Tag: college

November 14, 1997.  Kind of brilliant, but really weird. (#153)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 6 Comments

“I’ll see you tonight at JCF?” Sarah Winters asked as we left our math class in Younger Hall and crossed the street toward the Quad.

“Yeah,” I replied.  “Have a great day!”  I watched Sarah walk toward the Memorial Union as I walked diagonally in the other direction, crossing the Quad from northeast to southwest.  It was a sunny but cool November Friday morning, and many of the trees on campus were in the process of shedding their leaves.  Beyond the Quad, walking past the library and across Davis Drive, I noticed piles of leaves accumulating along the edges of walkways.  I continued south beyond Evans Hall, where I would go later tonight for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship; apparently Sarah would be there too.  I walked past the law school building to the University of Jeromeville Arboretum, a park-like public garden of trees and plants from around the world planted along a mile and a half of dry creek bed that had been converted into a long, skinny lake.  I walked past some succulents, their fleshy spiked leaves radiating from the ground, to a bridge a few feet wide connecting the north and south banks.  I stayed on the north side of the waterway and continued walking west on the path to the next bench, about fifty feet past the bridge, and sat, overlooking the waterway and a tall oak tree of the type that grew naturally here in the western United States.

Last year, I attended a convention in Urbana, Illinois, hosted by the parent organization of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  The convention was for university students and young adults to learn about missions and opportunities to serve Jesus around the world.  I was a newly practicing Christian at the time, many of my friends were doing these kinds of projects during the summer, and I wanted to learn more about what was out there.  Every attendee received a Bible that included in the back a plan to read through the Bible in a year, with a few chapters to read each day from three different parts in the Bible.  Next to each day’s readings were a checkmark.  Yesterday I had checked off August 8; I knew that I was a few months behind, and I had stopped trying to finish in a year.  I would just get through the entire Bible in as long as it took.

I read the verses for August 9 and prayed about what I read as I looked up at the oak tree.  Coming to this bench to read the Bible between classes had become my routine on school days for several months.  I had often heard talks and sermons about the importance of spending time with God first thing in the morning, but this routine seemed to work better for me.

On Fridays, I only had my two math classes.  I worked part time as a tutor that quarter, and I had one group that met on Fridays, in the afternoon after my other class.  After I finished reading, I headed back toward the Quad and the Memorial Union.  I planned to look for a table in the MU where I could sit and do homework until my other class started.  I had math to do, and it was the kind of assignment that did not require my full concentration, so I could work on it and not get distracted inside a busy student union.  Maybe I would even find friends to sit with, I thought.

As I looked around the tables, I did in fact find friends to sit with.  I saw Todd Chevallier, Autumn Davies, Leah Eckert, and John Harvey from JCF talking to Cheryl Munn, one of the paid staff for JCF.  They had pushed two tables together, and there appeared to be room for me to join them.  As I approached, Autumn smiled and waved.  Cheryl, who was sitting with her back to me, turned to her left, waving her arm toward me, holding her palm out at arm’s length, and said, “Out.”

What did I do?  I thought.  Did I accidentally say something inappropriate that had made me a pariah within JCF?  Was this another one of the cliques that had formed within JCF, doing some kind of exclusive Bible study that was only open by invitation?  Maybe no one was mad at me or trying to exclude me; maybe someone was just sharing something sensitive and did not want to share with people beyond a close circle of friends.  “Sorry,” I said, starting to back away.  Maybe I would not be sitting with friends this morning after all.

“Greg,” Cheryl said, motioning toward the table.  “Come sit!”

“You just told me not to,” I said, confused.

“Huh?  I was just telling Leah that she was on that side of the table, with her back to the wall, and she could see out.”  Cheryl made the same sweep of her arm, gesturing in my direction toward the rest of the room where others sat and a continuous stream of people walked by.

I stood for a second, puzzled, then laughed.  “Oh!” I exclaimed.  “I didn’t hear any of that.  I just saw you put your arm up, and all I heard you say was, ‘Out!’  I thought you were telling me to get out.”

“No, no!” Cheryl said.  Autumn laughed.  “Please, sit down!”  Relieved that I had done nothing wrong, I sat in an empty seat on the end of the table.  Cheryl and Todd sat on my left,  Autumn and Leah sat on my right, and John was facing me on the other end. “How’s your morning going?” Cheryl asked.

“Good.  Only two classes today.  Then I have a tutoring group this afternoon.”

“How’s tutoring going?  You like it?”

“Yeah.  It’s good experience, now that I know I want to be a teacher.  I’m going to do another internship in a classroom at Jeromeville High winter quarter.  I did that last spring, and I really liked it.”

“Did you guys hear Jeromeville is getting an In-N-Out Burger?” Todd asked excitedly.

“No!” Autumn exclaimed.

“Is that place good?” Leah asked.  “I’ve never heard of it.”

“I used to live in California,” Todd explained.  “It’s huge there.  It’s so good.”

“There’s one now in Gabilan, near where I grew up,” I said.  “My parents went there and said it wasn’t all that good.”

“That’s weird,” Todd replied.  “Everyone loves In-N-Out.”

“I’ll have to try it sometime.  I love burgers.”

“Hey, are you going to JCF tonight?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Romeo + Juliet is playing at 199 Stone tonight.  We’re probably gonna get some people together to go.  You wanna come?”

“Sure.  Is that the new Romeo and Juliet movie that came out not too long ago?”

“Yeah.  With Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.”

“Okay,” I said.  Those actors’ names did not mean anything to me, I did not follow movies closely, but I was always looking for opportunities to hang out with friends, especially those that did not require a lot of work on my part to plan.

“Isn’t Leonardo DiCaprio in that Titanic movie that’s coming out soon?” Autumn asked.

“Yeah,” Todd replied.  “That one’s gonna be good too.  I heard they built a replica of the actual Titanic for the movie, just to sink it.”

“Wow,” I said.


I was running a little late when I got to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship that night, since I made spaghetti for dinner and spilled it all over myself, necessitating a change of clothes.  The worship team was already playing when I arrived, and the room was mostly full.  Maybe the spilling of the spaghetti had been divine intervention, I thought, because as I walked into the room, I found myself looking directly at the back of Carrie Valentine’s head.  She sat a few rows down, one seat in from the aisle, with an empty seat next to her.  I walked over to her, pointed to the empty seat, and nervously asked, “Is anyone sitting there?”  Hopefully she understood what I was saying over the music.

“Go ahead!” Carrie replied, smiling.  I sat next to her.  As we sang along, then listened to announcements and a talk delivered by Cheryl, I realized the great irony of this situation.  I was sitting next to a cute girl.  This would provide an opportunity for a conversation afterward.  But I could not make plans with her, because I already had plans tonight, to go to the movie with Todd and Autumn and all of them.  Go figure.  Nevertheless, after the ending song, I asked Carrie how her week was going.

“Good,” she said.  “I just had a midterm today.  I don’t think I did very well.”

“Maybe you’ll surprise yourself,” I said.  “I’ve been trying to get ahead on reading and studying, because I’m gonna miss class Thursday and Friday next week.”

“Why’s that?”

“Some of us from Jeromeville Covenant are taking a road trip to San Diego, for the National Youth Workers’ Convention.”

“That sounds like fun!”

“It will be.  Apparently a lot of big-name speakers will be there.  And a lot of Christian bands play live there.”

“Like who?”

“DC Talk.  Audio Adrenaline.  Five Iron Frenzy.  The OC Supertones.  I don’t remember who else.”

“Wow!” Carrie said.  “San Diego is nice!  Have you been there before?”

“I haven’t.  I’ve only been as far south as Disneyland.  So this will be a new experience for me.”

“Have fun!  I’m jealous.”

“Thanks.  I’m excited!”

“How is that going, working with the youth group at church?  You work with junior high kids?”

“Yeah.  It’s a lot of fun.  Over the last few weeks, I did an unofficial project, not an actual church activity, where I made a movie based on some characters I created several years ago.  I got a lot of kids from the church to be in the movie.  And I filmed some of it at church, like we used the youth room for a school dance scene.”

“That sounds like so much fun!  How did the movie turn out?”

“Pretty good.  A little unprofessional looking in some spots, but it was fun.  We had a watch party after youth group this week.  Not a whole lot of people stuck around, but it was fun to watch the movie on the big projector screen in the youth room.”

“Nice!  I’ve never done anything like that.  My sister and I used to make home movies sometimes when we were kids, but nothing as complex as what it sounds like yours was.”

“That sounds like fun too,” I said.  I smiled, looking into Carrie’s big brown eyes, desperately trying to think of something to say to keep this conversation going.  I wondered if Todd would be okay with me inviting her along to see Romeo + Juliet?  “What are you doing tonight?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Carrie replied.  “I heard some people were going to see Romeo + Juliet, but I don’t know if I want to go.”

Perfect, I thought.  Carrie knew about the movie without me having to be awkward.  “I’m going,” I said.  “I think you should too.”

“I’ll wait and see how I feel later.  I need to go talk to some people from my Bible study before they leave.  But maybe I’ll see you at the movie tonight?”

“Yeah.  I’ll talk to you soon.”


William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, spelled with a plus sign but pronounced “Romeo and Juliet” like the play it was based on, was the movie that made actor Leonardo DiCaprio a household name.  I did not know much about the movie, except that I vaguely remembered hearing about its existence last year.  The lecture hall at 199 Stone Hall showed second-run movies on weekends, and this was often a destination for people hanging out after Jeromeville Christian Fellowship on Friday nights.

Carrie did end up coming to the movie.  A group of eight of us walked down Davis Drive from Evans Hall to Stone Hall, the next building to the west.  When we left, I was in the middle of telling Autumn about the Dog Crap and Vince movie that I made with the kids from church.  Autumn and I were near the back of the group, and Carrie was closer to the front.  As we walked into the theater, I could not position myself next to Carrie without looking conspicuous and awkward.  When I sat down, Todd was to my left, then Autumn, then three more people between Autumn and Carrie.  The aisle was on my right.  Carrie was here, but I was not sitting next to her.

When I was a freshman, movies at 199 Stone would be preceded by classic cartoons, an experience normally associated with past generations of moviegoers.  This tradition had fallen away at some point since then; tonight the screen showed a silent slideshow of advertisements before the movie started.  The lights darkened, I saw the name of the movie studio appear on the screen, but I became confused when a television with a news broadcast showed up on the screen.  Was the movie starting?  Was this the movie?  Surely this television was not part of the movie, since Shakespeare’s play was set in the sixteenth century.

The reporter began talking about the Montagues and Capulets.  Those were Romeo and Juliet’s respective families, so this was definitely the movie, but why did Verona look like a city in a gangsta-rap music video?  What were these police cars and helicopters?  I quickly realized that what I was seeing was not going to be a faithful reproduction of Shakespeare’s work.  Instead, the story had been adapted to a modern urban setting, with the Montagues and Capulets rival crime families.  As the movie continued, I noticed that all of the characters still spoke their actual lines, unchanged, from the Shakespeare play.

It was kind of brilliant, but it was really weird.

As the movie continued, I noticed more and more creative interpretations of Shakespeare’s words for a modern-day context.  The police chief was named Prince, for example, and it took me a while to realize that he filled the role of the actual Prince of Verona as written by Shakespeare.  The characters fought with models of guns named after the blade weapons used by Shakespeare’s original characters.  Even with these changes, though, it still seemed odd to me that these gangbangers spoke in Shakespearean vocabulary and iambic pentameter.

When the movie ended, as the credits played, I stood and stretched.  “That was weird,” I said disdainfully.

“That was so good!” Todd exclaimed.

“It was weird!” I repeated, louder.

“You didn’t like it?”

“It just seemed really unnatural having modern characters use Shakespeare’s language.”

“That’s what makes it so good!”

“I don’t know.  I guess it just wasn’t for me.  Thanks for inviting me, though.”

“Any time.”

As we walked out toward the parking lot, many of the others talked about how much they loved the movie, and I remained silent.  I tuned out the conversation, so I did not find out what Carrie thought of the movie.  I did not want to say any more bad things about the movie, in case Carrie loved it as much as Todd did.  I may have already ruined any chance I had with Carrie by not liking the movie, and I did not want to open my mouth again and make things worse.

I never watched that movie again, although now, with a quarter-century of hindsight, I would not rule out giving it another chance if the opportunity arose.  Maybe I would enjoy it more knowing from the start that the movie was a combination of Shakespeare’s words and a modern-day setting, and not having my thoughts darkened by the frustration of not getting to sit next to Carrie.

Why was it so difficult to ask a girl out?  Why was this process so difficult for me to understand?  Romeo and Juliet had no such problems.  Romeo crashes a party because he wants to bang some other chick who he knows will be there, he and Juliet see each other, he goes to the balcony, and boom, they were in love that night and married the next day.  What was wrong with me that love never dropped into my lap like that?  Of course, as a direct result of all of this, Romeo and Juliet both end up dead after a few days.  Maybe it was for the best that my life did not turn out like Romeo’s life; this story was, after all, a tragedy.

Readers: Was there ever a movie that all your friends liked but you didn’t? 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.

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November 5, 1997.  Another epic prank. (#152)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 10 Comments

“Excuse me?” the employee at the grocery store told me.  “You’re not allowed to have that in here.”

“What?” I asked.

“The camera.  Those aren’t allowed in here.”

“Why?”

“Company policy.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.  But it’s our company policy.”

“That’s dumb,” I said.

I sulked toward the front of the store, holding two 12-packs of toilet paper in one hand and the Santoros’ video camera in the other.  Taylor, Noah, and Erica were standing near the front of the store, each also holding toilet paper.  “They said we weren’t allowed to use the camera in here,” I said, disappointed.

“What?” Erica replied.

“Maybe because they don’t want competitors to find out how they do business, or what their prices are,” Noah explained.

“I guess that makes sense,” I said.  “But then we’ll be missing the start of the video where it shows all of us buying toilet paper.

“What if we film from the parking lot?  We can show each of us walking out of the store with toilet paper,” Taylor suggested.

“That’s a great idea,” I said.  “Where are Brody and Courtney?”

“Here they come,” Taylor pointed across the store, where Brody and Courtney approached us, each carrying toilet paper and giggling about something, as they often did.  The six of us all got in line to pay for our purchases.

“Wow,” the cashier commented, seeing all of us buying toilet paper together.  “Someone’s getting hit tonight.”  I laughed.

I went through the line first and waited outside, with the camera running.  We had each paid separately because we wanted to record a video of each of us individually buying toilet paper.  I stood in the parking lot and recorded Taylor, Noah, Courtney, Brody, and Erica each walking out of the store holding toilet paper, with about three seconds between each person.  I then walked inside the store and walked back out carrying my toilet paper, with Brody holding the camera, so that I could be in the video as well.


Lucky closed at midnight on weekdays, and we had finished our purchase and left the store about half an hour before closing.  It was a Wednesday night, and a few hours ago, we had all been at The Edge, the youth group for junior high school students at Jeromeville Covenant Church.  I was borrowing a VHS video camera from Zac Santoro and his family, because we were making a movie based on my characters Dog Crap and Vince.  That was the week that we had recorded the school dance scene after youth group.  The students did not know that we had plans to make another video with the same camera after they went home and went to bed.

A week ago, during our weekly meeting before the students arrive, we were talking about playing some kind of fun, non-destructive prank on a large group of students, and making a video of it to show at youth group.  “Does anyone have a video camera?” Noah asked.

“I’m borrowing one from the Santoros right now, because we’re working on the Dog Crap and Vince movie,” I explained.

“That’s perfect!”  We discussed all of the usual playful pranks that were popular at the time and made a plan.  Not everyone participated; Cambria and Hannah both had midterms to study for and could not stay up all night, as this would probably require.  Adam, the youth pastor, politely declined, although he was completely supportive of what we were planning to do.

Back then, Brody drove an old family sedan that seated six, three in front and three in back. The car had been his family’s old car.  We all piled in the car and headed north on Andrews Road, across Coventry Boulevard, toward the Santoros’ house.  We went there first because it was the closest.  “Kind of ironic that we’re using the Santoros’ camera to record the Santoros getting toilet-papered,” I remarked.

“I know!” Taylor said.

Brody stopped the car around the corner from the Santoros’ house, far enough away that they would not notice.  “Wait,” Taylor said before we got out.  “Let’s make sure to ration our toilet paper.  How many houses are we hitting?”

Noah looked at the list that we had made earlier.  “Eighteen,” he said.

“And we each got two 12-packs, so that’s 24 rolls.  Six of us, what’s six times 24?”

“One hundred forty-four,” I blurted out.

“And eighteen houses, what’s 144 divided by 18?”

“Eight,” I replied just as quickly.

“Good thing we have a math major on this adventure!” Courtney said.

“Yeah, because apparently you need my advanced math skills to do second grade arithmetic.  Just kidding.”

“So,” Taylor said, “maximum of eight rolls per house.  Ready?  Go!”

We began unwrapping the cases of toilet paper.  We carefully counted out eight rolls and walked quickly but quietly to the Santoros’ front yard, some of us carrying one roll and some of us carrying two.  Brody looked ready to throw his in the tree, but Taylor grabbed his arm.  “Wait!” he whispered.

“What?” Brody mouthed silently.

“We should show the house on camera first with no toilet paper.  So Zac can recognize his house.  Then we’ll show scenes of us TP’ing it.  And do that for all the houses.”

“Good idea,” I mouthed, nodding.  I started the camera and recorded the front of the house for a few seconds.  Then as the others threw their rolls of toilet paper into the trees and bushes, I continued recording people throwing toilet paper flying through the air, and the trees and bushes covered in long white streaks.  We stood back and admired our work for a few seconds, then quickly walked back to the car.  It was already midnight on a school night, and we had a lot of work to do.

Next, we drove the quarter-mile to Samantha Willis’ house, on the end of a cul-de-sac off of Alvarez Avenue.  We parked at the other end of the street, near the corner with Alvarez, and carried a total of eight rolls of toilet paper to the Willises’ front yard.  I had not been to this house before, but it backed up to the Coventry Greenbelt, so I had probably been on a bike ride at some point and seen the Willises’ back fence from a distance without realizing it.  The other five carefully tiptoed around the yard, throwing toilet paper up into the tree and across the bushes, as I stood back recording it all on camera.  I made sure to get a clear shot of the house, so that Samantha and her friends would recognize the house.  “This video is gonna be so cool,” I whispered to Taylor and Noah as we quietly walked back to the car.


