henchman, since Rick’s side of the family were gun enthusiasts. “But we should use the Nintendo Zapper as the prop gun,” Mark suggested.

“That would be hilarious,” I replied.

We continued brainstorming the ending of the movie. Evan survived the shooting, so the villain drove his car onto the field and ran over Cody’s character, whom we named Bob. Cody did not look at all like someone who would be named Bob, so we thought that was funny. Bob needed to play injured since the Salads were out of replacement players, and they managed to score a goal on a ridiculously improbable shot.

“Then we should end by showing Fidel Castro dancing,” Mark said, laughing, referencing Saturday Night Live.

“Let’s name your character ‘Castro,’” I suggested. “And at the end, you’re not there, and Evan and Bob talk about how you went to visit your Uncle Fidel in Cuba.”

“Yes!”

My least favorite part of doing a creative project with other people involved is getting everyone together at the same time. Fortunately, the Lusks were already planning on coming over today, as was Boz. Mark called Cody, and he was free to come over as well. Ronnie and D.J. Lusk, Rick and Miranda’s other cousins on their dad’s side, lived about an hour drive away, and they were also in town for the day. That gave us two more people to use as extras in the movie; Ronnie and D.J. played one of the opposing teams.

“Dad?” I asked as we started filming Saturday morning, shortly after Boz showed up with the camera. “Can you be in our movie for one scene?”

“Ahh,” Dad grunted as he got up from the couch, faking being annoyed although I knew he was going to enjoy helping out. “What do I have to do?”

“You’re the general manager of the Salads, but you get the player’s name wrong at the draft,” I explained. I placed the script on the table where he would be sitting in the shot, so that he could glance down at his lines if he needed to.

I sat next to Dad, in character as Coach McAfee. Mark and Boz faced us, with Boz holding the camera. “Where’d you get the camera?” Dad asked.

“We’re borrowing it from the Bosworths,” I explained.

Dad turned to Boz and asked, “That’s your camera?”

“Yeah,” Boz replied.

Dad played his part perfectly, speaking in an absent-minded manner that would make it believable that he would select the wrong player. As an added bonus, he called his own team the Lettuce instead of the Salads. To this day, I do not know if that was intentional, adding to the mood, or if that was just Dad being Dad and actually getting the name wrong. After Dad called Evan’s name, Boz ran into the scene, in character as Evan, doing a silly dance and hugging Dad’s character. Evan wore a sleeveless top with his arms covered in tattoos, drawn by Mark with a permanent marker.

Next, we went outside and set up the Moport field in the front yard, with the same scoreboard and goals that we used for the actual Moport tournament. When we got to the part with the supervillain getting kicked in the face, we filmed Boz and Cody, in character as Evan and Bob, kicking the ball around in practice. Evan then kicked the ball so hard it flew off camera. My plan was to have the villain, played by me in a different costume from Coach McAfee, looking out of a second-story window with the ball coming in from off screen to hit me in the face. But I had to change clothes for this.

“What are you gonna wear?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me go look.” I went inside to the closet in my old bedroom and dug around, not really sure what I was looking for, but hoping I would know when I found it.

In eleventh grade, five years earlier, I had to do a group project for history class, a presentation on one decade in American history. My group got the 1950s. We talked about President Eisenhower, the war in Korea, McCarthyism, and the Cold War. We also included some references to the culture of the 1950s, which my classmates decided would include getting me to dress up as Elvis Presley and lip-synch and dance. Mom got in on this, decorating an old thrift store shirt with fringe and sequins for my Elvis costume. When my classmates recorded me for the class project, I could not keep a straight face for more than ten seconds, but we decided that would be enough, because the stuffy 1950s father would turn off the television after ten seconds and refuse to let his children watch that garbage.

I found the Elvis shirt in my closet, along with a trucker cap printed in a cow pattern, which Dad had gotten from a local auto parts store, and a pair of oversized sunglasses. I walked to the window where my villain character would get hit in the face and opened it. “I’m ready,” I said to Mark, Cody, and Boz, still outside below.

“What the hell are you wearing?” Mark shouted.

“It’s my villain costume,” I replied.

“How is that a villain costume? You look ridiculous!”

“Hey, we’re not exactly trying to win an Academy Award for costume design. I was going for something that would look different from my coach character.”

After we finished, I went downstairs, taking off my villain costume as I walked outside. “Is that the Elvis shirt?” Dad asked as I walked past.

“Yeah. You’ll just have to see the final movie when we finish.”

