Tag: relationships

Mid-October 1998.  I knew what I had to do. (#195)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

The weather in Jeromeville was always beautiful in October.  Jeromeville got very hot in the summer, but by October the weather had cooled to a happy medium, still warm enough to be outside without the intense heat.  My routine this October was a little different from that of previous years, but I was settling into what would be my routine for this year.  Drive 19 miles down Highway 100 to Nueces for student teaching.  Come home.  Eat lunch.  Go to class in the afternoon.  I was still volunteering as a youth group leader at Jeromeville Covenant Church on Wednesdays, I was still going to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship’s large group meetings on Fridays, and I was in a Bible study with JCF on Tuesdays, led by my friends Courtney Kohl and Colin Bowman.

The baseball postseason was happening, but I was not following it.  The Bay City Titans were tied for the last playoff spot and lost the tiebreaker game.  Two players on other teams that year, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, had broken the previous record for home runs in a season; McGwire’s 70 had become the new record, which would only stand for three years.  While that had attracted many fans back to the sport that had lost fans in 1994 after a labor strike had ended the season early, many baseball purists would later look negatively on this era.  Many of the home run hitters of that time were using performance-enhancing drugs, or suspected of doing so, since baseball had more lenient rules about some substances that were banned in other sports.

I was also going swing dancing every Sunday at the University Bar & Grill.  Swing dancing was the big fad of 1998.  Many of my church friends had gotten into swing dancing over the last year, and while I resisted for a long time, having no interest in dancing, I finally gave it a try a few months ago and really enjoyed it.  My roommate Jed Wallace was really into swing dancing, and he went to the U-Bar on Sundays too, but many of my friends who were regulars there when I first started going had been there less often since school started again.

One Sunday morning that month, I sat in church trying to pay attention.  The worship team played a few songs at the beginning of the service.  Then the pastor got up and spoke something which I am sure was very nice, about some meaningful passage from the Bible.  But no matter how hard I tried, I could not pay attention, because I knew what I had to do today once the service was done, and that was all I could think about.

Of course, the world would not end if I did not go through with it.  This requirement for today was entirely self-imposed.  But I felt like I was going crazy, and whatever the outcome, good or bad, I knew that I would feel better once it was done.

It started a week ago.  Actually, it started months ago, but all of these thoughts intensified a week ago.  There was a welcome back potluck after church that week, to coincide with the start of fall classes.  Someone from the church had constructed a temporary dance floor out of plywood on the lawn between the church entrance and the parking lot.  After the potluck and dance party, the dance floor would be disassembled and used to build a new stage platform at the end of the church sanctuary building, where the worship team plays and the pastor preaches, about eight inches off the ground.  I dressed for church that day the same way I normally dressed for swing dancing: a white t-shirt, clip-on suspenders, black slacks, and a gray flat cap, the one I bought a while back when I went shopping with Bethany Bradshaw.  Bethany was not here this morning; she went to a different church.

Several non-dancers at church commented on my attire.  I said thank you and explained that it was for swing dancing.

After the service, after everyone had had time to eat, I heard swing music start playing.  I did not know the name of this song, but I had heard it before at the U-Bar.  I could not see who was controlling the music.  Maybe someone had just put on a Best of Swing Dancing CD of some sort.  The technology existed now to make custom CDs that were playable in ordinary CD players, so maybe someone made a custom mix CD of swing music.  I danced a few times with friends whom I knew were dancers.

About six or seven songs in, I saw Sasha Travis standing on the side of the dance floor, looking like she wanted to dance.  She wore a dark blue dress that came down to her knees.  Her hair was long and straight and brown, the same way she always wore it.  I walked up to her and asked, “Would you like to dance?”

“Sure!” she replied, smiling.  I led her to the dance floor, and we began dancing to “Zoot Suit Riot” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.  I was starting to get annoyed with this song; it was overplayed, it was always the first thing that people on the outside of the swing dancing revival movement associated with modern swing dancing, and Jed went on this whole rant recently about how much he hated this song and how it was not real swing music.  But I was willing to put all of that aside if it meant getting to dance with Sasha.

Step, step, rock-step.  I had been doing this for a few months now, and the basic step had almost become automatic to me.  I started doing some turns, lifting my arm and turning Sasha to the time of the music.  “I really like that hat,” Sasha said, smiling.

“Thanks,” I replied.  “It’s the same one I’ve been wearing for at least a month now.”

“I know, but I like it.”

A little bit later, I led Sasha into an inside turn, where she moved across the front of my body.  As she did, she playfully grabbed my hat and put it on her own head.  “That looks good on you,” I said, hoping that she would not notice that I was starting to get sweaty, and that the hat had absorbed the sweat of the last month and a half at the U-Bar.