We had been planning this event for the last week, and I had been assigned the task of making our route, since everyone knew that I was good with maps and directions.  Noah and Taylor, in consultation with Adam, had made a list of which students’ houses to visit.  We only included students from families that were regularly involved at church and families whom the youth leaders knew well.  Some of the kids came from families that would not appreciate being pranked, and some families were unsupportive of their children’s involvement with Christianity, so we did not want to get in trouble or jeopardize our relationships with those students and their families.

We hit a few more houses in north Jeromeville, then headed west across the overpass at Highway 117 to three houses in west Jeromeville.  We arrived at the Fosters’ house first of those three.  As we approached the front yard, full of bushes that could hold a lot of toilet paper, Erica turned to me and said, “This is really weird, toilet-papering my own house.”

“I know!” I said.  I kept one roll for myself, because of something I thought of on the drive over here.  When the other seven rolls had been strewn about the bushes, I unrolled mine and began decorating a large bush that had mostly been missed by the others.

As we tiptoed back to the car, I could now turn to Erica and whisper, “Your house is now the only house in the world which I have toilet-papered twice, once on the outside and once on the inside.”  I knew that Erica knew of my involvement in the prank that we pulled for her birthday last year, so I was not incriminating myself by saying that.

Erica thought about this for a second, then smiled and laughed.  “Oh, yeah!” she whispered back.  “And I never changed my answering machine from that night!  People still hear you guys singing when they call me!”

“That’s amazing!”

“I still think it’s hilarious that you filled up all those water bottles.”

“I think that was Brody’s idea.”

“Sounds like a Brody thing.”

Several houses later, we were driving along 8th Street in central Jeromeville when we noticed another car behind us turning out from a side street.  A few seconds later, flashing red and blue lights appeared from the car behind us.  Brody swore and signaled to pull over.  I looked at Taylor and Noah, horrified.  “Hide the toilet paper!” Taylor said, as we attempted to push as much of it as we could under our feet.

As Brody rolled down the window, the police officer from the car that pulled us over approached and said, “Your tail light is cracked.”

“It is?” Brody said.  “I didn’t know that.”

“Can I see your license and registration?” the officer asked.  Brody produced the necessary paperwork, and the officer filled out a ticket for Brody to repair the taillight.

“I’ll get that taken care of,” Brody said, looking at the ticket and putting it aside.

“Have any of you been drinking?”

“What?  No, we haven’t.”

“Step out of the car, please.”

Brody stepped out of the car as I sat silently in the back, terrified, looking at the others who were being equally silent.  After a couple minutes, the officer was sufficiently satisfied that Brody was sober and let him return to the car.  The police car drove off.

“Turn on the camera!” Taylor said.  I did so and pointed it at Taylor, who spoke to the camera.  “This is Taylor, reporting live from The Edge.  We just got stopped by the cops!  Brody, tell them what happened.”

I turned the camera to Brody, who said, “He said my tail light was cracked.”

“What else?”

“He wanted to know if I had been drinking.” Brody chuckled.  “Of course not.”

“We now return you to your regularly scheduled program,” Taylor said.  I turned the camera off.

A little bit later, we parked down the street from the Foremans’ house.  The Foremans had two students in The Edge, eighth-grade Shawna and seventh-grade Cory.  They lived on a cul-de-sac, this one in an older neighborhood, off of M Street just east of downtown Jeromeville.  “Be careful,” Noah whispered to the rest of us just before we got out of the car.  “They have dogs that might start barking.”  I nodded quietly.

Courtney was in the front as the six of us walked toward the Foremans’ house.  Their next-door neighbors had a tall sycamore tree that was beginning to shed leaves, and Courtney stepped on a dry, crunchy leaf as we reached the Foremans’ driveway.  As soon as the leaf crunched, two dogs began barking loudly.

“Run!” Noah whispered.  The six of us made an abrupt about-face and ran down to the car parked four houses away.  After we caught our breath, Taylor told me to start recording.  Brody turned north on M Street as Taylor announced, “This is Taylor, coming to you live from The Edge!  Shawna, Corey, we tried to include your house on this, but your dogs started barking.  If you woke up to the dogs barking in the middle of the night Wednesday night, or Thursday morning, that was us.  Sorry if we woke you up.  Hope you got back to sleep.”

We continued heading east after the Foremans’ house.  Eventually we reached Beech Drive, where the Houstons and the Suttons lived across the street from each other.  We only had to park once in order to hit both houses.

“They’re going to know right away it was us,” Noah said.  “Whoever goes outside first in the morning will notice that both of them got hit.”

“Should we only do one of their houses?”

“No, it’s okay.  Everyone will figure it out soon enough.”

I did my usual thing, recording each house from the outside first, then getting footage of the others throwing toilet paper into trees and unrolling toilet paper along bushes.  After we finished on Beech Lane, we drove all the way to Bruce Boulevard on the eastern edge of Jeromeville and crossed south of Highway 100 to hit a few houses in south Jeromeville.  By the time we finally got back to the church, where everyone had parked, it was almost three in the morning.  I walked home, since I lived just a short distance from church, and very quietly tiptoed to my bed and slept for less than four hours, since I had a full day of class and working as a tutor tomorrow.


“Greg,” I heard a woman’s voice say as I was leaving church the following Sunday.  I turned around and saw Mrs. Houston smiling at me.  “How was your week?” she asked.

“It was good,” I said.

“I was thinking about you the other day.  I was going to call you in the middle of the night and remind you that we love you.”  I looked at Mrs. Houston, a little confused, and she continued, “You know.  Because you stopped by in the middle of the night and told us that you loved us.”

“I see,” I said, chuckling.

Noah and Adam edited my footage down to a video about seven minutes long, with the Mission: Impossible theme song playing in the background.  This song, originally from an old television show about secret agents, had become popular again in recent years.  A movie based on the old show was released last year, and Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, the bassist and drummer for the band U2, had a top 10 hit with their recording of the theme song.  We showed the video at The Edge the following week, and students cheered and laughed as their houses appeared on the screen.

I have often humorously wondered if God keeps some kind of record for each person of how much toilet paper everyone has used for pranking purposes and how much each person has received as the target of pranks.  If such a ledger exists, mine is far out of balance.  I have thrown many rolls of toilet paper for amusement purposes, mostly during my early twenties but also a couple of times after that, yet I have only ever received one roll in return.  During that same school year, different leaders with The Edge would take turns hosting watch parties for Monday Night Football each week.  This had been a popular tradition with previous years’ groups of students, but the students we had this year were not into football so much.  They would get bored by halftime and just to hang out or play games instead.  The Monday after we showed the video, I was hosting the football watch party, and Noah and Brody, who shared an apartment right across the street from me, were at my house.  Adam pulled me and a couple of the boys aside at one point and said that we should prank Noah and Brody while they watched the game, so in an inconspicuous span of five minutes, we walked across the street with a couple of rolls of toilet paper and decorated the bushes in front of Noah and Brody’s apartment.  The following week, I was at Noah and Brody’s for Monday Night Football, and when I got home, I noticed that someone had tossed one roll of toilet paper into the tree in my front yard.

Of course, there is no eternal consequence for being out of balance like this, and it is not something that affects my life from day to day.  All of this toilet-papering was in good fun, and as Mrs. Houston said, playful and non-destructive pranks like this are a way for recipients of the prank to know that we are loved.

Readers: Those of you who know where I live in real life, please don’t toilet-paper my house. I have enough to deal with right now. Also, tell me about some pranks that you’ve been part of.

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

October 31-November 2, 1997.  Wrestling with God at Fall Conference. (#151)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

The year that I was a senior, Jeromeville Christian Fellowship had a large class of freshmen who had been very active in the group.  Also, many of the students in the class above me did not graduate in four years and were still involved in JCF as fifth-year students.  The group was the largest that it had been in the time I had been involved; its Friday night large group meetings were almost completely filling 170 Evans, a lecture hall with two hundred seats.

October 31 was a Friday that year, but there was no large group meeting, because it was the weekend of the annual Fall Conference.  Not everyone who came on a typical Friday had the money and free time for a weekend retreat, but around seventy people from JCF attended Fall Conference that year.  JCF was a chapter of Intervarsity, a nondenominational Christian ministry with chapters at colleges and universities across the United States and a few other countries.  This Fall Conference was a regional retreat, attended by students from Intervarsity chapters at six different schools around the area.  The University of Jeromeville had the largest chapter out of all of them.  Last year, about half of the students at Fall Conference came from UJ.

Those of us who were going met at four o’clock in a parking lot on campus to carpool for the hundred-mile trip north to the retreat center at Muddy Springs.  Tim Walton, a freshman with thick black glasses, approached me as I walked from my car to where the rest of the people were.  He was with another freshman, a tall, sandy-haired guy whom I had met a couple of times whom I knew only as “3.”  “Hey, Greg,” Tim said.  “We’re in your car.”

“Cool,” I replied.  “Who has the list?”

“Dave and Janet.”

I walked over toward Dave and Janet McAllen, the couple who worked full time as staff for JCF.  Janet held a clipboard and made a checkmark next to my name.  I looked to see whose names were next to mine.  Melinda Schmidt, Autumn Davies, Tim Walton, 3.  Even the carpool list just called him 3.  “Autumn isn’t here yet,” Janet said.  “Do you need the directions?”

“I remember how to get there,” I said.

I saw Melinda in the distance; I walked off to tell her that I had arrived.  She carried her bag to my car, where Tim and 3 stood waiting for me to unlock it so they could put their things in the back.  Autumn arrived about five minutes later; after she loaded her bags, the five of us got in the car and headed north on Highway 117.

The North Valley was a productive agricultural region, with a variety of crops grown.  Highway 117 narrowed to one lane in each direction north of Woodville, passing through various fields, pastures, and orchards.  This was a lonely stretch of road, with only one town of around a thousand people in the thirty-mile stretch between Woodville and the point where Highway 117 ended and merged with Highway 9.

“Can I put this in?” Melinda asked, holding up a tape.  “It’s a mixtape of Christian music.”

“Sure,” I replied.  Melinda put her tape into my car stereo; the first song was “Liquid” by Jars of Clay.  I knew that one.

“Did you guys do anything for Halloween?” Autumn asked.

“I was at the Halloween party at the De Anza house,” I said.  “They had it last night, since most of them are on this retreat.  Tim and 3 were there too.”

“How was that?  I wanted to go!”

“It was fun.”

“I wanted to go too,” Melinda added.  “I had a midterm today that I needed to study for.”

“What did you dress as?” Autumn asked.

“I just wore this old 70s-looking jacket that I borrowed it from the lost and found at church.  Xander had a great costume.  He dressed as a hillbilly, with overalls, and a cowboy hat, and a piece of straw in his mouth.  And he had a real missing tooth.”

“What?  Missing tooth?”

“Yeah.  Apparently he really is missing a tooth.  He normally wears a bridge, and he took it out for his costume.”

“Wow,” Autumn said.  “That’s dedication.”

“Lots of good costumes.  Sam Hoffman was Austin Powers.  And Ramon was Michael Jackson.  He even went to campus in costume today.  Did you see him in the parking lot?”

“No!”

“He’s still in costume, with the red jacket and the glove, and he made his hair more curly than usual.”

“That’s amazing!”

“He pulled it off really well,” Tim said.

At its north end, Highway 117 merged into Highway 9 just south of Mecklenburg, a medium-sized city about the size of Jeromeville.  From there, we drove north through various fruit and nut orchards and a few small towns.  Melinda’s tape ran out, and Tim put on a tape with some really weird songs on it.  He said it was from some TV show on a channel I didn’t get.

“You’ve never seen that show?” Tim asked, incredulously.

“I don’t have cable,” I explained.  “None of us really watch TV all that much.  And the cable provider where I grew up doesn’t have a whole lot of channels compared to most places.”

“Wow.”

Around quarter to six, we arrived in Bidwell, a city of about ninety thousand and home to one of this state’s oldest public universities.  My dad had spent his early childhood in Bidwell, and I still had relatives in the area that I had grown up visiting around twice per year.  I had applied to Bidwell State, and was accepted, but Jeromeville is a more prestigious university, and they offered me a scholarship for my grades.  I turned off of Highway 9 at the exit leading to Muddy Springs.  There was a Wendy’s just off of that exit where most of the carpools coming from Jeromeville stopped to eat.  The five of us sat at a table together, watching people from JCF who arrived before us leave and watching others arrive after us.

“I’ve never asked,” Autumn asked 3 at one point.  “Why do they call you ‘3?’”  I was glad Autumn asked, because I had been wondering the same thing since I met 3 a few weeks ago, and I thought asking would be too awkward.

“My real name is Robert A. Silver III,” 3 explained.  “Because I’m The Third, my family just started calling me ‘3’ when I was a kid.  Some people who are The Third go by ‘Trey,’ but my dad just thought ‘3’ sounded better.”

“That’s a great nickname.”

“So is anyone hoping to learn anything specific at this conference?” Melinda asked.  “God spoke to me so much on the China trip over the summer.  I can’t want to do something like that again next summer.”

“What was this China trip?” 3 asked.  Melinda explained that twelve students from JCF went on a mission trip to China over the summer as part of a large group of hundreds of students from various Intervarsity chapters around the US. 3 was a freshman, so he would not have been around last year when they were preparing for the trip.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Just whatever God wants to teach me, I guess.”


After we arrived at Fall Conference, nine miles past Wendy’s into the foothills outside of Bidwell, all six schools had a worship session led by JCF’s worship team.  A group of students, also from Jeromeville, performed a skit about a freshman experiencing Jesus for the first time. In between scenes from a day in the student’s life, Ramon danced in his Michael Jackson costume and sang a song called “Freshman,” to the tune of “Thriller.”  Liz Williams, actually a senior, played the freshman, and from the way she and Ramon behaved after the skit finished, it quickly became apparent to me that they were back together.  Liz and Ramon had been a couple from about a month into freshman year until the start of junior year, when they had an amicable breakup.  To this day, I do not know exactly how or when they got back together, or why.  I’m always out of the loop of other people’s relationships, even though I had known Liz and Ramon as long as they had known each other, and three years later I would eventually attend their wedding.

The head staff from Capital State’s Intervarsity chapter, a man in his thirties named Stan, led the teaching that weekend.  He spoke on Genesis chapter 32, in which God wrestles with Jacob and gives him the name Israel, meaning “he struggles with God.”  Jacob later would go on to be the ancestor of God’s chosen people, the twelve tribes of Israel.  I was tired, so I went to bed fairly soon after Stan’s talk Friday night.  Stan continued his teaching Saturday morning, and after that session, we all received a handout, with instructions to find a quiet place and spend some time with God.  The handout listed verses to read and related questions to answer.

It was a cool morning; I put on a sweatshirt and walked around outside.  A large ninety-year-old building dominated the retreat center; it had been built as a hotel, the centerpiece of a mountain getaway resort.  It was later sold to a Christian organization, who now used the first floor as the lobby, cafeteria, and a meeting room, and the rest as a dormitory.  The paved road ended at the parking lot for the retreat center; I noticed a dirt road continuing deeper into the hills which I had never noticed before.  I walked in that direction, carrying my Bible.

The last four miles of the drive to Muddy Springs followed a canyon into the hills, and this dirt road continued to follow the small stream that formed the canyon.  Oaks grew in the valley, at least in the areas that had not been claimed for agriculture, and pines grew in the mountains; Muddy Springs was in the transition area where both grew on the surrounding grassy hills.  The hills were brown; it had not rained in at least six months.  In this part of the world, October typically felt like a milder version of summer, with sunny and pleasant days, but today was the first of November, and right around the time the calendar changed, the weather usually did too.  The rain had not returned yet, but the sky was gray and dreary, and the leaves on the oaks were becoming more brown and more sparse.  I found a large rock with a flat enough top to sit on, overlooking the canyon and the ridge beyond.

I read from the handout.  Pray that God will open your eyes and ears to His presence in your life, I read.  I did this.  I followed the succeeding prompts on the page, thinking about how I might be wrestling with God at the moment.  I prayed about my struggles with being outside the cliques.  I prayed that I would meet a nice Christian girlfriend soon, and I prayed for patience until that happened.  I continued reading the paper; it said to listen quietly until I heard God speak.  I closed my eyes and bowed my head.  After hearing nothing, I opened my eyes and looked around.  I stared at the hills around me, at the gray sky, at the trees.  I bowed my head and closed my eyes again.  Still nothing.

The schedule for the day had allotted an hour for us to wrestle with God outside that morning, and by the end of that hour, I was frustrated.  God had not even shown up to wrestle with me.  Did that mean I won by forfeit?  That was not the point; it felt more discouraging than anything, like I was not important enough for God to speak to.  I looked at my watch; it was almost time for lunch.  I started walking back to the building, defeated, and I sat and ate alone.

“Hey, Greg,” Eddie Baker said, approaching me.  He had just finished eating with others, and he was walking toward the exit with Tabitha, his girlfriend.  “What’s up?”

“I’m just kind of discouraged.  I feel like God isn’t speaking to me, like he did to Jacob, or like all the stories I hear from all of you guys.  Like maybe I’m not a real Christian.  Or not a good enough one.”

“That’s not true!” Eddie replied.  “Look at how much you’ve grown the last two years.  You’ve helped out with things around here.  And now you’re working with junior high kids at church.  It takes a lot of faith to commit to something like that.”

“God speaks to everyone in his own way and his own timing,” Tabitha added.  “Don’t think of yourself as less than others because you don’t hear from him in the same way.”

“I guess,” I replied.

“I’ve been where you are, and so have a lot of us,” Eddie explained.  “This is the way that God wrestles with us sometimes.  Just keep listening for his voice.”

“And when you feel like you’re not good enough?” Tabitha said.  “That’s not God’s voice.  That’s Satan trying to distract you.”

“I know,” I said.

“Can I pray for you?” Eddie asked.

“Sure.”

“Father God,” Eddie began as we bowed our heads, “I pray for Greg, that you will speak to him, in a way that he will hear your voice clearly.  I pray that he will shake off all of this discouragement, and know that it is not from you.  I pray that you will give him a new name and a new identity, so that he will know his identity in you, as your beloved child.  I thank you for bringing him here to Muddy Springs, and I pray that when we go back to Jeromeville, Greg will return with a renewed sense of faith and identity in you.  Amen.”

“Amen,” I said, looking up.  “Thanks.”


We had the afternoon free, so I went back to my room.  Kieran Ziegler was my roommate for the weekend.  “I love that story about Jacob wrestling with God,” Kieran said.  “Because I can tell people that wrestling is the only sport mentioned in the Bible.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, chuckling.  Kieran was on the UJ wrestling team; of course he would notice this.

“Brent is gonna get some people to play Ultimate.  You wanna come?”