We had just as much ridiculous fun for the rest of that Saturday and Sunday as we finished filming. For the scene where Rick’s henchman character shoots Evan, Rick wore a black cowboy hat and boots, with an actual holster on his belt. We all had a hard time keeping a straight face as Rick, trying to be serious, pulled the Nintendo Zapper, the gun from the old Duck Hunt game, out of his holster, complete with cord dangling from the bottom.

Although we kept the plot basically the same, we added two scenes that were not in the original script. In one, Boz, in character as Evan, wakes up in the middle of the night and has a vision of two-time Moport champion Mark Dennison giving him encouragement. Mark Dennison was, of course, just Mark playing himself, wearing his Ice Monkeys uniform from the Moport tournaments. Since this was an extremely low-budget film, many of us were playing multiple roles, and the audience would just have to accept the fact that Mark Dennison looked exactly like Evan’s teammate Ben Castro. Although Mark Dennison had some encouraging words for Evan, he acted kind of obnoxious, eating Evan’s food and sitting right on top of him on the bed. Pee-Wee the cat was in the room at the time, and Mark picked her up and started petting her.

The other scene that we added happened after the villain’s plan to plant drugs on Evan failed. Boz played a double role as the henchman who planted the drugs, and only Boz and I were in the room when we filmed this scene. The camera did not need to move, so I just placed it on a table. On Monday morning, when I had finally finished editing, I watched the final cut of #1 Draft Pick with my family and the Lusks, and I had not yet realized that none of them had seen this scene, not even Mark.

“The plan didn’t work!” Boz’s hunchbacked henchman character shouted on screen. “Evan was proven innocent, and he’ll be playing in tomorrow’s game!”

On the screen, in character as the villain with the Elvis shirt, I looked directly toward the camera and said, “Then it’s time for Plan B.” The henchman walked off screen, tapping his fingers together. A few seconds later, the villain reached over and pressed Play on a portable CD player. Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” began playing as the villain began doing some kind of dorky, ridiculous dance.

As my family watched this scene, hysterically laughing, Mark looked at me, confused. “That’s Plan B?” he shouted. “What is going on here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, laughing so hard I began crying. “I was just doing something weird.”

“But… really? That’s your Plan B?”

Mom and Dad laughed particularly hard at later scenes in the movie, like when Rick’s character shot Evan with the Duck Hunt gun, and when the villain drove his car onto the field. “So that’s why you drove on the lawn the other day,” Dad said. As the final scene played, with Mark and I in character as Ben Castro and Uncle Fidel, dancing to Tubthumping, then transitioning to the credits, I looked around the room to see everyone’s reaction. “That was very good,” Mom said.

I made a copy of #1 Draft Pick to leave with Mark and packed the other one that night to bring back to Jeromeville with me. Mark showed the movie to Cody and Boz the next time he saw them, and they both enjoyed it. I showed it to a couple of my school friends over the years, but not nearly as many people saw this one compared to my earlier Dog Crap and Vince movie. But, considering how quickly we had to put everything together, it turned out fairly good. This was definitely the highlight of my winter break that year.

And of course, to this day, my family still laughs whenever we hear the phrase “Plan B.”

Rest in peace, Uncle Darrell. He lost his battle with cancer in 2023 as I was outlining this episode.

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

December 5, 2021December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 16 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.

*Mom found the Christmas ornament and put it up this year.*

December 24-25, 1995. I really wish Mom would ask me first before volunteering me for things. (#64)

October 7, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 9 Comments

“Time to open presents,” I said as I put my dinner plate in the sink.

“First I have to do the dishes, then I have to go upstairs and finish wrapping them,” Mom replied. “I told you, I’d tell you when I was ready. Go watch Jeopardy! or something.”

“Mark is watching basketball.”

“Then go watch basketball with Mark.”

“I don’t care about those two teams,” I said, climbing the stairs to my bedroom. I turned on the computer. My parents had no Internet service, so the only way I could use the Internet was to dial the same number I used to connect to the Internet in Jeromeville. Mom told me that it was okay to check my email a couple of times per day, but I did not want to tie up the phone line for hours at a time with an expensive long distance call, so I was not chatting on IRC or reading Usenet newsgroups from my parents’ house.