“Thanks!” Sasha said, smiling.  I continued dancing with her for the rest of the song.  At the end of the song, I dipped her into my arm.  She tried to reach up to hold the hat on, but I knocked it off, grabbed it before it hit the ground, and put it back on my own head.

“Thank you for the dance,” I said.

“Thank you!” Sasha answered.  The two of us walked back to the side of the dance floor and talked with some of our mutual friends until people asked them to dance.


Ever since the moment Sasha stole my hat, a week ago now, I could not get her off of my mind.  It felt like I was thinking about her all the time, in the car on the way to my student teaching assignment, while I was helping those students learn math, while I sat in class.  

I took three deep breaths in my seat after church ended, and I walked outside.  I saw Sasha walk outside that door just a few seconds ago; hopefully she was not in a hurry to get home.  She stood talking to Courtney and Erica, her roommates.  I walked up, ready to ask Sasha if she had a minute to talk, but Courtney saw me first and said, “Hey, Greg!  How are you?”

“Pretty good,” I said.

“How was your weekend?”

“Nothing special.  Just catching up with studying and homework.  Probably going swing dancing again tonight at the U-Bar.”

“That’s fun!” she said.  “I won’t be there tonight.”

After Courtney turned to talk to someone else, I knew I had to force myself to say what I needed to say, or else I would chicken out again.  I walked up to Sasha and said,  “Sasha?  Can I tell you something?”

Sasha turned toward me, clearly not expecting this.  “Okay,” she said.  I stepped about ten feet away, out of earshot of anyone, and motioned for her to follow me.

“I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you these last several months,” I explained.  “I like dancing with you, and I enjoy hanging out.  I was wondering… I really like you, and I was wondering if you were interested at all in, you know, being more than just friends.”

Sasha gave me a strange look.  I was not sure what to make of it, but whatever would be the typical reaction of someone getting this news and being interested in return, this was not it.  “Greg, I’m sorry,” she said.  “You’re a really nice guy, I’ve enjoyed hanging out too, but I just don’t see you that way.”

I nodded slowly for a few seconds.  “That’s ok,” I replied.  “You don’t need to apologize.  I just feel like I’m at the point where I need to say something.  I needed to know.”

“I understand,” she said.  After a few seconds of silence, she added, “Don’t feel bad.”

“I won’t,” I replied.  “Will you be at the U-Bar tonight for dancing?” I asked.

“I won’t be there tonight.  But have fun!”

“I will,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic.


When Jed and Brody moved into this house, Brody suggested that we do a communal meal once a week.  The rest of us approved of this idea.  Tonight it was Sean’s turn to make dinner, and he made some dish with chicken and rice.  I did not talk much at dinner.  I did not feel like talking.  Brody asked me at one point how my weekend went, and I just said fine without giving any details.  Brody mentioned that he would not be having dinner with us next week, because it was his birthday and his family was taking us to dinner.  Jed told us all about how he had just bought the album Americana Deluxe by a swing band called Big Bad Voodoo Daddy on CD.  After dinner, as we were cleaning up, Jed put his CD on; I recognized some songs from swing dancing at the U-Bar.

Later that night, I was in the large bedroom I shared with Jed, sitting at my desk reading for one of my classes.  Jed walked in and asked, “Hey, is everything okay?  You seemed kind of distant at dinner.”

“I just have stuff on my mind,” I explained.

“I don’t want to pry, but I have a question for you.”

“What is it?”

“After church, I saw you talking to Sasha,” he said.  My heart sank.  How much did Jed know?  Was he going to make a big deal and make fun of me, put me down for my choice of women?  Was he going to tell me it was inappropriate for me to feel that way, since she was only eighteen years old and I was twenty-two?  He continued, “I was talking to her a few minutes later, and she was acting really weird, not her usual self.  And you’re not your usual self tonight.  What were you two talking about?  Is this all connected?”

I sat in my chair, looking up at Jed, then looking off into the distance, trying to figure out how much to say.  I did not want anyone knowing about any of this.  I did not know that Jed would be talking to Sasha immediately after I did.  But he was not exactly being intrusive; he did not talk to her after church with the intention of finding out what I had told her.  He was simply being observant.

“This is just between us… promise?” I said.

“Yes.”

“I told her I liked her, and she didn’t like me back.”

Jed nodded.  “I wondered if it was something like that,” he said.

“Hmm,” I replied, still not looking Jed in the eye.  I wondered if my actions had been so obvious that everyone at church knew by now.  But then again, maybe not; had I been in his position, observing all that he had about me and Sasha today, the same thought probably would have crossed my mind.

“Sorry about that,” Jed said.  “Is it going to be weird seeing her at church and being friends with her roommates and everything?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.  I really did not.

“Have you been out with her a lot?”

“Not like one-on-one.  Just hanging out in the same circles, and dancing, and stuff like that.”

“She probably wasn’t expecting you to say that, then.”

“I guess.  I’m just so bad at this.”