“I need a nap,” I said.  “Maybe if you’re still playing when I wake up.  Or when I give up on trying to fall asleep.”

“No problem.  I’ll see you around.”

I closed my eyes after Kieran left, but I did not sleep.  I could not shake these thoughts of not being good enough.  I still felt left out of the cliques within JCF.  I wished I had been asked to live at the house on De Anza Drive, with Eddie and Xander and Ramon and Jason and John and Lars.  All the cool things in my social circle happened around those guys, like the Halloween party Thursday night.  I kept hearing people tell stories about God working in their lives, like when Melinda and Eddie and Tabitha and a bunch of others went on the China trip last summer.  Some people have said that they sometimes hear God speak audibly, and some of my friends came from the kind of Christian traditions that spoke in tongues.  Many of my friends have led others to faith; Eddie did that with his freshman dorm roommate, Raphael.  But not me.  I was not good at talking about Jesus or my faith with others, and that would probably make me ineffective on a mission trip to another country.  I had heard a speaker once highlight the importance of supporting missionaries behind the scenes, and I was all for that.  I gave money to friends’ mission trips, and to my church, which supported missionaries.  That role was more suited to me.  But it also made me feel like I was missing out on all the cool experiences.

I went outside after about forty-five minutes of not sleeping.  The Ultimate Frisbee game was still going on, but with no flat grassy field at Muddy Springs, they played on a paved basketball court, which did not exactly seem safe.  I watched the game with a few other people who were just hanging out and watching.

At the evening session, Stan from Cap State told stories from the Bible about other people whose names and identities God changed, besides Jacob.  Rahab, the prostitute from Jericho who helped the Israelite spies, whose family God saved from Jericho’s coming destruction.  The invalid at the pool of Bethesda, whom Jesus healed.  And Abram, Jacob’s grandfather.  Long before God wrestled with Jacob, he changed Abram’s name to Abraham, to indicate that Abraham, an old man with a barren wife, would become the father of a great nation.  I read all of these stories again later that night before I went to bed, trying to keep these Bible stories on my mind to avoid another descent into discouraging thoughts.


When I woke up, the sky was sunny and clear.  It was still cold, but the dreary gray had departed.  My mind was also becoming sunny and clear as I kept thinking about last night, particularly about the man whom Jesus healed at the pool of Bethesda.  I read his story, chapter 5 of the Gospel of John, again that morning, and something stood out to me.  I knew in my head that God was not ignoring me when he remained silent, but it seemed much more real now.

The conference center gave out name tags in plastic cases to all attendees.  I removed my name tag from the plastic case and turned it backward, so that the blank back of the card showed, then I put it back in the case and attached it to my shirt with the built-in safety pin.

The students from all six schools gathered in the main hall, in a separate building from the old hotel, for worship that morning.  Before Stan gave his final message, Janet McAllen got up and invited anyone who so desired to share something that we learned this weekend.  “Tell us your name, what school you’re from, and anything that God spoke to you this weekend,” she said.  I raised my hand, and she called on me first.

“Hi,” I said, standing up.  This was it, the moment I got to share my sudden idea. I pointed to my blank name tag and said, “I don’t have a name, because God is going to give me a new one.”  I smiled, and everyone clapped for me.  I was not doing this for applause, though.  “Sometimes I feel like I’m not really hearing from God the same way everyone else does,” I continued.  “But that doesn’t mean that God has given up on me.  The man by the pool at Bethesda waited thirty-eight years to meet Jesus.  God could have healed him earlier, but he waited until the time was right for the man to meet Jesus face to face.  The man didn’t know that.  We don’t always understand God’s timing.  But I’m going to keep listening, and following, and God will answer all these questions I have in his own time.”

I sat down again.  A few other people stood up and shared what they learned.  After one final message from Stan, we all went to lunch, then we began packing for the return trip.  No one played music on the trip home, because everyone was tired.  Autumn slept most of the way home, and 3 nodded off for a bit too.  I was okay with that.

And I was also okay with not being in all the cliques, and I was okay with not having a girlfriend.  At least I was trying to be okay.  All of those names that had been stuck in my head for years, outcast, loser, forever alone, and all the horrible names my classmates in elementary school had called me, those were not God’s name for me.  God had already changed my name.  I was his beloved child, I was forgiven, I was saved, and I was living his will for my life.  Sure, I would suffer setbacks, and life would not always go the way I wanted it to, but that was because my vision was short sighted.  God had a better long-term plan for me, and ultimately, if I was living out God’s will in my life, nothing could stop me.

Readers: Have you ever felt like you were wrestling with God, or just struggling in general with something you believe in? Tell me about it in the comments, if it’s not too personal.

Check out my other projects, Greg Out Of Character and Song of the Day by DJ GJ-64.

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 10 Comments

These days, in the era of YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, it is difficult to believe how recently it was that common people did not constantly make their own videos.  In the 1990s, doing so required a camera that cost hundreds of dollars, and was the size and weight of a medium-sized textbook, at minimum.  Also, it was necessary to record these videos onto a tape, and to make sure that there was enough room on the blank tape to record the video without erasing any existing footage.  Showing someone a homemade video required a television connected to a VCR or to the camera itself.  The Internet existed, but the processing and connection speeds of computers in that era limited most Internet uses to text and standard-definition photos and graphics.

I never had a video camera growing up.  I wanted one so badly.  I had many ideas for movies and shows I wanted to make.  My brother Mark and I, along with whatever neighborhood kids were around, would sometimes act out performances that would have made good home movies.  We had a weird variety show called The Mark Show, full of characters based on various inside jokes, and a game show called Messy Room, inspired by Double Dare and Fun House and the other kids’ game shows that briefly became popular in my preteen years.  For some of our shows, we would record the audio so we could at least listen to them later, but they were the kind of performances that would have worked much better with video.

Now, in my early 20s, my creative project was a website called Dog Crap and Vince, which I began shortly after I taught myself the basics of HTML, the code used to make websites.  Dog Crap and Vince was a series of crudely illustrated stories about the adventures of two quirky high school students, and it would have worked much better as video or animation.  I still did not have a video camera, nor did I have the money to buy one.  But I had more connections now than as a child, so when I showed Dog Crap and Vince to the boys from the youth group at church, and mentioned that it would work better as a TV show or a movie, Zac Santoro offered to ask his dad if I could borrow their video camera.  And thus one of my most involved creative endeavors of my life so far was born.

That night, we had talked about beginning the project Sunday after church, so when I walked up to Zac, Ted Hunter, and Danny Foster after church and asked if they were ready to start filming, I felt inwardly frustrated when Zac replied, “Huh?”

“The Dog Crap and Vince movie.  You said you talked to your dad about borrowing your video camera, and that we could start filming today.”

“Oh, yeah!  He said you could borrow it.”

“So, like, now?  Are we going to your house?”

“Sure.”

“I can’t,” Ted said.  “My mom said I have to come straight home.”

“We talked about this on Wednesday,” I reminded Ted.  “You said you’d be free on Sunday, and that you would play Vince.”

“I forgot.”

“Well, I can still get the camera, and maybe we can film some scenes that don’t have Vince in them.”

“Film some scenes?” a voice behind me asked.  I turned around to see Jim Herman.  I knew Jim from seeing him around church; he was older than me, I would guess in his mid-thirties, presumably single because I never saw him with any sort of family.  Everyone at church seemed to know Jim.  “What are you guys doing?” Jim asked.

“We’re making a movie,” I explained.  “I’m borrowing a camera from the Santoros.”

“You think I could go along and help out?”  Jim’s question caught me off guard, and when he saw me hesitate, he added, “That way you can all be on camera at the same time, and I can be the cameraman.”

“Sure,” I said.  “That would be helpful for scenes I’m going to be in.”


By the time we got to the Santoros’ house, we had already made a change to the script.  The boys had decided to film a scene that broke the fourth wall, in which I would knock on Zac’s door asking if Zac could come make a movie with us.  Although I had carefully worked on this script for several days, this change seemed like it would fit the quirky, offbeat nature of the Dog Crap and Vince world.

Zac, Danny, Jim, and I walked up to the front door of Zac’s house.  I knocked on the door, and Zac’s dad answered a minute later  “Hi, boys.  Hi, Greg,” he said, shaking my hand.  “Jim.”  Had I been more observant of body language and subtle cues, I might have noticed a shift in Mr. Santoro’s tone when he addressed Jim, but at the time I thought nothing of it. “Here’s the camera,” Mr. Santoro continued, handing me the camera.  “Please be careful with it.”

“I will,” I said.  “They wanted to film a scene here first.  Is that okay?”

“Sure!”

I handed Jim the camera as we filmed the new scene.  Zac’s six-year-old sister answered the door, and I asked if Zac was home.  Zac appeared a few seconds later, and I said, “Hey, Zac.  Let’s make a movie.”

“Okay!” Zac announced excitedly, acting overly dramatic in a way that I had not intended.

“Go get Danny,” I said.

Zac turned his head toward the inside of the house and called out, “Danny!  Let’s go make a movie!”  Danny ran out of the house a few seconds later, Zac following, me following both of them, and Jim following us with the camera.  “We’ll pick up Ted on the way!” I shouted, since Ted was not there.  The two boys, for reasons unknown other than the fact that they were teenage boys, jumped onto the hood of my parked car.

“Cut,” I said to Jim a few seconds later, taking the camera back after he stopped recording.

“Ow!” Danny said.  “You kicked me in the head!”

“What?” Zac asked.  I played the footage back on the camera’s small screen, and just before Jim had stopped recording, I saw Zac’s foot connect with Danny’s head as they climbed on my car.  “You have to leave that in the movie!” Zac said.  “Sorry, Danny, it was an accident.”

“It looks good,” I said.  “I think it would be hilarious to leave that part in the movie.  Especially since it was an accident.”


The leaders from The Edge, the junior high school youth group from church, would have dinner at the Parkers’ house before youth group on some Wednesdays.  The Parkers’ oldest son, Brody, was a sophomore at the University of Jeromeville and one of the Edge leaders, and their youngest, a girl named Michelle, was a student in the youth group, the same age as the boys I was making the movie with.  Michelle was playing Kim, Dog Crap’s love interest in the movie.  I had arranged with the Parkers and Michelle’s real life friend, a girl from the youth group named Shawna Foreman, to film a scene when the leaders came to the Parkers’ house for dinner.  The two girls were in Michelle’s room, talking about cute boys, when Michelle’s character, Kim, admitted that she liked Dog Crap.  I held the camera for that scene, and one take was good enough.

The Parkers had two telephone lines in their house.  Adam, the youth pastor, was downstairs using one phone to call the other, so that I could record Kim answering the phone in her room.  After Shawna’s character left, the final film would cut to Dog Crap fidgeting in front of his phone, working up the courage to call Kim and ask her to a school dance.

“Hello?” Michelle said in character as Kim.  The final film would then cut to Dog Crap chickening out, awkwardly shouting into the phone, “You have the wrong number!”  I continued running the camera as Michelle got a confused look on her face and said, “Oh, sorry.”  Michelle hung up the phone.  Then she looked up and said, “Wait a minute!  How could I have the wrong number? I didn’t call anyone!”

I played the tape back on the camera’s small screen.  “It looks good,” I said.  “Thanks.  We’ll do the dance scene after The Edge tonight.”

“Sounds good!”

“Do you need me again?” Shawna asked.

“Those were your only speaking lines, but you’ll be in the background at the dance.”

“Great!  I’ll see you tonight!”


Five Iron Frenzy, a punk-ska band with a Christian background who were too edgy to get much attention on Christian radio, was very popular with the Edge kids at the time.  Ted told me that he had gotten the band’s permission to use their music in our movie; he was probably not telling the truth, but I did not bother to check.  After The Edge, I filmed the school dance scene for the end of the movie in the youth room.  Five Iron Frenzy’s “Where Zero Meets Fifteen” played while Dog Crap and Kim danced.  The others in the background danced in much sillier ways than I had imagined; I was losing control of just how quirky this movie was, but I just wanted to get it done.  And quirky was good for a project like this, I thought.

“I love this song!” Zac said in character as Dog Crap.

“Me too!” Michelle replied in character as Kim.  “It’s my boyfriend’s favorite song!”

“Boyfriend?” Dog Crap said.

“Just kidding!  Vince told me to say that.”

I wanted to imply that Vince was playing a prank on Dog Crap by telling Michelle to pretend that she had a boyfriend. I wanted Dog Crap to say something like “I’ll get him back for that,” but what Zac did instead was shout, “Vince!” and run out of the room.  At this point, I was not going to be picky; that would have to be good enough.

Kim’s comment about her boyfriend was a reference to a scene from earlier in the movie.  I had to shoot the film out of order, to accommodate everyone’s schedules, and I took careful notes of what had already been done and who was needed in each scene.  In the boyfriend scene, which we had not yet recorded, Dog Crap and Vince were at school, talking at lunch.  Dog Crap said that it is hard for him to ask a girl out because, whenever he starts talking to a girl, she will start talking about her boyfriend, so that he will not ask her out.

“That’s not true,” Vince replied encouragingly.  “There’s Christine.  Go talk to her.”

Dog Crap walked up to Christine and said, “Hey, Chrsitine.  Did you figure out that one math problem you were confused about?”

“Yeah,” Christine answered.  “My boyfriend is good at math.”

Dog Crap walked back to Vince with a look on his face as if to say I-told-you-so, and Vince said, “That was just one girl.  It’s not everyone.  There’s Samantha.  Go talk to her.”

Dog Crap walked up to Samantha and said, “Hi, Samantha.”

“My boyfriend says hi to people,” Samantha replied.

At least that was how I pictured the scene in my head.  When we recorded it a few days later, Vince said “go ask her out” instead of “go talk to her” for Christine.  That seemed out of place if the whole point of the movie was that Dog Crap wanted to ask out a different girl from these two.

Christine and Samantha each had only one line, and I recorded their parts for that scene after we finished the school dance scene.  It turned out better than I had planned.  When I first started working with The Edge last year, a girl named Samantha Willis had said some awkwardly silly things to me.  When I wrote this scene, I named this character Samantha because I had Samantha Willis in mind to play the role, and fortunately, she agreed.  “My boyfriend says hi to people a lot!” she exclaimed excitedly on camera, before adding “Bye, Dog Crap!”  It was perfect.

We filmed one more scene in the youth room.  I played Matt, the school bully, who was also trying to ask Kim to the dance despite Kim’s frequent rebuffs.  In this scene, near the end of the movie, Kim turns Matt down again.  “I’d rather go out with someone who crawled out from under this table!” Michelle exclaimed in character as Kim, lightly shoving Matt away.

Just then Zac, in character as Dog Crap, crawled out from under the table, where he had been looking for something he dropped.  Dog Crap greeted Kim, who smiled at him, and he used the opportunity to ask her to the dance.  I thought that scene was particularly brilliant writing on my part, and Zac and Michelle acted it perfectly.


On Saturday, I picked up Zac, Ted, Danny, and Michelle, as well as Jim, who did not have a car.  We went to a nearby school, with classrooms that opened directly to the outdoors with no hallway in between, to film the scenes taking place at school.  It was more common in those days for school grounds to be left unlocked, open to the public, and all of the school scenes took place outside of classrooms, so this would be good enough for my purposes.

While Dog Crap was trying to find a way to ask Kim to the dance, Vince was training for an upcoming video game tournament.  My bully character, Matt, in addition to trying to steal Kim, was also bragging that he was going to win the tournament.  Dog Crap’s cousin had told him about Fish Boy, a mysterious video game master who lived in Jeromeville.  I also played Dog Crap’s cousin; my two characters were distinguished on camera by Matt wearing a hat and Dog Crap’s cousin not wearing a hat.  Of course, though, in one scene I forgot to wear the hat as Matt, and confusion resulted when I showed the movie to people later.  I did not know how to run a costume department.

In character as Dog Crap’s cousin, I suggested that we all travel to Jeromeville to meet Fish Boy, and Ted replied as Vince with a brilliant ad-libbed rant.  “Jeromeville?” he said with a crazed look, grabbing my shoulders to get my attention.  “I’ve heard about this place!  They have frog tunnels!  And roundabouts!  And you get arrested for snoring too loud!  It scares me!”

I was not expecting this, but I stayed in character and calmly replied, “But Fish Boy is there!  You’ll win the video game contest for sure.”

Vince, instantly back to normal, said, “Oh, yeah. Let’s go!”

Later, we drove around to film scenes from the Jeromeville trip.  In character, I got lost several times and made multiple wrong turns, including getting stuck in a roundabout circling multiple times.  I took Jim and Michelle home, since I was done with their scenes, and the rest of us went to the Fosters’ house to film the scenes with Danny playing Fish Boy.

Danny’s eighteen-year-old sister Erica, a leader with The Edge, joined us as we walked a quarter mile to the nearest gas station, where the characters had to stop to ask for directions.  I had intended this scene to be a shot-for-shot parody of the scene from The Empire Strikes Back where Luke Skywalker meets Yoda, without realizing at first that the little green stranger who finds him is Yoda.  The boys wanted to go into the gas station store and get snacks.  I wanted to focus on getting my movie done, but since these boys were doing a favor for me for free, I let them.  Afterward, I reminded everyone of their lines and started the camera.

“We’re being watched!” Zac said in character as Dog Crap, noticing a girl next to them.

“No harm I mean you,” Erica replied, using her normal voice but Yoda’s characteristic syntax.  “Wondering what you are doing here, I am.”

“We’re looking for a video game master.”

“Fish Boy!  You seek Fish Boy!”

“You know Fish Boy?” Dog Crap asked.

“Take you to him, I will!”

For the next scene, we returned to the Fosters’ house.  After an awkward blooper in which Ted forgot his lines, Ted, in character as Vince, angrily spoke up about how they were wasting their time.  Luke Skywalker had done the same when Yoda took him to his house.

“I cannot teach them,” Erica said, turning away.  “They have no patience.  They are not ready.”

“I was once the same way,” Danny replied from off camera.

Dog Crap and Vince looked at Erica, wide-eyed.  “Fish Boy?” they said.  They turned to each other and added, “Fish Boy’s a girl?”

“No, silly!” Erica replied, no longer speaking like Yoda.  “I’m no good at those games!  Fish Boy’s my little brother.”

Danny emerged from his bedroom, wearing some weird mask and carrying a hockey stick.  Neither of those details was in the script, but this movie was already weird enough, so I allowed it.  I continued recording as Fish Boy showed the other two shortcuts and special techniques for the game they were playing.  After we finished, I thanked Danny’s parents for letting us their house.  I took Ted and Zac home, then went home myself.