I listened as the modem made the sounds associated with checking my email. It began with a standard dial tone, followed by the tones of the number I had to call to connect to the University of Jeromeville network, but this time there were eleven tones, not seven, since I was calling from outside the area code. A series of hisses, clicks, high-pitched beeps, whirs, and other unintelligible sounds followed this, until I saw a progress bar indicating that my messages were downloading. When the messages had all downloaded, about a minute later, the computer clicked and disconnected. I had last checked my email when I woke up this morning, and four new messages had come in since then. Three of them were jokes that people had forwarded me from someone else, and I had seen all of them before. The fourth message, which was sent early this afternoon, I paid more attention to. It was from Brittany, a girl in Texas who was one of the first friends I made on the Internet, a year a half earlier when this computer was brand new. This was the first I had heard from Brittany in about a month.

From: swimgirl17@aolnet.com
To: gjdennison@jeromeville.edu
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 1995 01:44 -0600
Subject: Re: hi

Greg! I’m so sorry I haven’t been writing. I’ve been really busy with school. Classes this year have been so much more work than high school was. I feel like I did ok on all my finals though. Studying for finals pretty much took up all of the last few weeks. But now I can catch my breath until spring semester starts. How did your finals go? Are you back with your family for Christmas?

–Brittany

I used to get emails from Brittany just about every day for most of the last school year, my freshman year at UJ and Brittany’s senior year of high school. But over the last several months, I had heard from her less and less as her life got busier. I clicked Reply and began typing.

From: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
To: swimgirl17@aolnet.com
Subject: Re: hi

Hi! It’s good to hear from you! I’m glad you did well on finals. What are you taking next semester? Do you have any fun plans over break? Do you know yet where you want to transfer after you finish community college?

I think I did well on my finals too. I only had three this year. I’ve been at my parents’ house for about a week. We’re going to open presents later tonight. We always open presents the night before Christmas, because the night before my 9th birthday, I was so excited to open presents that I couldn’t sleep, and I kept Mom awake all night. Ever since, so that I’d be able to sleep when I was a kid, we always open birthday and Christmas presents the night before instead. Tomorrow, we’re going to church, and then my grandma’s house in Gabilan, the next town over. My aunt and uncle and cousins will be there, so we’ll have more presents to open.

My mom also wants to go see my grandma’s neighbors. Their daughter is a senior in high school, she’s taking physics, and Mom volunteered me to tutor her. I don’t particularly want to spend my break doing homework with some stranger. I really wish Mom would ask me first before volunteering me for things. That’s how I ended up with the summer job at the bookstore. But at the same time, maybe it won’t be so bad, because I get to hang out with a girl.

“I can’t find bows,” Mom called from her bedroom. “Do you care if one of your presents doesn’t have a bow?”

I minimized the window in which I was typing my message to Brittany and opened the door. “Mom, I tell you every year, we look at the wrapping paper for like two minutes and then tear it off. I don’t care what the wrapping looks like.”

“Well, I want it to look nice. Gifts are supposed to have bows.”

“I really don’t care.”

“If you really don’t care, then, I’m done. Are you ready to open presents?”

“Sure.”

I saved my unfinished message to Brittany and turned the computer off, following Mom downstairs. I would have more to write after I was done opening presents.

“I hope this is the one you asked for,” Mom said as Mark opened a box. Inside was a University of North Carolina Tar Heels basketball jersey.

“Yeah, this is it,” Mark said, admiring his present. “Thank you!” Mark lived and breathed basketball, and he had favorite players on many different teams as well as several favorite college basketball teams, none of which were anywhere near our house in Plumdale. I preferred to be a fan of local teams, but most of the top college basketball programs were on the other side of the country; North Carolina, for example.

I grabbed a box with my name on it next; from the size and weight, I guessed that it continued clothing. I pulled out a gray shirt with red writing and tan highlights: BAY CITY CAPTAINS, it said. “Thank you,” I replied. The Bay City Captains were my favorite pro football team, the only sports team that I followed closely that year. The Captains won last year’s championship and, despite having lost the final game of the season that morning, would advance to the playoffs again this year. I made a note to myself not to mention the Captains shirt when I finished my email to Brittany, given what I knew about her football allegiances.

We continued opening presents. I got a new pair of jeans, and some blank audio cassettes, for making copies of CDs and listening to them in the car. My car had no CD player. Mom handed me one final gift, a box about the size of a book, but much less heavy. “You didn’t ask for this, but I saw it and figured I had to get it for you,” Mom explained.

“Ha! This looks hilarious!” I shouted as I tore the wrapping paper and read the label underneath. It was a computer game, Beavis and Butthead: Virtual Stupidity. I read the description on the back of the box. It was an adventure game; the player controlled Beavis and Butthead as they walked around the streets of Highland, making mischief and trying to impress Todd, the local delinquent who the boys misguidedly admired. But then I saw something on the label that made me feel panic mixed with disappointment. “I can’t play this,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Mom asked.

“It’s for Windows 95.”

“Oh… and that means there’s no way it’ll run on your computer?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Can you get Windows 95 for your computer?”

“That would be expensive. And my computer isn’t very powerful; it would probably run very slowly.”

“I’m sorry,” Mom said. “I didn’t even think to look.”

You never do, I thought. I considered bringing up the time Mom completely missed the “explicit lyrics” warning label when she got Aunt Jane one of Adam Sandler’s comedy albums a few Christmases ago, but I decided not to say anything.

“We’ve been meaning to get a computer for us,” Mom continued. “So you can play it here when you come home for spring break. Right?”

“Yeah. That works.”

After we were finished opening presents, I went upstairs. I was disappointed that I would not be able to play the Beavis and Butthead game, but I tried not to let my disappointment show. Christmas was always stressful for Mom, and I already felt a little frustrated with Mom because of the way she had volunteered me to tutor Monica Sorrento in physics without asking me. I turned on the computer and finished my email to Brittany.

We just finished opening presents. Mom got me the Beavis and Butthead computer game, but it requires Windows 95 and I don’t have that. I feel bad, because Mom is going to think I’m upset with her. When I was 13, my computer was broken, and my presents that year were all computer games, and I got so upset and threw a tantrum because I couldn’t play with any of my Christmas presents. I feel terrible, because now Mom always has to apologize over and over again if any of us asked for something for Christmas and she wasn’t able to find it, or if something she got wasn’t quite right. I’ve told her every year I’m more mature now and she doesn’t have to worry about it, but I think I traumatized her for life.

What are you doing for Christmas? Have a great day!

gjd

The next morning, as we drove to church, Mom was rattling off a bunch of things about people whom we might see at church this morning. “The Lusks all went to midnight mass, so we won’t see them, but they’ll be at Grandma and Grandpa’s house this afternoon,” Mom said.

“Good,” I replied. Jane Lusk was my mom’s younger sister, and seeing their family, particularly my cousins Rick and Miranda, was always a highlight of Christmas for me.

“And the Sorrentos usually go to Mass first thing in the morning. But we’re still going over there this afternoon.” I nodded silently, prompting Mom to ask, “Right?”

“Yes,” I said. I did not want to make the situation worse, but I felt like I really needed to speak up. “But I really do wish you would stop volunteering me for things without asking me first,” I said.

Mom paused, taken off guard by my question. “Are you saying you don’t want to go see Monica Sorrento today?”

“No. It wouldn’t be nice to back out now.” Besides, I thought, it isn’t every day that I get to talk to girls, but I did not say that part out loud.

“Okay,” Mom said, sounding bothered. “But when have I volunteered you to do things before?”

“When you told Paula McCall that I could work at the bookstore over the summer.”

“You were home, you had nothing to do, and you even said you should get a job.”

“I know, but maybe that wasn’t the job I wanted. I mean, I probably would have said yes if you had asked me, but you still should have asked me first.” Mom did not reply to that, so I continued. “And remember fourth grade, when most of my class was mean to me, and you invited all four of the kids who weren’t mean to me over for play dates.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted. I was trying to help you make friends.”

“I wanted to make friends, but I wanted them to be nicer to me at school. I didn’t want them at our house. And in sixth grade, when we had to babysit Jonathan Hawley once a week because you thought I might want to play with someone from my class. He was so annoying!”

After a few seconds of silence, Mom replied, “He was annoying, wasn’t he. I’m sorry.”

“Just ask me first next time you tell someone you think I’d like to do something.”

“Okay. I promise I will.”

“Thank you.”

“And you’re sure you’re still okay with going to the Sorrentos today?”

“Yes.”

After church, we exchanged presents from the rest of the family at my grandparents’ house. Grandma got me new socks, and Aunt Jane got me another Bay City Captains shirt, a little different from the one I had opened at my parents’ house. Rick’s present from Mom was a Captains hat that looked very similar to my shirt. I suspected that Mom and Aunt Jane had bought all of the Captains merchandise together when they went shopping together earlier in the week.

After about another hour of sitting around eating and playing games, Mom asked if it was okay to go next door to the Sorrentos’ house now. “Okay,” I said. I got up and followed Mom next door, waiting nervously on the porch behind Mom as she rang the doorbell. The Sorrentos were a large family, and they lived in a large two-story house. They had five girls; Monica was 17, the oldest, and the youngest was in elementary school. Mom had known the Sorrentos for years; Mom and Aunt Jane and Mr. Sorrento and his sister all went to high school together.