Over the next couple weeks, when I had time, I finished recording the remaining scenes.  I edited the movie with a very unsophisticated setup of two VCRs connected to each other.  We had a watch party on the big projector screen in the youth room at church after The Edge the following week; most of the Edge leaders and some of the kids who were in the movie stuck around to watch.

By modern standards, the movie was pretty terrible.  I knew nothing of acting, directing, or editing, and with my rudimentary equipment, the video and sound quality was subpar.  The characters’ clothes inexplicably changed from one shot to the next within the same scene, and twice during the movie, my shouts of “Cut!” were audible at the end of scenes, since editing a video with two VCRs was not a precise technique.  The film was only half an hour long, too short to be considered a feature film.  But we had so much fun and made so many memories during those few weeks.

The Dog Crap and Vince movie had a lasting legacy in my life.  The boys from The Edge and I quoted lines from the movie to each other for years to come.  I watched that movie so many times with so many people that I still remember much of the dialogue by heart.  And Samantha, the boys’ classmate whose boyfriend said hi to people, became a regular character in the web series.  It was later revealed that the character’s last name was Whitehead, and years later, among my adult friends, the act of bringing up a significant other in conversation out of context became known as “pulling a Samantha Whitehead.”

Those few weeks that I spent making the Dog Crap and Vince movie also set in motion a chain of events that took a much darker turn.  I had no idea at the time that anything like that would come to pass from it, or that anything like this would happen among a Christian community such as Jeromeville Covenant Church.  Looking back, though, in that context, it makes sense now why Mr. Santoro, normally a warm and friendly man, seemed aloof when he greeted Jim Herman on the day I borrowed the camera.  But that is a story for another time.

This project was also the beginning of my realization that I prefer creative projects I can do alone over ones requiring the involvement of others.  As much as it is fun to bring others into my creative mind, coordinating everyone’s schedules and dealing with flaky people caused much frustration.  The same thing invariably happened every other time I tried to involve others in Dog Crap and Vince projects.  But for the people who did stick to their commitments, I now have a record of the role they played in my life.

Readers: Tell me in the comments about something creative that you worked on with others. Did it all go according to plan or not?

As always, the episodes featuring Dog Crap and Vince were inspired by Cow Chip & Lance, an actual creative project that some people I know have worked on for decades. It has been inactive for a couple years, but some of their material is still available for viewing (click).

Also, if you like music and aren’t following my other site yet, Song of the Day by DJ GJ-64, go follow that one.

And I updated my Greg Out Of Character blog for the first time in several months, with a post that has little to do with 1997. Go follow that one too.

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

October 15-19, 1997.  Trying to figure out if I can graduate in June. (#149)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

The weather in Jeromeville for most of October was typically what I could consider perfect.  Days were sunny, with afternoon temperatures in the 80s, still warm enough to be outside, but the nights were cool, so the days did not get blisteringly hot like they did in July and August.  I was still wearing shorts to class during the third full week of fall quarter, and I had some free time on that Wednesday afternoon, so I sat outside on the Quad.  I brought another book with me to campus in addition to my textbooks, and I was looking through this book when I saw Carrie Valentine walking toward me, coming from the direction of the library and headed toward the flagpole.  I waved, but she was not looking in my direction, so I quickly put my hand down, not wanting to look awkward.  I nervously watched as she approached and waved again when she turned her head toward me.  She stepped off the path and walked toward me.

“Hey, Greg,” Carrie said, smiling.  She put her bag down and sat on the grass facing me.  “Can I hang out here?”

Yes, I thought.  Of course you can.  It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve actually gotten to talk to you, and I’ll never make you fall in love with me if we don’t talk more often.  But all I said out loud was, “Sure.  What’s up?”

“I’m meeting with my Kairos leader,” Carrie explained.  “But I’m early.”

“You’re in Liz’s group, right?”

“Yeah!”

“We were in the same dorm as freshmen.  She was across the hall, one down from me.”

“That’s cool!  Whose Bible study are you in this year?”

“Joe Fox and Lydia Tyler.  The group is so huge, we usually read the Scripture together and then break up into three smaller groups.”

“How big is it?”

“Usually around twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five!  Why so many?”

“Honestly, I think it’s because, with all the Kairos groups, and all the specialized Bible studies for certain groups of people, there was only one group left for all the rest of us.”

“Interesting.  You couldn’t be in a Kairos group?”

“The Kairos ministry is for training future leaders.  You have to be asked to be in a Kairos group, and they don’t invite seniors.  Unless you’re leading a group as a senior and you were in one before, like Liz.”

“I see,” Carrie replied.  “Hmm.”

I decided not to share my exact thoughts about Jeromeville Christian Fellowship’s Kairos ministry, since Carrie was part of a Kairos group.  As I was thinking about what else to say, Carrie broke the silence and asked, “What are you working on?  Is that the course catalog?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “I was trying to figure out if it’s possible for me to graduate at the end of this year, what classes I still need to take, stuff like that.”

“That’s exciting!  What are you doing after graduation?”

“I’m going to be a teacher.”

“That’s so cool!”

“I’m still trying to figure out if I’ll do my teacher certification through Jeromeville, or Capital State, or somewhere else.  I know Jeromeville’s program is one year, and it’s only fall through spring.  If I graduate in June, then I’ll be able to do that, but if I don’t graduate until December of ’98, then I’ll either have to wait until the fall of ’99 to start student teaching, or see if anyone has a program where I can start in the winter.”

“I hope you get all that figured out.”

“I got this Graduation Progress Tracker form in the mail last week, I guess they send it to all the seniors.  They list all the graduation requirements and what you’ve done and what you still need.  And I also have some prerequisites for the teacher certification program that I have to be able to fit in.”  I saw a familiar face out of the corner of my eye walk up to the flagpole.  “There’s Liz over there,” I said, pointing.

“Oh, yeah,” Carrie replied.  “I should go.  Good luck figuring that out!  Keep me posted.”

“I will!  Tell Liz I said hi.”  I watched as Carrie got up and walked to the flagpole.  She said something to Liz, who then turned in my direction.  I waved, and both of them waved back.


My new house on Acacia Drive was a quick three minute walk to church, and in addition to Sunday mornings, I was there every Wednesday night as a volunteer with The Edge, the youth group for junior high school students.  Before the students arrived, the leaders met to catch up, go over the events of the upcoming night, and share prayer requests.

“What’s up,” Taylor Santiago said as I approached the group.  I had known Taylor the longest of any of the other Edge leaders; he lived on the floor above me freshman year.  Taylor was also the one who first suggested I get involved with The Edge.

“Not much,” I said.  “I’m just trying to figure out if I can graduate in June.”

“I thought you said you were going to go four years plus one more quarter.”

“I just assumed I had to, with all the math classes I still have to take and the prerequisites for the teacher training program.  But I was looking at stuff earlier, and if I understand correctly, I think I will be able to graduate.  I wanted to take some more of Dr. Hurt’s New Testament classes, but I might have to skip those if I don’t want an extremely full class schedule.  They don’t fulfill any requirements at this point.”

“Have you filed your intent to graduate yet?” Noah Snyder asked, having overheard this entire conversation so far.  Noah was the youth group intern, being paid part time by the church to lead The Edge.

“Not yet,” I replied, “but I want to do that in the next few days.  I just hope I understand everything correctly, and that I don’t get to graduation day and someone tells me that I can’t actually graduate, that I have to take more classes.”

“That won’t happen,” Taylor said.  “I’m pretty sure someone will contact you if you file for graduation and you haven’t met the requirements yet.”

“Kathleen Sutton works with the office that handles all that stuff,” Noah added.  “You could probably ask her to look over your form.”

“That’s good to know,” I said.  Kathleen Sutton was a youth group parent; the Suttons occasionally hosted lunch socials for the church college group at their house. Kathleen’s daughter was in The Edge last year, and she had an older son in high school and a younger son in the preteen youth group.  “When I got that Graduation Progress form, it had a number to call.  I’m sure between that person and Kathleen Sutton, I can get all of this figured out.”

“Are you going to stay at Jeromeville for your teacher certification?” Noah asked.

“If I can, I’d like to.  I know the professor who does math education, and I’d be able to stay here and keep working with The Edge.”

“I’m going to stay in Jeromeville, but commute to Cap State for mine.  It’s cheaper, and it just works out better for me.  They have a really good program for elementary school teachers.  I’m not sure what they’re like for high school teachers, though.”

“If staying in Jeromeville ends up too complicated, I’ll look into Cap State too,” I said.  Capital State University was about twenty miles from Jeromeville on the other side of the Drawbridge, and Noah’s mention of their program being cheaper started to give me doubts about my tentative plan.  However, Mom always told me not to worry about money, that we would find a way to pay for things.  My grandmother had started a college savings account for me when I was very young, and with the academic scholarships I had received, we had hardly had to use that money so far.  I would also have to find a way to pay for school if I stayed at UJ for part of a fifth year as an undergraduate, so I would keep that under consideration if any options that did not include graduating in June were still on the table.


When I got home, I went straight to my backpack, in the large bedroom that I shared with my roommate Sean.  Sean was sitting at his desk typing a paper on his computer; a cluster of helium balloons, including one that said “Happy Birthday” and another that had the number “22” written on it in black marker, was rising from the floor next to him, anchored by a weight at the end of a ribbon a few feet long.

“It’s your birthday?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Sean replied.

“I didn’t know that.  Happy birthday!  Did you do anything fun?”

“I went out to dinner with some friends from the wildlife bio major tonight.  We just got back a little while ago.  And I’m flying home tomorrow to spend the weekend with my family.”

“That’ll be nice,” I said, excited for Sean that he will get to see his family, but also excited that I would have the bedroom to myself all weekend, able to flirt with girls on Internet Relay Chat and not worry about someone looking over my shoulder.

I got out my course catalog and the Graduation Progress form.  I had completed my general education requirements and the classes required for everyone regardless of major.  The only requirement remaining was for the major itself, and I needed three more upper-division mathematics classes, including 150B, the continuation of my current abstract algebra class.  With two quarters left, I had plenty of time to take those.  I was limited in which classes I could take, since not all classes were offered every quarter, or even every year.  But I was sure I could find three that would work with my schedule.  Math 150B was offered every year in the winter, and at this point I did not really care what the other two classes would be.

The tricky part would be preparing for the teacher training program.  In my state, universities do not offer education majors; instead, teacher training is a one year graduate program taken after completing a bachelor’s degree.  I would have to reapply to UJ by the end of November, this time as a graduate student applying to the School of Education.  I was missing three classes for that program’s requirements: Educational Psychology, a lecture class offered by the physical education department called Healthful Living, and one more English class of my choice.  I looked up to see which quarters those classes were offered, and I came up with a plan.  In the winter, I would take Ed Psych, Math 150B, and some other math class that I could fit into my schedule, and in the spring, I would take Healthful Living, one more math class, and Fiction Writing for the English class.  Fiction Writing was a lower-division class, but it sounded the most fun and interesting out of all the English options, and I would still have enough total upper-division units to graduate.  Healthful Living was only a two-unit class, so I would need one more class in the spring in order to be a full-time student.  I would be able to take one more of Dr. Hurt’s New Testament classes after all; he taught Christian Theology in the spring.  For the winter, I would have just barely enough units to be a full-time student, so maybe I could look at doing another two-unit internship tutoring at Jeromeville High School, as I had done last spring.

At that moment, something caught my eye at the bottom of the Graduation Progress Tracker.  A few lines of small print at the bottom informed me of a number to call if I had questions.  Apparently, as fourth-year student, I had been assigned to a specific person, the one who had filled out this form, and that person would process my application to graduate, as well as answer any questions I might have.  The lower left corner of the form said, “Completed by,” with a blank for that person to initial, and in that blank were the handwritten initials “KS.”  I remembered Noah’s words a few hours earlier, telling me that Kathleen Sutton worked in the office that processed these forms.  Could Kathleen Sutton be the “KS” who filled out my form?  Did I just happen to get assigned to the one person in that office whom I knew personally?  How many of these graduation processing specialists were there, and what were the chances of that?  It was probably a coincidence; there were plenty of people in the world with the initials K.S.  I had nothing more to do at this point for graduation planning, and I had finished everything I needed to do for tomorrow’s classes, so I went to bed.


I saw the date on Sunday morning’s newspaper; it was my brother Mark’s birthday, sixteen years old now. I reminded myself to call home this afternoon, although I had already sent him a card with a fart joke on it.

I had not yet turned in my application to graduate.  I was nervous.  What if I was not ready to graduate?  I would apparently have my requirements done by the end of the school year, but what if I was misinterpreting the requirements?  And was I really ready to finish my undergraduate time and move on to the next phase?  A few weeks ago, when I thought I would need another quarter or two to graduate, I was looking forward to staying in Jeromeville longer.  Jeromeville was my home now.  I had a community here.  Advanced mathematics was getting weird and abstract, I did not enjoy it as much as I used to, and I was ready to be done with school.  But filing for graduation would bring closer the inevitable day when I would leave Jeromeville and go out into the world.

All of this was still on my mind when I got to church that morning.  The worship team played a fast song to begin the service, and when they played a slow song later, I sat and prayed about these things.  I asked God to give me peace about my plan to graduate at the end of the year and do my student teaching through UJ.  Send me a sign that this is your will for my life, I asked silently.

God often speaks to me through odd coincidences.  Some people have told me that I pay too much attention to this sort of thing, but God knows that it will get my attention.  The sign that I prayed for came quickly, as I was wandering aimlessly on the patio after church mingling with others.  I saw Kathleen Sutton ahead of me in the direction I was walking; she turned and looked at me, and I waved.  “Hello,” I said.

“Greg,” Kathleen replied.  “I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”

“What do you mean?”

“I work in the office that processes graduation applications.  We were doing this year’s Graduation Progress Trackers, and I recognized your name on one of the forms I filled out.”

“Oh, wow,” I said.  Kathleen Sutton was “KS” after all.

“I saw your transcript,” Kathleen continued.  “A 3.9 grade point average, and all As in all those hard math and science classes.  You have a pretty impressive academic record.”

“Thank you,” I replied.

“What are you planning to do after you graduate?”

“I’m going to be a teacher.  I didn’t think about being a teacher until just last year, but I was planning out the rest of my year this year, and I’ll be able to do all the requirements for the teacher certification program before the end of the year.”

“Good for you!  We definitely need good teachers who know their subject matter.  I’m sure you’ll do great.”

“Thanks.  Oh, by the way, if I’m misunderstanding something, and I file for graduation but I don’t actually have all the right classes, will someone let me know?”

“Definitely.  But I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

When I got home, I changed into an old pair of shorts and went to the small shed in the backyard.  Our house only had a covered carport, not a locked garage, so I typically left Schuyler, my bicycle, in the shed.  I had a long ride I would occasionally do around the entire perimeter of the city of Jeromeville, and with the October days getting shorter, I wanted to do my long ride again before it got too cold and gray.  I had sat down once with a ruler and a map and estimated the ride at fifteen miles, and the fastest I had ever completed the ride was just a few seconds short of an hour.  I rode west on Coventry Boulevard across Highway 117, worked my way through the neighborhoods of West Jeromeville, then headed back east on Fifth Street along the row of walnut trees that separated the city of Jeromeville to my left from the university’s agricultural research fields to my right.  After crossing back to the east side of 117, I cut through campus, past the North Residential Area and the Rec Pavilion, and emerging into downtown Jeromeville next to the Death Star building on Third Street.  Although I was trying for record time, pedaling as fast as I could, I slowed down a little bit through downtown, with its many cars, bicycles, and people.  I worked my way to the Cornell Boulevard underpass, still too narrow for its traffic volume, southeast past Murder Burger and across Highway 100.

I had learned quickly as a freshman that I would feel a bit out of place in a university town like Jeromeville with its hippies and extreme politics.  But now, as a senior, I was on a timeline to graduate eight short months from now, and I did not want to leave.  Jeromeville had grown on me.  It was the place where I found friends, and the place where I found Jesus.  I had gotten involved with youth ministry at church and built meaningful connections beyond the campus bubble.  Jeromeville, in all its quirkiness, was home.

I continued along the southernmost neighborhoods of Jeromeville, through the neighborhood where Eddie, John, Xander, and Lars had lived when I first met them sophomore year, and into a section of the Greenbelts where those guys had held the Man of Steel disc golf competition.  I continued east all the way to Bruce Boulevard, the easternmost of Jeromeville’s north-south thoroughfares, and turned to the north.  About a mile north, I crossed back over Highway 100, where a new neighborhood was under construction, rare in a city like Jeromeville where suburban sprawl is so hated.  I turned west on Coventry Boulevard and rode for almost three miles, then turned into the Greenbelts of north Jeromeville, emerging on Maple Drive about half a mile north of my house.  I looked at my watch when I got home: 58 minutes, 57 seconds, a new record for me.

Time moves forward.  Children grow up and become university students, who then go out into the real world and have children of their own.  But, although time was definitely moving forward, maybe I did not have to leave Jeromeville yet.  I would still have one more year at UJ in the teacher training program, so I would be a registered student through June of 1999.  If I did not get into UJ’s program, Jeromeville was close enough to commute to Capital State.  After that, there were plenty of high schools in commuting distance from Jeromeville where I could work; maybe I could even teach at Jeromeville High.  If I did leave Jeromeville eventually, as I would do in 2001, it would happen when the time was right, when I felt ready to move on.

Readers: Did your education and career end up happening according to your plan or projected timeline? Did you even plan these things in advance? 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.

October 10, 1997.  A silly party game at Scott and Joe’s apartment. (#148)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 2 Comments

As I walked from the parking lot toward Evans Hall for the Jeromeville Christian Fellowship meeting, I quickly realized that I was probably underdressed wearing just a t-shirt and jeans.  October days in Jeromeville were usually still warm and summerlike; I had worn shorts to class that morning.  But the nights were quickly becoming cooler, and the sun was setting earlier.  It was almost completely dark by the time JCF started that night, and I felt a chill in the air.  Once I got inside, though, I would probably be more comfortable.

I had more friends at this point of my life than I had ever had before, but I was definitely a follower, not a leader, when it came to socializing.  Although JCF was supposed to be a time of worship, prayer, and Scripture, one of the things I looked forward to the most was the possibility of people socializing afterward, whatever form that may take.  I did not typically initiate social activities; I was nervous, and afraid of rejection, and I was not always familiar with the kinds of things that normal people did for fun.  But I also did not want to be presumptuous and invite myself somewhere that I was not welcome.  And, of course, all of this socializing had not led to any better luck with finding a girlfriend.  I had never had a girlfriend, and I had never even so much as kissed a girl.