A few seconds later, I heard footsteps and the clicking of a door being unlocked; the door opened, with Mrs. Sorrento on the other side. “Hi, Peggy! Hi, Greg! Merry Christmas!” she said. I could not remember if I had ever actually met Mrs. Sorrento, but everyone at Our Lady of Peace Church seemed to know who I was, because they knew Mom.

“Hi,” I said.

“Monica is in her room. I’ll go tell her you’re here,” Mrs. Sorrento said, walking down the hallway. I stood awkwardly, staring at Mom and looking around at the part of the Sorrentos’ house that I could see from the doorway, until Mrs. Sorrento returned with Monica about a minute later.

“Hi,” Monica said, smiling. Turning to me, she said, “Nice to meet you,” and shook my hand. I returned the handshake. Monica was short and thin, with curly brown hair and brown eyes.

“You needed help with physics?” Mom said to Monica. “Greg always liked physics.”

“There was something I didn’t understand,” Monica explained, “but I went in to talk to the teacher about it. I think I get it now.”

So Mom dragged me all the way here to tutor Monica in physics, and now she says she does not need a tutor. Now I really did not understand the point of all this. “That’s good,” I said to Monica. Trying to think of something to say, I added, “I had a bad physics test last year. High school physics was easy for me, so I didn’t study very hard. But I started going to my professor’s office hours, and I studied really hard for the next one, and that time I had the highest grade out of the whole class, about 200 people.”

“Wow,” Monica replied. “I know that’s normal for you, but 200 people in a class sounds kind of crazy.”

“Yeah.”

“So how do you like Jeromeville?”

“I like it. It’s a huge school, but I’ve found smaller communities to get involved with. That’s important.”

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about colleges, but I’m going to stay home and go to Hartman for the first two years. I’m probably going to apply to Jeromeville, though. And U of the Bay, and Capital State, and Central Tech. I know those for sure.”

“That sounds good.”

“Greg applied to Central Tech too,” Mom added. “But not Capital State. Right?”

“Yeah.”

We continued making small talk with Monica and Mrs. Sorrento for about another fifteen minutes. Mom and Mrs. Sorrento talked about people from church whom I did not know, and Monica and I talked about school and classes. Mr. Sorrento and two of Monica’s sisters also appeared to say hi.

“Are you ready to go back to Grandma’s house?” Mom asked.

“I think so,” I replied. Turning to Monica, I added, “And you’ll let me know if you need help with physics or anything like that?”

“Sure!” Monica answered. “Let me get your contact information.” She went back to her room and returned with a pen and paper, on which I wrote my address, phone number, and email.

“Can I get yours too?” I asked. “Well, I know your address. Do you have email?”

“My dad does. If you write me there, he’ll pass it on to me.” Monica wrote her phone number and Mr. Sorrento’s email on the piece of paper, tore that part of the paper off, and gave it to me. I put it in my pocket.

“Thank you,” I said. “It was nice meeting you.”

“Nice meeting you too!” Monica said, smiling.

“Thanks for coming over,” Mrs. Sorrento added. “It was good seeing you guys.”

“You too,” Mom said.

As soon as we were out of earshot, walking back up to Grandma’s front door, Mom said, “See? That wasn’t so bad.”

“I know,” I said.

“And I promise in the future, I’ll ask you before I tell someone you’ll do something.”

“Thank you. Can we just drop that now and enjoy the rest of Christmas?”

“Sure.”

I still thought it was a little strange that Mom seemed to make such a point of Monica needing help with physics, but then Monica told me she did not even need help. I could think of two possible explanations for how this happened: either Mom misunderstood whatever Mrs. Sorrento had originally said about Monica not doing well in physics, or the physics thing was entirely made up and Mom was just trying to help me meet girls. Either one was very possible, knowing Mom.

Monica and I kept in touch off and on for the rest of that school year, and I saw her in person occasionally on future visits to my grandmother’s house over the years. We never did become close lifelong friends, nor did anything else happen between us, but that was just part of the cycle of people meeting each other and growing apart naturally.

Since that day, though, Mom really did get better about not telling people I would do things for them without asking me first. When situations like that came up in the future, Mom would say things like “I’ll ask Greg” instead of “Greg would love to do that.” And that was what I really wanted, to be treated like an adult and be allowed to make my own decisions. Being a parent and watching children grow up is a difficult transition, but a willingness to communicate and listen helps everyone get through it.