Now that I was taking my Christian faith more seriously, I was constantly being told to pray about this and submit to God’s will, but so far God’s will did not involve a girlfriend for me.  Nothing had ever worked out with anyone from my year or the year behind me.  There were two cute sophomore girls at JCF whom I was interested in, Carrie Valentine and Sadie Rowland, but so far no opportunities had come up to make anything happen.  Maybe I would have better luck with this year’s new freshmen, although that might bring up questions of whether or not an 18-year-old was too young for me. I was a 21-year-old senior hoping to graduate in 1998.

Sarah Winters and Liz Williams were working the name tag table.  “Hey, Greg,” Sarah said, writing “Greg” on a name tag.  At the same time, a guy named Silas walked up to Liz’s table, and she filled out a name tag for him.

“Hey,” I said, noticing something interesting.  I pointed back and forth between Sarah and Silas and said, “We’re all in Math 115 together.”

“Oh, yeah!” Sarah replied.

“How do you like that class so far?” Silas asked.

“Seems pretty straightforward.  Unlike Math 150.”

“I know!  150 gets kind of weird.”

“What class is that?” Liz asked.

“Number theory,” Sarah replied.  Sarah, Silas, and I were all mathematics majors.  I found it noteworthy that Silas had already taken Math 150, since it was usually a senior class and Silas was only a junior, a year behind me.  But I knew that he was some kind of mathematical genius who had completed a lot of university-level coursework before beginning at the University of Jeromeville.

I looked around the room and found an open seat next to Scott Madison and Amelia Dye.  “Hey, Greg,” Scott said.  “What are you doing after large group?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“You’re coming to my place.”

“What for?”

“Just hanging out.”

“Okay,” I said.  Finding appropriate situations for socializing can be difficult and scary for me sometimes, but other times it was easy, like tonight.

After large group ended, Scott told me he had some things to get ready, and he reminded me to show up at his apartment in half an hour.  I walked around, looking for other people to say hi to.  I saw Sadie a few rows behind me; I walked to the aisle and back toward her.  “Hey,” I said after she turned around and saw me.

“Hi, Greg!  How was your week?”

“Not bad,” I said.  “We had a performance yesterday for chorus.  They’re renaming the drama building after a professor who was instrumental in founding the department, and we had to sing this weird-sounding modern piece with lyrics that she wrote.”

“That’s cool!  I heard about that in the newsroom.  Oh, yeah, did you see I got my first article published in the Daily Colt this week?”

“I did!  I saw your name on the article.  It was the one about the girl who didn’t know she was pregnant, right?”

“Yeah!  Isn’t that crazy?  How do you not know you were pregnant?”

“I guess it’s possible, if you don’t gain much weight during the pregnancy.  But still, her doctor told her multiple times she wasn’t pregnant.  Isn’t it your job as a doctor to know what’s going on with your patient?”

“I know.  At least she and the baby are okay.  And I didn’t really want to write fluff pieces like this, but it’s a start.”

“Yeah.  Put in your time doing this now, and then later you can write the kind of stories you really want to write.”

“I want to write about city news and politics.  Last year’s city writers were way too nice to the crazy liberals who run this town.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Someone needs to tell the truth, and not just suck up to them and their ilk.”

“Their what?”

“I never told you that story?”

“No,” Sadie replied.  I proceeded to tell her about the time I got into an argument on the Quad last year with a City Council member who was against a plan to widen an underpass.  Traffic backed up horribly at that underpass, but according to these elected officials, wide four-lane roads do not belong in a small town like Jeromeville.  “She told me that I was ‘of a different ilk.’”

“‘Ilk,’” Sadie replied.  “That’s a funny word.”

“Seriously.  Jeromeville has fifty-six thousand people.  That’s not a small town.  That’s big enough to have traffic jams.”

As the conversation paused for a few seconds, I contemplated whether or not to invite Sadie to Scott’s house, and if so, how to do so.  I did not feel right bringing an uninvited guest to someone else’s house.  But I really wanted to keep talking to her.  The point became moot, however, when Sadie said, “I should get going.  I’m really tired tonight.  I had a long day.”

“All right,” I replied.  “I’ll see you next week?”

“Yeah!  Have a good night!”  Sadie gave me a hug, then walked out of the building.


Scott led a Bible study on campus for freshmen, and when I arrived at Scott’s apartment that night, a good sized crowd had already shown up.  I recognized Tim and Blake, two freshmen from Scott’s study, sitting and talking to Scott. My Bible study that year was Joe Fox, Scott’s roommate; he was sitting next to his girlfriend, Alyssa Kramer. Kieran Ziegler, John Harvey, Brent Wang, a freshman girl named Chelsea, Silas the math major, and a few others were also there.

Blake and Scott were talking about weddings. Blake said that he had recently been to his cousin’s wedding, and Scott and Amelia were currently planning their wedding next summer. I walked to a couch and sat down, not in a mood to think about weddings. I would probably never have one myself.

After about twenty more minutes of mingling and snacks, Amelia began asking if anyone had ever played a party game called Psychologist.  “Have any of you guys ever played that?  One player is the psychologist, and he has to ask the others questions?”  One other person had some vague memory of the game, but most of us did not know this game.  Amelia continued explaining, “So the psychologist leaves the room, and everyone else decides that they’re going to answer the questions, like, in some certain way.  Not necessarily if it’s true or false, but according to something else.  We all know how we’re answering, and the psychologist has to figure it out.”

“I don’t get it,” Alyssa replied.

“It’ll make more sense when we start playing.  Can we try it?  It’s a fun group game.”  No one objected.  “Who wants to be the psychologist?” Amelia asked.

“I’ll do it,” John said.  “I feel like I should, since I’m a psych major.”

John stepped outside and closed the door behind him.  Amelia explained, “So the way I learned the game is that you answer the questions as if you are the person on your left.  So, for example, Brent is sitting to the left of Greg, so if John asks, ‘Greg, are you a math major,’ Greg would say no, because Brent isn’t a math major.  If John asks, ‘Greg, do you play piano,’ Greg would say yes, because that’s Brent’s answer.  Brent plays piano.  So do we all understand?”

“What if you don’t know the answer?” Brent said.  “Like, what if he asks me, I don’t know, ‘Have you ever been to France?’  I would answer for Scott, but I don’t know if Scott has ever been to France.”

“Just say I don’t know,” Amelia explained.  “I’ll go get John, and we can start playing.”  Amelia went outside to tell John to come in.

“It’s cold out there!” John said.  “You guys ready?”

“We’re ready,” Amelia replied.  “Just start asking yes-or-no questions.”

“Okay,” John said.  “Joe, is it cold outside?”

Joe appeared confused.  “Yes?” he replied.

“You should probably ask people questions about themselves,” Amelia explained.  “That’ll make this easier to figure out.”

“Okay,” John said.  “Amelia, are you getting married next year?”

Blake was on Amelia’s left.  “No,” Amelia replied.

“Hmm,” John said.  “Greg, are you tall?”

“No,” I said.  I was six foot four, but Brent, to my left, was shorter than average for a male university student.  A few people giggled, and Brent gave me a look as if to express humorous annoyance at me calling him out for being short.

“Chelsea, are you female?”

Tim was sitting to Chelsea’s left.  “No,” Chelsea replied, trying to hold back giggles.  A few others laughed.

John continued asking questions that had very obvious answers.  “Brent, do you have dark hair?”

“No,” dark-haired Brent said, with blond Scott to his left.

“Joe, are you a man?”

“Yes,” Joe replied.  I was on his left.

“Hmm,” John contemplated.  This was the first time someone had given an answer that was actually true.  “Greg, are you a man?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Alyssa, are you a man?”

“Yes,” Alyssa replied emphatically, with Joe to her left.  John continued this pattern of asking the same question to multiple people, and after about fifteen minutes, he figured out that we were all answering as if we were the person sitting to our left.

“I wanna play again,” Blake said.

“We can’t really play again, because everyone knows the secret now,” Tim replied.

“We could just think of a different way to answer the questions,” Amelia explained. “Who wants to be the psychologist this time?”

Silas volunteered to be the psychologist; he went into the bathroom and turned on the fan, instead of going outside in the cold.  “Anyone have any ideas of how to answer the questions?”

“We could answer for the person sitting, I don’t know, three to the right,” Alyssa suggested.

“That’ll be too easy to figure out, after we did the person to the left,” John replied.

“Hey, I have an idea,” Blake said.  “We all pick someone, and we look at that person’s hand.  If the hand is palm up, we say yes, and if the hand is palm down, we say no.”

“That’s a great idea!” Amelia said.

“I’ll do the hand,” Kieran said.  “I’m sitting in an armchair, so it’s easy to see.  If my left hand is palm up, say yes, and if my left hand is palm down, say no.”

We called Silas back into the room.  Kieran sat in the armchair with his palm down.  “Tim, are you a freshman?”

“No.”

“Greg, are you in my Math 115 class?”

“No.”

“Kieran, are you a man?”

I looked around the room, where I could see people trying to hold back laughter.  Kieran’s own left hand was the only thing requiring him to claim that he was not a man, and Silas had unwittingly exposed this just three questions into the game.  But Kieran had the perfect response.  “Hmm,” he said loudly as he furrowed his brow and scratched his chin with his left hand, palm up, as if pantomiming being deep in thought.  “Yes,” he said while his palm was up.  A ripple of giggles flowed through the room, since everyone but Silas knew exactly while Kieran moved his hand that way.  Kieran then put his hand back down, palm still up.

Silas, confused about why everyone was laughing, asked, “Tim, do you wear glasses?”

“Yes.”

“Greg, do you wear glasses?”

I did not.  “Yes,” I said.

“Brent, do you wear glasses?”

Brent did wear glasses, but Kieran had switched his hand to the palm down position as Silas was asking the question.  “No,” Brent said.

The questions went around in circles for almost an hour, with people occasionally laughing when humorous answers were given.  At one point, Silas asked me if I was tall; Kieran’s hand was palm up, so I said yes.  Next, Silas asked Chelsea if she was tall; she was five foot two, but Kieran’s hand was still palm up, so she said yes.  That made people laugh.  Kieran switched his hand as Silas was asking other people if they were tall, and he inadvertently asked me again with Kieran’s palm down this time.

“No,” I said.

Silas paused, realizing what had just happened.  “Wait,” he said.  “Earlier, you said you were tall.”  I smiled silently, wondering if he was finally figuring this out.  “Alyssa, do you have brown hair?”

“No.”

Silas thought about this.  “Alyssa, do you have brown hair?”

“No.”

“Alyssa, do you have brown hair?”

“No.”

Kieran switched his hand, grinning.  “Alyssa, do you have brown hair?”

“Yes.”

“Greg, are the Captains your favorite football team?” Silas asked.  I was wearing a Bay City Captains shirt that night.

“Yes.”

“Greg, are the Captains your favorite team?”

“Yes.”

Kieran switched his hand.  “Are the Captains your favorite team?”

“No.”

This continued for another several minutes.  Silas seemed to be counting how many times we answered one way before switching to the other answer, and Kieran wisely switched his hand after inconsistent numbers of questions and answers.  Silas began watching things in the room more carefully, and he eventually noticed Kieran’s hand and figured it out.

“Finally!” Silas said.  “That was a good one.”

“I know,” Kieran replied.  “I thought I was in trouble when you asked if I was a man.”

“That was hilarious,” I said.  “Brilliant performance.”

By the time our second game of Psychologist ended, it was getting late, and the crowd at Scott and Joe’s apartment began dispersing.  I drove home, quietly unlocked the door because I did not know if any of my roommates were asleep yet, and went to bed.

It took me a while to fall asleep, and I thought about the events of that night as I drifted off to sleep.  Psychologist was a fun game.  I wondered if I would ever be able to introduce the game to a new group.  I never did, though, and to this day, I have only played it that one time.  The game was fascinating.  At first, everything looks like nonsense, but after asking enough questions, and making enough careful observations, some order begins to emerge in the players’ replies.

Would I really never get to experience my own wedding?  I did not know, but it sure felt like it.  Everyone else was getting into relationships.  Scott and Amelia were getting married soon, and so was Josh, one of my roommates.  I knew plenty of girls, but I did not know how to make anything happen.  Sadie was lots of fun to talk to, but she always seemed too busy to do fun things after JCF.  Carrie Valentine was not even at large group tonight; I had not talked to her all week.  When would it be my turn?  Maybe life really was like a game of Psychologist.  Maybe God was working behind the scenes in ways that I could not understand.  Things happen to everyone that make no sense.  But after asking enough questions and enough observation, an order begins to emerge.  It takes time to understand what is happening, sometimes decades or more, but God has a plan, and someday it will all make sense.

Readers: What’s your favorite party game? Tell me about it in the comments.

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September 25-October 9, 1997. An unexpected performance at the start of the school year. (#147)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 7 Comments

The start of the new year at the University of Jeromeville felt a little different this year, because I finally had a well-defined career goal: I was going to teach high school mathematics.  A few years ago, I remember having told people that I could never be a teacher, because of all the politics involved with education.  The professional organizations and labor unions for teachers tended to lean far to the left of most of my political positions.  I just assumed that I would stay in school forever and get an advanced degree in mathematics, unless I thought of something else to do with my life in the meantime.  But after a positive experience last spring helping out in a high school math classroom, and a negative experience last summer doing math research, I had decided not to let politics get in the way of doing something that I would enjoy doing.

School started on a Thursday, as it always did, and as was the case most quarters, Thursday was my lightest day of classes.  I was working as a tutor again this quarter, so hopefully I could schedule lots of tutoring groups and sessions on Thursdays.  My only class that first day was Writing In Education, which met on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the late morning.  I took Advanced Composition as a sophomore, which, combined with the AP English test that I took in high school, satisfied my writing requirement.  I could have taken Writing In Education instead of Advanced Composition, but I did not know two years ago that I would be going into education.  Also, if I stayed at UJ for my teacher training, that program required twelve units of English as a prerequisite, so this class would count toward that.  I could take a fun English class later this year to finish that requirement, if such a class existed.

I took two math classes that quarter.  The first one was Theory of Numbers, which met Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays in the morning.  I walked into the class Friday morning and took a seat on the left side of the room against the wall.  The class met in Younger Hall, in the old part of campus facing the Quad.  This was a classroom with chairs that had writing desks attached, not a lecture hall with fixed seats, but it was a relatively large classroom, holding around sixty students.  Students continued trickling in, and shortly before class began, Sarah Winters walked in and sat in an empty desk on my right.  I smiled and waved.

“Hey, Greg!” she said.

“We finally have a math class together,” I pointed out.

“I know!”

Sarah was another mathematics major, and I had known her since our first week as freshman at UJ.  When we were freshmen, she lived downstairs from me in the same dorm and was also part of the Interdisciplinary Honors Program.  She had been part of some of my most memorable moments and adventures, but despite being good friends and having the same major, this was the first, and only, time we ever had a math class together.

The professor, Dr. Alterman, was also at the time the Chair of the Mathematics Department, so I had heard his name around the department a bit .  He was an older man who spoke in a way suggesting that German was his first language.  I was not entirely sure what “theory of numbers” meant; Dr. Alterman explained that it was the study of positive integers.  Number theory dealt with questions involving prime numbers and prime factorizations, modular arithmetic, and divisibility, which quickly built into much more complicated results.  This class sounded interesting so far.  Numbers were something I could easily wrap my head around.

After lunch, I had my other math class, Introduction to Abstract Algebra, in Wellington Hall on the other side of the Quad.  Since this was a required class for all mathematics majors, I recognized many students whom I had had in classes before, including Jack Chalmers, Katy Hadley, and the student formerly known as Andrea Briggs.  Andrea was my first crush at UJ, but I quickly learned that she had a boyfriend, whom she had recently married.  Sarah was not in this class; I wondered why, since it was required.  Although normally a senior class, it is possible to take it as a junior; maybe she had taken it last year.  I never did learn why.

Abstract algebra was once described to me as algebra without numbers.  Abstract algebra studies the relationships between the elements of a set and the operations done to the element, categorizing such relationships so as to show that mathematical structures that are used for quite different purposes can sometimes be very similar.  This sounded fascinating, but difficult to conceptualize.  The professor for that class was Dr. Hess, and he spoke clear English, something unusual among the mathematics faculty at UJ.  I had heard of him before, because he was married to Dr. Thomas, another mathematician at UJ and one of my favorite professors.  I knew of at least one other married couple among the UJ mathematics faculty besides them.  I began looking around the classroom with the fleeting thought that maybe mathematicians were destined to marry each other, and maybe my future wife was in this class.  If so, the girls in class did not give me much hope.  Andrea was married, Katy and I never really seemed to click, and the rest of the girls in this class weren’t very attractive.


I was in University Chorus again this quarter.  Before, chorus had always met Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 12:10 to 1:00, but this quarter the time had moved to only Mondays and Wednesdays, from 4:10 in the afternoon until 5:30.  After going through the procedural first day matters, Dr. Jeffs, the conductor, handed out the syllabus.  “You’ll notice something unusual,” he said.  “On October 9, a week from Thursday, we have a performance.”  A few in the room gasped.  I found “October 9: Waite Hall Dedication” on the syllabus  Waite Hall?  Hall, as in a building on campus?  I knew this campus well from all of my explorations on my bike, and I knew of no Waite Hall.

“The drama building next door is being renamed, in honor of Dr. Cecilia Waite,” Dr. Jeffs explained.  “In 1928, Dr. Waite became the first woman to be offered a tenured faculty position here at the University of Jeromeville, and she will be the first woman to have a building named for her.  Back when UJ was just an agricultural college, Dr. Waite was considered the founder of the  English department.  She was also an accomplished poet, and we will be singing ‘Doors of Learning,’ a piece with lyrics written by Dr. Waite, and music composed by a former professor here in the music department.  We will also sing ‘Hail, dear Jeromeville,’ the UJ alma mater.”

“The ceremony will be an hour long, from 9 to 10,” Dr. Jeffs continued.  “All of the performing arts groups will be at this dedication.  Attendance is mandatory.  So if you have any conflicts with other classes, talk to your professors now.”  I did not.  I would have to run straight from there to English, possibly in my chorus tuxedo, but I would not have to miss class.  And when I filled out my availability to work for tutoring, I had not put 9:00 on Thursdays as an available time slot; I wanted one day of being able to wake up a little bit later, if possible.

“We’ll be practicing these two songs for the first two weeks, then we will move on to the other pieces we’ll be doing for our regular concert in December.”  Dr. Jeffs instructed a few volunteers to pass out sheet music for Doors of Learning and Hail, Dear Jeromeville.

Last year, when I began doing chorus, I learned very quickly that reading sheet music was not my strong point.  I took piano lessons in childhood for a few years, so I knew how sheet music worked, but I was not experienced enough to learn a new song exclusively from sheet music.  Both of the other times I did chorus, the campus store had a CD of the piece we had to learn in the textbook section along with the sheet music, and I learned my part by listening to the recording while singing along from the sheet music.

No such recording existed of Doors of Learning, and by the end of that first rehearsal, it had become obvious that this song would be very difficult to learn.  Having been composed by a professor of music in 1970, it was full of very strange, nontraditional chords,.  The lyrics itself, a poetic description of life at a university, would have some semblance of rhythm if they were spoken without the music, but the strange music seemed to eliminate all traces of rhythm from the poem.

On Wednesday, the next time we met, we began rehearsing Hail, Dear Jeromeville.  This song was much simpler.  The marching band played it at the end of every football and basketball game, so I had heard it before.  It was in the unusual key of D-flat major, which may have made it difficult to play on instruments, but this would not affect me as a vocalist, as long as I knew the starting note.  The chord progression used simple, predictable chords, and the four parts of the chorus sang the song in unison, so there were no strange modern harmonies to adjust to.  Halfway through the class, we switched back to Doors of Learning, but this time we divided into groups, sopranos and altos in one room, and the much smaller group of tenors and basses in the other.  With only two parts of strange harmonies in the room instead of four, it was easier to concentrate on my part without the discordant sounds of all three of the other parts throwing me off.


It had been over three years now since I had graduated from high school, and for all practical purposes, I only had one high school friend left.  It was more difficult to keep in touch in the 1990s, with no social media or texting and long distance phone calls costing money per minute.  Email was a newly mainstream technology, and I had stayed in touch with a few high school friends by email, with varying degrees of frequency.  But as more time passed, the emails from high school friends gradually stopped coming.  Melissa Holmes was the only high school friend I had heard from in the last several months, and she did not write often these days, being very busy with school herself.

Four years ago, I spent much of my senior year of high school in a secret, internally tumultuous attempt to sort out my feelings for Melissa and her apparent lack of feelings for me.  Fortunately, we emerged from that experience still good friends.  Melissa moved to the opposite end of the state for school, where she had grown up and where most of her family was.  I got an email from her over the weekend after classes started, and I wrote her back Monday night, telling her about the very weird music I had to learn for chorus.

She replied about a week later.  

From: “Melissa Holmes” <m.l.holmes@sanangelo.edu>
To: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 1997 10:42 -0700
Subject: Re: hi

Wow, two retreats the same week.  Sounds like a great time!  I’ve never been to either of those places, but I have been to the Great Blue Lake, and it’s so beautiful up that way.

How are your new roommates?  Everyone getting along okay?  I moved into a small studio apartment by myself, a little closer to campus this year.  Classes are keeping me busy.  I haven’t really been doing much else.

I’m glad to hear you’re doing chorus again.  Good luck on that building dedication ceremony.  And you’re right – I got out my guitar and tried playing that weird chord you told me about – it sounds terrible!  Hopefully it sounds better in context, as part of the whole piece.  Let me know how it goes!

-Melissa

It’s good to know I’m not the only one who thinks Doors of Learning sounds strange, I thought, chuckling to myself.  I got out the sheet music again, trying to hear the bass part in my head, focusing only on the notes I would have to sing, hoping that I would be able to sing them with three other parts simultaneously singing notes that did not harmonize naturally to my uncultured ear.


By the time of the performance, Doors of Learning had started to sound a little better to me, and I felt like I had pretty much learned my part.  Melissa was right; the strange chords and harmonies did sound a little better now that we had put all of the parts together and rehearsed the song in its entirety a few times.  The harmonies still felt unnatural to me, but when the song was performed as intended, something just felt like it worked right.

I took the bus to school in my tuxedo on the morning of the building dedication, arriving at the building by 8:45 as I had been instructed.  The drama building, and the recently erected sign bearing the name Cecilia Waite Hall, faced Davis Drive just south of the Quad and southwest of downtown.  Waite Hall was sandwiched between the music building and the art building, neither of which had been named after people yet.  The three buildings faced a paved courtyard with a sculpture in the middle; facing Waite Hall, my back to the street, the music building was to my left and the art building to my right.  Inside was a four-hundred-seat theater, with a hallway to the side leading to classrooms and offices.  A portrait of Cecilia Waite had been added permanently to the lobby.

I went into a door leading to the backstage area, where we had been instructed to meet.  A number of chorus students stood around mingling; I walked up to Scott Madison and Amelia Dye, the newly-engaged couple whom I knew from church.  “How’s it goin’, Greg,” Scott said.

“These are some of the weirdest chords I’ve ever heard,” I said.  “But I think I know my part now.”

Amelia offered reassurance.  “I’m sure you’ll do fine,” she told me.

“And, just think,” Scott added, “if you mess up, there’s lots of other guys you can try to blame it on.”

I laughed.  “Thanks.”

Dr. Jeffs called us to attention, announcing that the ceremony was about to start.  He explained that we would perform Doors of Learning about halfway through the hour-long ceremony, and Hail, Dear Jeromeville at the very end.  When we were not performing, we were to sit silently backstage, so as not to interrupt the speakers and the other performance groups.

From where I was, I could hear everything happening on stage.  The speaker introduced himself, then spoke for a few minutes about Dr. Waite and her contributions to the English department, the dramatic arts department, and the university in general.  When he finished this, I heard him say something that surprised me: “And now, will you please welcome to the stage, Professor Emerita Cecilia Waite!”

As the crowd applauded for Dr. Waite, I realized that it had never occurred to me that she was still alive.  From all that I had heard about her in the last two weeks, I associated her with the early history of the university, since she joined the faculty in 1928.  Dr. Waite spoke for several minutes, after which the master of ceremonies returned to the stage to introduce a brief performance by drama students.  They were followed by the concert band.

We were next.  When the band finished, the master of ceremonies announced us, and I followed everyone else onto the stage.  We walked onto risers that had been placed at the back of the stage, and Dr. Jeffs took his place to conduct us.  I looked out at the room full of university dignitaries and noticed a small, frail-looking woman who appeared to be at least ninety years old in the front row.  This was definitely Cecilia Waite; I recognized her from the portrait I had seen half an hour ago.  She smiled through the entire performance of the song with the lyrics that she had written.  Despite the nontraditional harmonies, I thought we sounded pretty good, especially with the full orchestra accompanying us as well.

We returned backstage while the Chamber Singers performed, followed by an instrumental performance of the orchestra and a few other performing groups.  Others shared stories about Dr. Waite in between the performances.  At 9:55, as the ceremony reached its end, we returned to the stage to sing Hail, Dear Jeromeville, with the orchestra backing us again.  As we finished, the entire room applauded.  I smiled.  I had never been honored by a group of university mucky-mucks before, and while I was certainly not trying to impress anyone, I appreciated their approval.

I got a few interesting looks from classmates walking into Writing In Education in my chorus tuxedo, but when someone asked, I simply explained that we had a performance for chorus this morning.  After class, I immediately took the bus home, then changed into normal clothes and ate lunch at home before riding my bike back to campus to meet with the students I was tutoring that afternoon.

Cecilia Waite passed away in 1999 after a battle with cancer.  I saw a much smaller reproduction of the portrait in the lobby on the obituary page of the Capital City Record one morning and realized something looked familiar about that picture, then I saw her name in the headline, and it all clicked.  Dr. Waite had lived to see her legacy on the sign in front of the building, and now I was a part of that history.  Many years later, the social media pages of the Jeromeville Alumni Association shared a photograph of Waite Hall and a short one-sentence biography of Cecilia Waite.  “Do you remember what it was called before that?” the caption asked.  I typed, “Before that, it was just the Drama Building.  I was there in 1997 performing with University Chorus at the ceremony to dedicate the building under the new name.  Dr. Waite was there too.”  When I began studying at Jeromeville in 1994, I thought of the campus as just a place to go to school, but the longer I had been here, I was finding myself relating and connecting more and more with the history of this campus.  I had a connection to this campus now, and I still feel that connection to this day.

Readers: Have you ever been part of a local ceremony like this one? Or do you have any noteworthy connection to your local history? Tell me about it in the comments!

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 17 Comments

Life is full of difficult and seemingly impossible tasks.  Sometimes such tasks require hard work to complete, and sometimes I just never get motivated enough to do difficult things.  But every once in a while, everything I need to accomplish something difficult just falls into my lap, leaving me to just take the final step.

I had just spent five days away from home at Outreach Camp, the retreat for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship where we plan for the upcoming school year.  I did not go straight home to Jeromeville after that, though, because I had another retreat for the weekend, this one with student ministries for Jeromeville Covenant Church.  This encompassed youth groups for preteens, junior high school, and high school, as well as the college group.  I was a leader with The Edge, the junior high group.  The leaders for the preteen youth group were high school students, and almost all of the leaders for all of the other groups were University of Jeromeville students, like me.

Outreach Camp ended at 1:00, and the other retreat started at 6:00, and it did not take five hours to drive between them, even on curvy mountain highways, so I was the first one to arrive other than the paid church staff.  I mingled and helped them set up as others began arriving.

“Greg!” Taylor Santiago said when he saw me.  He and Pete Green, who played guitar for the college group, arrived together.  I had known them the longest of anyone on this retreat; we were all in the same dorm freshman year.  Taylor gave me a hug.

“Good to see you again,” I said.  “How was the rest of your time in Chicago?”

“Tiring, but really good.  It’s pretty intense, seeing what some of those people are going through.  It’s a world away from our kids at The Edge.”

“I’m sure it is.”

Josh, my housemate back in Jeromeville, and his girlfriend Abby showed up shortly afterward.  They pulled me aside as if they wanted to talk to me about something.  “You should know this, because you’re my housemate.  We’re gonna announce it to everyone later tonight,” Josh said.  “Last night, I asked Abby to marry me.”  Abby held up her left hand, showing off her new engagement ring.

“Wow,” I said.  “Congratulations!  Does that mean you’ll be moving out and we’ll need a new roommate?”

“No,” Josh explained.  “The wedding won’t be until summer.  So you won’t need to find someone in the middle of the school year.”

“Good,” I said.  “I don’t know if you heard, but Scott and Amelia just got engaged too, during Outreach Camp.”

“They did?” Abby said.  “Good for them!”

We all went into the main building of this retreat center to eat after everyone arrived.  After dinner, Pete and a few others led us in a time of worship music, then we had free time to hang out until it was time for bed.  “Do you know how to play poker?” Taylor asked me.

“I’m not great at it, but I know the basics.”

“I brought a poker set.  We aren’t playing for real money, of course.  Are you in?”

“Sure.”

Taylor, Abby, Josh, and I sat in a circle, along with Noah Snyder, the junior high group intern and Taylor’s best friend from high school; Adam White, the youth pastor; and Nick Hunter, a sixteen-year-old leader with the preteen youth group whose younger brother Ted was one of the junior high students I knew well.  A few hands in, I was dealt a full house, and I managed to bet big enough to get a big return but not so big that everyone else dropped out.  It did not take long for me to lose the rest of that money, though.




Most of the serious work of the retreat, specifically the things related to running the youth groups, happened on Saturday.  The leaders met in groups separated by which group we worked with, so that I was with The Edge leaders: Noah, Taylor, Abby and Josh, Martin Rhodes, and Courtney Kohl and Brody Parker, a sophomore couple who first met as Edge leaders last year.  Adam, as the youth pastor, was in charge of three of the four groups meeting here this weekend, but he met with us tonight.  Before he had a paid position at the church, he had been a volunteer with The Edge, and he had something specific to our group to talk about.

“This is it so far this year,” Adam said.  “James and Kate are going to be doing high school.  Charlotte isn’t going to J-Cov anymore.  And everyone else was either busy or too involved in other things.”

“What about Erica?” I asked.  I had noticed that Erica Foster was not here this weekend.  I wondered if this meant that she was no longer a leader with The Edge this year, or if she just had other commitments.  She had been in Turkey this summer living with a family of missionaries that J-Cov supported, but I thought she must be back by now, especially with school starting soon.  I did not want to ask earlier, I did not want anyone to think it was weird that I was asking about Erica, but this time I just blurted it out without thinking.

“Oh, you’re right,” Adam replied.  “Erica is still doing The Edge.  But still, we lost six leaders this year.  Considering how many kids show up each week, we definitely don’t have enough leaders as we should have.  So, I’m proposing a challenge for all of you.  I want you to prayerfully consider, at some point this year, recruiting someone to join the Edge team of leaders.  If you know someone around church, someone in the college group, whoever, who might make a good Edge leader, invite them to come check it out.”

My heart sank.  Being a leader with The Edge was supposed to be fun.  I got to hang out with fun, energetic young teenagers, playing games with them and teaching them about Jesus.  It was not supposed to involve me having to awkwardly ask my friends to make a commitment.  I knew in my head that Jesus’ death on the cross paid the price for my sins, and that my own good works were not what got me into Heaven.  But I often felt pressure to be a better Christian because I was not constantly out there doing things.  Taylor’s mission trip to Chicago, Erica’s mission trip to Turkey, I had never done anything big like that.  And I also felt the constant pressure to reach out and invite others to church, to Bible study, and the like.  I was not good at inviting anyone to anything.  The frequent reminders at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship to invite all of our non-Christian friends just made me feel like there was something wrong with me.  I did not have many close non-Christian friends, since I had little to nothing in common with most non-Christians.  I understood well the value of inviting non-Christians to Christian events; I first got involved with JCF when my friends from freshman year invited me, and this led to me making my faith my own.  But I hated that pressure, especially since inviting people to stuff did not come naturally to me.

Of course, recruiting friends to work as leaders with The Edge was a little different.  I was looking for people who were already Christians, looking for somewhere to serve; they would not interpret my invitation as asking them to change their religion.  Still, though, any sort of conversation where I had to ask someone to do something always felt forced and unnatural to me.  It always felt like I was only talking to the other person because I wanted something.  However, I knew plenty of Christians, and I talked enough about being a youth group leader that it was certainly possible for it to come up naturally in conversation.

I woke up fairly early Sunday morning.  I put on a sweatshirt, since it was cold outside, and brought my Bible to a bench where I could sit and read Scripture and enjoy the view of God’s creation.  When I went back to the cabin, Noah was awake.  “How’s it goin’, Greg,” he said quietly.

“Okay, I guess,” I replied.  “I’m just stressing about having to recruit another leader.  I’m not good at inviting people to things.”

“Don’t feel any pressure.  Nothing’s gonna happen if you don’t.  Just think of it this way.  Keep it in mind in case it ever comes up in conversation.  If you know someone who might be interested, tell them.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t let this get you down.”


The drive down Highway 52 to Capital City was full of mountains and rocks and pine trees.  The first fifty miles went relatively slowly, with only one lane in each direction and lots of traffic from people who came up to the mountains for the weekend.  As the road gradually widened approaching Capital City, traffic began moving faster. It took close to two and a half hours to get down the mountain, across Capital City, and back to my house in Jeromeville.

Despite the usual dread about having to get up early again for classes, the beginning of a new school year always felt hopeful.  I would have new friends to make, new professors to meet, new things to learn.  For all I knew, maybe one of those new friends I made would be my future wife.

I spent Monday running errands around campus.  I stood in a long line to buy my books.  I had told the Learning Skills Center that I was available to work ten hours per week this quarter as a tutor, so I also checked to see when I would be scheduled to work this quarter.  While I was there, the woman at the check-in desk mentioned that they needed proctors for the mathematics placement test they would be giving the next morning, so I returned to campus on Tuesday morning and got paid to work a couple hours by standing and walking around a room as incoming students took this test.

Tuesday night I went back to campus for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship’s Welcome Mixer.  This year it was held in the Arboretum Lodge.  The Arboretum was possibly my favorite part of the University of Jeromeville campus, a park-like collection of plants from around the world running a mile and a half along a long, skinny lake made from a formerly dry creek bed.  Near the west end of the Arboretum was a grassy field surrounded by tall oaks, pines, and redwoods, with an event room called the Lodge at one end of the field.  I had only been inside The Lodge once, three years ago this week, for a similar beginning-of-year party for the Interdisciplinary Honors Program that I was part of freshman year.

I was working a shift for the first hour of the night at the welcome table, filling out name tags and directing students to leave their contact information so that JCF could be in touch with them.  I was proud of myself for knowing many students’ names, but of course there were many new students to meet.  JCF had used all of their usual outreach techniques during the last few days: students lingering around freshman dorms randomly helping people move in, a table on the Quad during busy times with information about our group, and lots of signs and flyers around campus.  Last week at Outreach Camp, when they asked for volunteers to sign up for those events, this one hour shift at the name tag table was all I signed up for, since I knew I would be gone on the youth leaders’ retreat while everyone was moving in.

It would take me a while to learn all of the new people’s names, but by the time my shift was over, a few already stood out to me.  Being the secretly girl-crazy guy I was, cute girls stood out in my mind the most. I remembered in particular an attractive, bubbly girl named Brianna with curly blonde hair, and a short girl named Chelsea with light brown hair and bright blue eyes.  I looked around the room, but I did not see Brianna or Chelsea.  Among the guys, the one who stood out to me most was named Tim; he had brown hair, black Buddy Holly glasses, and a t-shirt that said “Nobody knows I’m Elvis.”  I had no idea what that meant, but this Tim guy surely was quirky, in a fun kind of way.  I saw Tim and another new guy talking to Scott and Amelia.

“Hey, Greg,” Scott said as I approached.  “Have you met Tim and Blake?  They live in the Forest Drive dorms, so they’ll be in my Bible study this year.”

“I saw you guys come in,” I said.  “I was at the name tag table.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tim said.  “Nice to meet you, Greg.”

“You too.  Where are you guys from?”

“I’m from Sullivan,” Blake said.  I knew Sullivan; it was on the drive from Jeromeville to my parents’ house in Plumdale, about halfway.

“I’m from Seger Ranch,” Tim said.  “I bet you don’t know where that is.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Scott explained.  “Greg has a reputation for knowing his way around really well.”

“This time, Tim wins, though,” I said.  “I don’t remember where Seger Ranch is.”

“Ha!  I have stumped the master!” Tim exclaimed.  “It’s down the Valley a few hours, about half an hour outside of Ashwood.”

“Oh, okay.  I bet you don’t know where Plumdale is.”

“Nope.  Is that where you’re from?”

“Yeah.  Near Gabilan and Santa Lucia.”

“I know Santa Lucia.”

I made small talk with Scott, Tim, and Blake for a few minutes.  When they dispersed, I continued walking around the room, next introducing myself to a girl with short brown hair whose name tag said “Hannah,” in handwriting that was not mine.  John Harvey had been working the name tag table at the same time as me; he must have filled out Hannah’s name tag.  I would have remembered, because it would have stuck out in my mind that the name Hannah is a palindrome, reading the same forward and backward.

“Hi,” Hannah said, noticing me approaching.  “I’m Hannah.”

“I’m Greg,” I replied.  “Are you a freshman?”

“Yeah!  What about you?”

“I’m a senior.”

“Cool!  Have you always been part of JCF? Since you were a freshman?”

“I started at UJ as a freshman, but I didn’t get involved with JCF until sophomore year.”

“Oh yeah?  Why’s that?”

I paused.  “It’s kind of a long story.  Do you want to hear it?  I can try to make it short.”

“Sure!”

“I grew up Catholic.  My mom’s family has always been Catholic, but it didn’t really mean a lot to me personally.  So I was going to Catholic Mass at the Newman Center.”

“Newman Center?”

“It’s like the Catholic student club at secular schools.  I lived alone sophomore year, and I had some friends from freshman year who went to JCF, so I started going just to stay close to my friends.  And the more I started meeting people at JCF, the more I realized I didn’t really know Jesus personally.  So I made a decision for Jesus that year.  I still went to Mass for a while, because I didn’t want to turn my back on my family heritage.  But eventually I felt like I needed to find a church where people were serious about learning about the Bible and not just going because that’s what you do.  So I stopped going to Mass about a year ago.”

“That’s cool, how God found you through your friends,” Hannah said.  “My story isn’t that complicated.  I grew up in a Christian family.  We’ve always been involved in church.”

“That’s good too.  You got to experience church life as a kid in ways that I didn’t.”

“I’m looking for a church in Jeromeville too.  I think someone said JCF isn’t connected to one church, right?  Is there a church where a lot of people here go?”

“I go to Jeromeville Covenant Church now,” I said.  “There’s a lot of JCF people who go to J-Cov, including the McAllens, the couple who are the head staff of JCF.  And I know some people here also go to First Baptist Church of Jeromeville, and some go to Jeromeville Assembly of God.”

“I’ll try those out,” Hannah replied.  “You like Jeromeville Covenant?”

“Yeah.  They’ve got a good college group. I like the way the college pastor teaches.  And I got involved as a junior high group leader toward the end of last year.  That’s been a lot of fun, getting to work with younger kids, and getting to know their families.  It makes me feel more like part of the community.”

“That does sound like fun!  I taught little kids’ Sunday school back home, and I was thinking it would be nice to get involved with something like that.”

I felt like pieces were suddenly starting to come together in my head.  Before I could pause and overthink and talk myself out of it, I asked, “Do you want to come to junior high group sometime and see if you’d be interested in being a leader?  The youth pastor was just talking about how we needed more leaders.”

“Sure!  When is it?”

“We meet on Wednesdays, so tomorrow night would be the next time.  But really, any Wednesday.”

“Yeah!  I think I’m free tomorrow night.  How far is it?”

“About a mile past campus, on Andrews Road.”

“Can you give me directions?”

“Sure,” I said.  I wrote directions from campus to church on the back of a flyer; I also wrote the church phone number and Adam and Noah’s names, so that she could ask someone who actually worked at the church if she had any questions.

“Thanks!  I’ll see you tomorrow night, then!  It was nice meeting you!”

“Yeah!  Good luck with everything this week,” I said.  Could it really be that easy?  I just possibly recruited a new leader, the thing I had been scared of just three days earlier.  Now, hopefully, Hannah would actually show up and stick with it.


“We have two possible new leaders tonight,” Adam said on Wednesday night as the leaders for The Edge met to discuss the night.  “Why don’t you introduce yourselves.  Hannah, you go first.”

“I’m Hannah, and I’m a freshman.  I grew up in a Christian family, I taught Sunday school when I was in high school, and I just got to Jeromeville on Sunday, so I’m looking for a church.”

“Welcome,” Adam said.  “And how’d you find out about The Edge?”

“Last night, at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship’s welcome thing.  Greg told me about it.”

I looked up and noticed that Noah was smiling at me.  He must have been remembering when I was feeling uneasy about having to recruit a new leader.  And today, I had recruited a new leader.  Mission accomplished.

“I’m Cambria,” the other new leader said.  “I was talking to someone at church last week about wanting to get more involved, and working with junior high kids was one of the options, so I’m checking it out.  I’m a sophomore.  I recognize some of you from JCF. Like I know Greg.”  I waved at Cambria when she said my name.  I did not know that she would be coming to The Edge tonight.

“Welcome,” Noah said.

“I hope you enjoy the night,” Adam added.

Both Hannah and Cambria stayed with The Edge for the entire school year.  Hannah volunteered with the youth groups at J-Cov for the entire four years she was in Jeromeville, two years with The Edge, then two years with the high school group after her small group moved on to high school.  I had been afraid of recruiting a new leader, and Hannah was the only new leader that I ever directly invited in four and a half years of working with The Edge, but I still did what I was afraid of, and that is important.  No one I met that year became my future wife, but with classes starting tomorrow, I still had a good feeling about this year.  And it did end up being a memorable year.

By the way, two of my friends did end up meeting their future wives in this story, but I’ll get to that another time.

Readers: Has there ever been a time you had to do something scary to you that wasn’t as hard as you ended up thinking it would be? Tell me about it in the comments.

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 7 Comments

Although I had been this way once before, this drive still felt unfamiliar enough to be exciting in its own right.  This part of the state in general was still mostly unfamiliar to me.  It was a Monday afternoon, and I had driven from Jeromeville on the valley floor east on Highway 100 for about fifty miles, across Capital City and its suburbs into the mountains.  Then, in a smaller city called Blue Oaks, I turned north on Highway 79 and drove north for another thirty miles.  As I continued climbing into the mountains, the landscape gradually changed.  Between Capital City and Blue Oaks, Highway 100 passed mostly through rolling hills dotted with oaks and covered with grass, brown now at the end of the hot, dry summer.  North of Blue Oaks, along Highway 79, the surroundings began to be dominated more by pine trees, with the grassy forest floor giving way to a coat of dead needles and cones.

After passing through two other small cities, I turned onto a rural road and drove another five miles, mostly uphill.  Pine Mountain Christian Conference Center was situated at the top of a ridge, and just past the conference grounds, the road began descending into the canyon of a river.  I turned left into the parking lot and stopped the car.  Jeromeville Christian Fellowship’s Outreach Camp was the week-long retreat where we planned for the approaching school year, and this year it was at Pine Mountain, as it had been last year.

“Hi, Greg,” Cheryl from the JCF staff team said as I walked up to the registration table.  “How was your summer?  You did that internship in Oregon, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “It wasn’t what I was expecting.  I learned that math research is not what I want to do as a career.”

Cheryl looked up from a list on a clipboard.  “Who was in your car?” she asked.  “I see you on the list, but someone didn’t write down who came with you.”

“I came by myself,” I said, “because I’m not going straight back to Jeromeville afterward.”

“Oh!  Where are you going?”

“Another retreat for the weekend.  Student ministry leaders at Jeromeville Covenant.”

“Fun!  That’s because you’re working with the junior high kids there, right?”

“Yeah.  Youth group leaders of all ages, and college group leaders, they’ll all be there.”

To the right of the parking lot was a sports field, where a group of about ten students were playing Ultimate Frisbee.  Brent Wang threw the disc a long distance downfield, where no one on his team appeared to be, but Seth Huang appeared seemingly out of nowhere, dashing downfield and catching the disc in the goal zone.  Ajeet Tripathi and Todd Chevallier sat to the side of the field, watching; I walked up to them.

“Hey, Greg,” Ajeet said.

Ajeet wore a black Bay City Titans baseball cap; I pointed at it and said, “I went to a Titans game a few days ago.  First time I’d been in three years.”

“Nice!  Which one did you see?”

“The one against Dallas that went into extra innings.”

“Sweet.  I watched that one on TV, stayed up to see the ending.”

“Brent and Seth are so good at Ultimate when they’re on the same team,” I said.  “I remember one time last year watching them play Frisbee on the Quad, and they did all kinds of crazy running throws and catches like that.”

“I know,” Ajeet replied.

“How was your summer, Greg?” Todd asked.  “Did you go home?”

“I was in Grandvale, Oregon, doing an internship.  Then I went home for a couple weeks, then back to Jeromeville for a couple more weeks.”

“Wait, Oregon?  I thought you were from the Santa Lucia area.”

“Yeah.  Plumdale, in Santa Lucia County.”

“So you were just in Oregon for this internship?”

“Yes.  Doing math research.  Sorry, I thought I told everyone last year I was going to Oregon.”

“You might have,” Todd said.  “A lot of people went places this summer.”

“Speaking of which, how was the China trip?”

“So good!  God really planted some seeds in some of the students we were working with.  We’re going to do a presentation about it at the main session tonight.”

“That’s cool.”


I spent most of the rest of that first day saying hi to people and catching up.  It was always good to see people for the first time in three months.  Saying hi to Haley Channing felt a little awkward, because of our history the previous school year.  We were friendly to each other, but I did not want to try to force any conversations or give the impression that I could not accept the fact that she just wanted to be friends.

Intervarsity, the parent organization of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, led a trip that summer where hundreds of students from all around the United States and Canada went to China to do ministry among university students.  Twelve students from JCF went on the trip, and from the presentation that night, it sounded like it was a challenging yet powerful experience.  Evan Lundgren, my Bible study leader from the previous year, was on the trip; he was also a native of Santa Lucia County, but we did not know each other growing up.  After the presentation, Evan and I were catching up, and he told me something about the trip that was not addressed in the presentation.  “We had some new couples form on the trip,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” I asked.  “Like who?”

“Darren and Katrina.”

“Hmm,” I said.  Darren and Katrina ran in the same circles already, so this was not terribly surprising.

“And Eddie and Tabitha.”

“Eddie and Tabitha?” I repeated.

“Yeah.”

“Eddie Baker and Tabitha Sasaki,” I said incredulously.  “They’re dating now?”

“Yes,” Evan replied.  I did not see this coming, probably because I considered them both close friends and had no idea that they were even on each other’s radars.  I often felt like the last to know whenever couples formed, though, so this was nothing new.


More couple-related news broke at breakfast Tuesday morning, although this involved an established couple who had been together for a year and a half, not a new couple.  As I walked to the dining hall, six girls were gathered around Amelia Dye, along with Janet McAllen, half of the couple that were the lead staff of JCF.  The girls were looking at Amelia’s left hand, which she held up as she said something about “this morning, we got up early to watch the sun rise.”  I noticed a diamond ring on her finger and put the pieces together in my mind.

“Scott proposed?” I asked as I walked by, pointing to Amelia’s ring.

“Yes!” Amelia answered excitedly.  “This was his grandmother’s ring!  It’s so beautiful!”

“Congratulations!”

This year’s JCF class had the unusual quirk that many students from the class a year older than me, including Amelia and Scott, did not graduate in four years, so they were still at the University of Jeromeville for a fifth year.  I was beginning my fourth year, and at this point it was uncertain whether or not I would be finished at the end of the year.  After discovering I disliked mathematics research, I decided that I wanted to be a high school teacher, but I had not yet figured out how long it would take to finish both the classes for my degree and the prerequisites for the teacher training program.  I had made an appointment to talk to Dr. Graf, my major advisor, next week after I got back to Jeromeville.

At the beginning of the morning session, Janet had gone over some highlights of the upcoming week.  Wednesday night, Sarah Winters would be sharing her testimony, telling the story of how they came to faith in Jesus.  Thursday afternoon we would walk down to the river where four students would be baptized.  And every afternoon, one of the campground staff would be running a ropes course, new to the center this year.

After lunch, I walked out to the ropes course, mostly because I had no idea what a ropes course was and I was curious.  A number of elaborate climbing structures had been attached to some exceptionally tall trees, one that looked like a giant rope ladder with wooden steps about three feet apart, a balance beam connecting two trees about thirty feet off the ground, and a small platform at the same height of uncertain function.  John Harvey was carefully climbing the giant steps of the ladder, pulling himself up to each step; he was attached to a rope extending above him high into the trees, through some unseen pulley, and down to where a campground staff member held the rope, probably to keep John from falling.  Several other students were standing by watching, and we all cheered when John reached the top of the ladder.

“Hey, you!” a female voice said from behind me.  I turned around to see Sadie Rowland smiling and wearing some sort of harness.  “Are you gonna go up there?  I’m going next.”

“I was just watching,” I said.  “It looks like fun, though.”

“How was your summer?”

“It was okay.  I was in Oregon doing a math research internship.”

“Math research.  That sounds like something you’d be good at, and I wouldn’t.”

“Actually, I mostly just learned I don’t like math research, and that I don’t want to do it as a career.  Math research is weird and complicated and hard to understand what you’re doing.”

“So then do you know what you’ll do after you graduate?”

“I’m going to be a teacher.  I helped out in a high school classroom last year, remember, and I really liked that.  I always thought I didn’t want to be a teacher because of the politics involved, you know, but maybe I shouldn’t let that get in the way of something I enjoy doing.”

“Oh, I know, there’s a lot of messed up political stuff in the school system.  And your coworkers will be a bunch of liberals.  But maybe you’re right.”

“Yeah.”

“I think you’d be a good teacher.”

“Thank you,” I said.  “How was your summer?”

“Nothing special.  I was just home, working.  I’m thinking about an internship too.  I found out about something for poli-sci majors where we can go intern in DC.  That would be an experience.”

“Wow.  Yeah.”

While Sadie and I continued to make small talk, John crossed the balance beam while hanging onto another rope.  He now stood on the small platform.  I could see its purpose now: there was a zip line above the platform, and another platform about thirty feet away on another tree, at a lower height, with steps leading down from it.  John grabbed the handle and slid along the zip line to the other platform.  “That looks fun,” I said as John dismounted and began climbing down from the tree.  Everyone cheered.

“Yeah!” Sadie replied.

“Are you ready?” the camp employee asked Sadie as John detached the rope.

“Yes!” Sadie replied.  “I’ll talk to you later, Greg.”

“Yeah.  Have fun!”

I watched as Sadie carefully climbed the giant ladder, a bit more cautiously than John.  I cheered with everyone else as she finished each section, and when she climbed down at the end she had a wide smile on her face.  Sadie was so easy to talk to.  I hoped to have more opportunities to do so this week and in the upcoming school year.


During my freshman year at UJ, I was part of something called the Interdisciplinary Honors Program.  This program consisted of around seventy specifically selected freshmen who lived in the same building and took one class each quarter specific to the program.  My first friends at UJ were other students in the IHP, and I got involved in Jeromeville Christian Fellowship the following year through students in the IHP who invited me.  One of these students was Sarah Winters, a mathematics major like me.  She was a sweet, kind-hearted soul, a listening ear when a friend needed someone.  Sarah would see the good in others even when they were not acting at their best; I saw that freshman year, when I got upset and threw a cardboard box at her and she never got mad at me.  “I hope you all had a great afternoon,” Cheryl said after the worship team finished their set on Wednesday night.  “Tonight, you’ll be hearing from Sarah.  She’s going to share her testimony.”  Sarah stood and walked to the podium, and everyone clapped.  Sarah lowered the microphone a little as she began.

“I didn’t grow up in a Christian home,” Sarah began.  I had heard her say this before, but I still found it surprising.  She always seemed so strong in her faith, a good example of what a Christian woman should be like, and yet I found out later that she had only become a Christian at age 17, a few months before we met.

 “We just weren’t religious at all,” Sarah continued.  “And my parents divorced when I was eight, so I didn’t have a very stable home life, going back and forth between Mom’s house and Dad’s house.  By the time I got to high school, I was still doing well in classes, but I was starting to make some bad decisions in my social life.”  I felt myself getting scared, not wanting to know what bad decisions Sarah was making.  I did not want to be disappointed in her.  But I kept listening.

“Junior year, I played at this big marching band event, with a lot of other school bands from all over the state.  I met a guy there from another school, and we just hit it off really fast.  We even snuck off during part of the time we were supposed to be performing to go make out.  After that weekend, we stayed in touch, we called each other, we wrote letters, and a few months later he asked me to his prom.  He lived in Hilltown, near Bay City, and I lived in the Valley, in Ralstonville, so it took me a couple hours to drive there.  I didn’t want to drive home in the middle of the night, so I stayed with him.”  I was pretty sure I knew what was coming next, and it made me a little uncomfortable to hear her say it.  “And I slept with him,” Sarah continued.  “It was my first time, but I thought I loved him, so it felt right.  And that continued whenever we’d see each other in person.  He’d come see me or I’d go see him a few times during the summer, and every couple weekends in the fall.

“Then he cheated on me,” Sarah explained.  “Suddenly now I felt dirty, and ashamed, and angry.  I had given him everything, I had stayed loyal to him in a long distance relationship, and all that meant nothing to him.  And I handled it in the worst possible way: I had a fling with this guy at school who I knew liked me, because I needed to feel like someone wanted me.  And I slept with this guy too.  But this time it didn’t feel right.  I knew that I was only with this guy because I didn’t want to be alone.  So we broke up after about a month.

“I apparently didn’t learn my lesson from that, because soon after that, I had a new boyfriend.”  Some people chuckled.  I had not seen this side of Sarah before, and I was a bit unsettled.  “But this guy was different.  He was a Christian.  He invited me to church.  I avoided telling him about my past, because I knew he wouldn’t approve, but when I finally did tell him, he told me about God’s redeeming love, how the blood of Jesus Christ had washed away my sins.  Shortly after that, I made a decision to follow Jesus.  And it hasn’t been easy, but I’ve learned so much about how I don’t need attention from guys to be wanted and loved.  Jesus loves you just who you are.  I am a beloved daughter of the Lord.”

Dave McAllen gave a talk after this, also about the new identity we receive in Christ, but I could not stop thinking about Sarah’s story.  It brought new context to some of the other conversations we had had over the years.  More importantly, I knew that there was something I had to tell Sarah now.  She had been placed in my group for the week, so we would be debriefing together after tonight’s session talking about any thoughts we had about tonight.  

“I haven’t slept with actual girlfriends,” I told my small group after the session, “but I’ve struggled with having lustful thoughts and…” I did not want to be unnecessarily graphic, but I did not want to be vague either.  “Acting on them, alone,” I said.  “One time a while back, I was feeling particularly ashamed because of that, and I wanted to talk to someone, but I was too embarrassed to say anything face to face.  So I sent an email to someone in this small group using an anonymous emailing service, so my name wouldn’t be on it; I just said I’m someone you know and I need someone to talk to.  My friend replied, saying to read the Bible or do something to distract myself when I feel that way, but most importantly, not to get down on myself, because Jesus loves me.  I needed that reminder tonight.  That’s all I wanted to say.”  Everyone else seemed to get the hint that I did not want to talk about this in detail, and no one asked me anything more about it.

After everyone shared, we prayed to close the night.  As people dispersed to the cabins, I stayed in my seat, looking at Sarah, hoping that she had remembered that incident.  She sat next to me, put her arm around me, and said, “Jesus loves you.”  I put my head down; Sarah just stayed there silently next to me with her arm around me from the side.  After several minutes of quiet, I looked up and gave her my best half-smile.  “Are you okay?” Sarah asked.

“Yeah.”

“You wanna get some sleep now?”

“That’s probably a good idea.  Thanks for sticking around.”

“Of course.  Jesus loves you.  Don’t ever forget that.”


I heard abbreviated versions of a few other students’ testimonies Thursday afternoon at the river baptisms.  I found it interesting that Kieran was getting baptized.  Last time JCF had a baptism event, when Sarah had gotten baptized at the end of sophomore year, Kieran had made a big deal to say that he wanted to make a public declaration of his faith, but he had already been baptized as a baby and did not feel a need to be baptized again.  I wondered what caused him to decide now to be baptized after all, especially since I was also one who had been baptized as a baby and not as an adult.

I said goodbye to everyone Friday afternoon when Outreach Camp ended, but I knew I would see them soon.  At the end of the road that the camp was on, everyone turned south on Highway 73 back toward Blue Oaks, but I turned east less than a mile later, on Highway 22 toward the Great Blue Lake, since I had another retreat to get to.  I put on a tape of Third Day, a Christian rock band from Georgia that I had discovered last year, as I drove through more forests and mountains, some of the most breathtaking scenery I had ever experienced.  I was in no hurry, since I left Pine Mountain a little after one o’clock and most of the group from Jeromeville Covenant would not arrive at the other retreat until evening.

Highway 22 took me back to Highway 100 eastbound, which actually ran diagonally to the northeast through that area.  I exited the freeway again on the road that eventually took me to the western shore of the Great Blue Lake, about an hour and a half after I left Pine Mountain.  The lake was huge, surrounded by forested mountains, except for the lake’s outlet through a narrow river valley that I had followed from the time I turned off the freeway.  The area was popular with tourists year-round, hiking and boating in the summer, and skiing in the nearby mountains in the winter, so traffic slowed down in some spots.  Now that I finally saw the area’s natural beauty in person, I understood why it was such a popular destination.

I drove south along a windy mountain road, down the entire western shore of the lake, stopping a few times to take pictures since I was in no hurry.  I passed through a city called Lakeview at the south end of the lake, then climbed back into the mountains over a summit on a road that would eventually lead me back to Capital City.  Six miles past the summit, I saw the road I was looking for.

At last year’s Outreach Camp, God had opened a door for me to have a specific role in JCF as the worship band’s roadie, but they did not need one this year.  I had signed up to sit at JCF’s table on the Quad during welcome week, and to help out with a welcome mixer next Tuesday night, but these were not ongoing ministries for the year.  I did have a specific ongoing ministry outside of JCF, though: I was volunteering as a youth leader at church.  God had still shown up at Outreach Camp this year in a more simple way, providing the opportunity to reconnect with my friends and hear messages I needed to hear from the Scriptures and others’ testimonies.  I looked forward to seeing how he would continue to show up in my life at this other retreat and during the first week of school.

Readers: Do you enjoy going on retreats, or just generally getting away from your regular life and being out in nature? Tell me about one such time in the comments.

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September 12, 1997. My return to the baseball stadium. (#144)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 9 Comments

I was never an athlete.  My brother Mark got all the athletic talent in our family.  I played tee ball when I was six years old; all I remember is that we did not keep score, which I thought was dumb, and the coach made me cry once.  My high school football career lasted one day, before I realized that I was in way over my head and badly out of shape.  Despite that, though, I still grew up around sports, watching games on television and working the scoreboard and snack bar for Mark’s baseball and basketball games.

I went to my first professional sporting event, a Bay City Titans baseball game, in 1982, the summer after I finished kindergarten.  A few years later, the four of us in our family started going to games more regularly, a few times every year, until the summer of 1994.  By that time, several months of negotiations had failed to produce a resolution between the players’ union and the team owners on money issues.  The players voted to strike, and the last month and a half of the season was canceled, as well as all postseason championship games.  The strike was not resolved until a few weeks into the 1995 season.

I moved to Jeromeville for school during that players’ strike, and with no baseball that fall and no cable TV with which to watch games once baseball resumed in the spring, I stopped following baseball closely.  Besides, I was still upset that the previous season had been canceled.  One of my favorite players, Matt Williams, had 43 home runs at the time the strike began, giving him a legitimate chance to break the record for home runs in one season, which was 61 at the time.  He never got that chance, and he never hit that many home runs in another season.  Baseball had broken my trust.

The strike did not affect the minor league teams playing in smaller cities, and some national television networks began showing high-level minor league games.  A new independent league, with players and teams not connected to the big leagues, formed in the western United States in 1995.  This league included a team in Santa Lucia County where I grew up, the Gabilan Peppers.  I went to a few games with my parents over the years when I was home during the summer, and they were always lots of fun.  Unfortunately, the Peppers only lasted a few seasons before folding.

I did not think about going to a baseball game again until just recently.  I had stayed in touch off and on over the years with Mrs. Allen, my English teacher from both seventh and eighth grade.  Seventh grade had been a very difficult year for me, I was going through things that I could not share with anyone around me, and I did not really have friends.  Mrs. Allen had been a positive influence for me that year, someone who believed in me and showed me that school could be a safe place.  Last week, shortly after I moved back to Jeromeville for the fall, I got an email from Mrs. Allen, asking how I was doing.  Among other things, she asked if I had been following the Titans, because they had a chance to win their division and make the playoffs.  She was a season ticket holder, and she invited me to come to a game with her before classes started again for me.  I told her that I had not been following closely since the strike, but it would be good to see her, and good to go to a game again after three years.

It was mid-afternoon on a Friday as I left Jeromeville for the Titans game, driving west on Highway 100 toward Bay City.  The first half hour of the drive, as far as Fairview, was very familiar to me, because that was also the first part of the drive to my parents’ house.  But after Highway 6 split off from Highway 100 to the south, the next thirty-two miles of busy freeway from there to the Bay City Bridge was a road I had only been on twice.  The first time was that weekend trip sophomore year when I rode in Eddie Baker’s car and kept hoping for a chance to talk to Haley Channing, and the other time was last year seeing the other major sports team in Bay City, the Captains football team.

In Oaksville, as I approached the bridge, traffic slowed to a halt.  This was normal for this area, especially on a Friday afternoon as people tried to get home from work and get either away from or into the city for the weekend.  I had left earlier than I needed to, expecting to hit traffic.  I inched forward at a crawl for about fifteen minutes leading to the toll booths.  I gave the toll taker one dollar, which was the toll on most of the area’s bridges at the time before it increased dramatically over the next couple decades.

Oaksville and Bay City were separated by about four miles of water.  Most of my trips to Bay City as a child were to watch Titans games, and the stadium is at the extreme south end of the city, so that I would not see much else of the city on those trips.  I had also been to a few other places that required driving across the city from south to north.  This spectacular view I had now of entering the city from east to west, with all of the tall buildings of the city’s downtown rising from the water below, was one I had only seen a couple times before.  I did not grow up around buildings this tall, and the concept of such a densely populated city fascinated me.  I could not fully admire the view, however, because I had to pay attention to where I was going.  The freeway was extremely crowded at this time of day, and I had to make sure that I was not in an exit-only lane, and that I would end up in the correct lane to continue onto Highway 11 southbound at the point where Highway 100 ended, two miles after the bridge.

After taking almost half an hour to drive the seven miles from the bridge to the stadium, I found a parking spot in the vast asphalt lot, among the sea of cars surrounding the stadium, and began walking toward the entrance.  The Titans’ stadium was built in the 1960s, during an era when the construction landscape in professional sports was dominated by huge concrete structures on the fringes of cities with little character on the outside.  Being in Bay City, there was at least the view of the bay, but even this was removed from the inside of the stadium in 1971 when the Captains began sharing the Titans’ stadium.  New seats were added to accommodate the larger crowds for football, surrounding the entire field 360 degrees in a misshapen ring, distorted to account for the different shapes of baseball and football fields.

Mrs. Allen had told me to meet her outside one specific entrance to the stadium, and as I approached, I was surprised that I found her relatively quickly, considering the size of the crowd.  She looked pretty much the same as she had when I was first in her class nine years earlier, a heavy-set woman in her late forties, with long hair typical of one her age who had been a hippie in her twenties.  She wore a Titans jersey and jeans.  I waved as I approached her.  “I hope you weren’t waiting long,” I said.  “I hit traffic.”

“Hi, Greg,” Mrs. Allen replied, giving me a side hug.  “I haven’t been here that long.  I figured traffic might be bad coming over the bridge.  How are you?”

“Pretty good.  Ready to go in?”

I followed Mrs. Allen to our seats, toward the back of the lower level.  The evening air was cool, because of the bay nearby, and would only get colder as the night went on.  Night games in Bay City had a reputation for being cold, and the stadium had been built in one of the coldest and windiest parts of the city, simply because it was one of the few places in the city with open land at the time.  I had been carrying a jacket, the same jacket I got for the trip to Urbana last winter, but I was not quite cold enough to put it on yet.  I was a little sweaty from walking from the car to the stadium.

“So how was your time in Oregon?” Mrs. Allen asked.  “What exactly were you researching?”

“Quasi-Monte Carlo integration using low-discrepancy sequences,” I explained.  “I was looking at ways to efficiently approximate integrals that can’t be calculated exactly using conventional means.  ‘Monte Carlo integration’ uses random numbers to make this approximation; that’s why it’s called Monte Carlo, because of random numbers being associated with gambling.  We were looking at ways to choose numbers that give more efficient and accurate approximations than just purely random numbers.”

“That’s all a bit beyond me,” Mrs. Allen said.  “When would you use something like this?”

“Any time you need to calculate an integral that can’t be calculated using normal methods.  Integrals are used for finding area and volume of irregular shapes.  And for any problem where you have to multiply, but the things you multiply are changing.  Like, for example, you multiply speed times time to find distance.  But if the speed is always changing in some predictable way, you would use an integral to find the total distance.  And some integrals can’t be calculated using regular techniques like adding and multiplying, so we need efficient ways to approximate them, and we need to know how accurate those methods are.”

“I see.  So what did you learn from your research?”

“Honestly, I’ve been telling people that the most important thing I learned was that I don’t really like math research.  But I’m glad to have learned this now, before I go invest years of my life and thousands of dollars in a Ph.D. program.”

“That’s a good point.  Graduate school is a huge commitment.”

“I know.”

“So do you know what you’re doing instead after you graduate?”

“Even though I said a few years ago I never wanted to, I’m now looking at being a teacher,” I explained.  “One of my professors set me up helping out in a high school classroom last spring, and I really enjoyed it.  I know I need a few more classes I hadn’t planned for as prerequisites for the teacher certification program.  I’m taking one of them this next quarter, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get them all in during this year.  So I don’t know yet if I’m going to graduate in the spring.  I might have to wait to start student teaching until the fall of ’99.  I’m also going to look into options for other teaching programs besides Jeromeville, but one of the professors from the Jeromeville program I’ve met before, so if I stayed at Jeromeville, I’d have that familiarity.”

Mrs. Allen had a look of excitement on her face; I could see that she approved of this career choice.  “Good for you!” she exclaimed.  “I think you’ll make a great teacher.”

“Thank you.”  It was an honor to know that I had Mrs. Allen’s vote of confidence, since she had been such an influential teacher in my career as a student.

“I’ll have to tell Mr. Colby when I see him on Monday,” Mrs. Allen said.  “I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear you’re looking into teaching.”

“Yes.  Tell him I said hi.”

“He used to tell that story all the time about the time he had to step out of the room, and when he came back a few minutes later, you were teaching the class.”

“I remember that,” I said, laughing.  “Someone asked me if I knew how to do a homework problem, and I didn’t want to scribble all over her paper, so I went up to the board to do it.  And when I was done, I turned around and everyone was watching me, and they started asking me more questions.”

“That’s a great story.”

The baseball game had begun by then.  The opponent was the Dallas Armadillos, and because of the recent changes made to baseball scheduling, this was the first time the Armadillos and Titans had ever played each other.  Before this year, teams in the two baseball leagues did not play each other until the end of the season, when the two champions would face each other.  Dallas was in the other league, and they had never been in the championship, so they had never played Bay City until this year.

The Titans scored first with a home run in the second inning, but their lead did not hold.  Three Dallas players got hits in the fourth inning, and two of them scored.  The game was then boring for about an hour as the teams took turns not scoring for the next few innings.  Mrs. Allen and I used that time to catch up and make small talk.  I told her more about my new house and roommates, as well as volunteering with the church youth group and being in chorus last year.

“When do classes actually start for you?” Mrs. Allen asked.

“September 25.  But next week I’m going on two retreats.  Monday through Friday I’ll be in Pine Mountain with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  Then I’ll be leaving straight from there to a retreat with the youth group leaders from church, somewhere up near the Great Blue Lake.”

“That sounds like it’ll be fun!  A good way to spend the last week before school starts.  What classes are you taking?”

“Number theory, abstract algebra, writing in education, and chorus.”

“I’m glad you’re still doing chorus.  You were never doing anything with music back in middle school, were you?”

“No.  I was too self-conscious back then.”

“That’s too bad.  But I’m glad you found chorus eventually.”

“Thanks.”  

The crowd became more lively after the Armadillos’ pitcher threw two walks and gave up a hit, loading the bases for the Titans.  A new pitcher came in for the Armadillos, and the next Titans batter hit a ground ball and was thrown out for the second run of the inning.  The runner on third base was fast enough to score, giving the Titans a tenuous lead of three runs to two, and the crowd cheered loudly.

I stood and cheered, then sat back down a minute later. “It’s cold,” I said; more of my body’s surface area had been exposed to the cold night wind when I had stood, and I had no more layers of clothing to put on.

“It’ll be nice when the new stadium gets built,” Mrs. Allen said.  “The new location is supposed to be less windy.”

“So did they decide on a new location for sure?” I asked.  The team had been trying to get this old, windy stadium replaced for a long time.  Five years ago, the old owners tried to sell to a group that was going to move the team out of state, but the other teams in the league voted the sale down.  The owners then sold the team to a group committed to keeping them in Bay City with a plan to build a stadium close to downtown and the bridge.

“Yes.  It’s the same place they’ve been talking about for years, near the bridge,” Mrs. Allen explained.  “But they had to go through a long process to finally get everything approved.  Construction is supposed to start later this year, but it’ll be a couple more years until it’s done.”

“That’s exciting,” I said.

Both teams scored again shortly afterward, and by the end of the eighth inning, the score was tied at four each.  No one scored in the ninth inning, and the game went to extra innings.  I shivered in the cold wind as I watched the game and continued to make small talk with Mrs. Allen.  Neither one of us wanted to leave the game early, but I felt miserable sitting outside in the cold, even with a jacket.  The jacket did not stop the wind from blowing into my face, and I only wore one layer over most of my legs.

But my persistence paid off.  In the bottom of the twelfth inning, a new pitcher entered the game for Dallas, and he did not seem to have a good command of where his pitches were going.  He walked the first batter he faced, then two batters later, with one out, he gave up a double to the outfield.  With runners on second and third base, the next Titans batter got a hit, scoring the runner on third and giving the Titans a win, by a score of 5-4.  I jumped up and began screaming and clapping loudly.  I reached over and gave Mrs. Allen a high-five.  “Someone’s excited,” she said.

“That was awesome!”

I walked Mrs. Allen back to her car.  “Thank you so much for inviting me,” I said.

“Tjhank you for coming!  It was so good to see you.”

“Yes.  Say hi to all my other old teachers.”

“I will.  Drive safely!”

“You too!”

Even though it was still technically summer, I turned on the heater when I got back to my car.  I was cold.  This was my first time watching a big-league baseball game in over three years, and tonight was the perfect experience to reintroduce me to the sport.  The Titans had gotten a win in dramatic fashion, and they had a good chance to make the playoffs.  This was also the first time I had ever stayed to the end of a night game that went to extra innings, and sitting through the cold made it feel more like I earned the win.

It had been a long game, and it was well after eleven o’clock by the time I got back to the car.  The drive back to Jeromeville would have taken about an hour and a half in good traffic, but traffic after a major sporting event is rarely good, so I did not get home until one-fifteen in the morning.  Traffic was mostly stop-and-go for the first couple miles, and it slowed down in other spots elsewhere in the city.  By the time I finally got to the bridge, traffic was moving again, and the rest of the drive home was smooth and uneventful.

The Bay City Titans did in fact end up with the best win-loss record in their division, but they lost in the first round of the playoffs.  It would be over a decade before I would get to see them win a championship in my lifetime, but I would go to many more Titans games over the next few years.  I was at the final game played in this stadium, and while I was not able to go to the first game in the new stadium, I was at the fifth one, the first Saturday game in the new stadium.  

Mrs. Allen is the only teacher from my childhood whom I have stayed in touch with semi-consistently for my whole life, although Mr. Colby did find me on Facebook when I was in my late 30s.  I tend to see Mrs. Allen every few years, through a combination of planned events and chance encounters when I am back in Santa Lucia County.  We met for lunch the last time I visited back home, in June of 2022; she is now in her mid-seventies, with much shorter hair, and has been retired for some time.

I have also been on the other side of some of those teacher-student relationships, since I grew up to be a teacher myself.  Many students I have never seen again after they finished their time at my school, or after I left their school, whichever the case may be, but there have been a small handful who have stayed in touch to various degrees.  I have watched some of my former students grow up and become parents themselves, I have attended three weddings of former students, and I have experienced at least one hilarious awkward encounter with a former student who knew I looked familiar but could not place how she met me.  All of those are stories for another time, but those stories are part of what keeps me going in the demanding and exhausting field of education.

Readers: Do you follow baseball? Do you have any fun stories about memorable baseball games you’ve been to?

I know I’m a day late this week, and it’s for a reason kind of appropriate to this episode: I was in Bay City yesterday at a Titans game, with my parents and the Kanekos, at that new stadium that got built a few years after this episode.

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.