“Everyone goes through this.  Don’t let it get you down.”

“I’m trying not to.  But it’s hard.”


Two days later, I was driving east on Coventry Boulevard, still thinking about Sasha.  I had managed to go all day Monday and Tuesday without seeing Sasha or any of her roommates on campus, and no one else had mentioned Sasha to me since I talked to Jed Sunday night.  But my destination tonight was Bible study, and Courtney, one of the leaders, was one of Sasha’s roommates.  If Sasha had been acting strangely after our conversation on Sunday, strangely enough to give Jed an outline of what was happening, then I assumed that her roommates were likely to know at least part of the story as well.  If she told them what she told Jed, though, I did not know if she had identified me as the guy who she rejected.

Things like this were why it had always been so hard for me to communicate my feelings toward women.  Back in the spring of 1990, as I was finishing middle school, my friend Paul Dickinson asked me if I liked a girl named Rachelle Benedetti, because he noticed I was often looking at her or trying to talk to her or something like that.  I admitted to Paul that I liked Rachelle, within a week it seemed like the whole school knew, and I was mortified.  I did not want everyone I knew to be in my business like this.

For an hour and a half, for most of Bible study, I thought that maybe I had gotten away with it.  Everything felt normal.  The only time I talked about things other than the passage of Scripture that we studied was when I got there and Colin asked me how student teaching was going.  But I was wrong.  After the study, I was usually in the habit of not rushing home, catching up with my friends first for a while.  Courtney came up to me a few minutes after we finished, and asked, “How are you doing?  I heard about what happened Sunday.”

“Yeah,” I said, not sure where to take this conversation.  Courtney seemed sympathetic, at least.  “I’m okay, I guess.”

“There’s someone out there for you,” Courtney said.  “Just keep praying about it.”

“I guess,” I said, trying to act appreciative of Courtney’s concern instead of rolling my eyes at the dumb cliché.

“They always say love finds you when you stop looking for it.”

Great, I thought.  An even worse cliché.  I heard that all the time, but how would love find me if I stop looking for it?  I was not really actively looking, I was just living my life, and no one had found me yet.  Of course love would find someone like Courtney when she was not looking for it; she was a pretty blonde girl, bubbly and friendly.  I was not so lucky.  I just said, “If you say so.”

“Everyone goes through this.  It’s just part of life.  You might need time, but someday you’ll wake up and feel like it’s time to get over it,” she said.  “Like when Brody and I broke up, I needed a few days to just sit with my feelings, but now everything is okay, and we’re still friends.”

More mildly angry thoughts bubbled in my mind.  I had no idea that Courtney and Brody broke up.  I was always the last to know anything.  These people were in the closest thing I had to an inner circle of friends.  Brody even lived at my house.  And yet I had no idea what was going on in their lives.  Apparently I was not in either of their inner circles, or anyone’s for that matter.  “That’s good,” I finally said, dejectedly.  “I’m not upset with her.  She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Who didn’t do anything wrong?” Colin asked, walking over to see what we were talking about.

“It’s nothing,” Courtney replied.  “Just something Greg said to someone that was taken the wrong way.”

“Yeah,” I said.  Courtney seemed to be deflecting the conversation away from the topic of Sasha now that Colin was within earshot, and for this I was thankful.  I did not want too many people to know about this.  But just in case, I added, “I don’t really want to keep talking about it, if that’s okay.”

“That’s fine.”


I was still thinking about this when I drove home later that night.  I was twenty-two and had never come close to having a girlfriend.  Things were starting to feel hopeless.  I had no idea what I was doing, and it seemed to come so much more easily to everyone else than it did for me.  No girls liked me, and nothing I could do would change that.

Part of the problem was that I did not know how to communicate my feelings to a girl.  When I was interested in someone, I always felt like I had to keep it a closely guarded secret, so she had no idea.  Why was I like this?  Probably because I grew up constantly being teased for everything, so I was just used to doing whatever I could not to give metaphorical ammunition to bullies, even though I really had not experienced much traditional bullying as a university student.  Also, my mother and her extended family were always in everyone’s business, and I did not want my romantic interests to become public knowledge that everyone started talking about.

But, I realized, on those few occasions where people did know about my romantic interests, none of what I feared happened.  Sure, back in middle school, Paul told a lot of people that I liked Rachelle, but they did not make fun of me for it.  He was just trying to help.  At the end of that year, when we took the honor roll trip to the amusement park at Mount Lorenzo Beach, he let me sit next to Rachelle when we rode the Giant Wave.  Jed and Courtney were not making fun of me about Sasha either; they just did not want to see me get hurt.

That was pretty much it.  The topic of Sasha rejecting me never really came up again among any of my friends.  It stayed on my mind for a long time, though.  The next time I had to change my password, a few months later, my new password combined the numbers on Sasha’s license plate with the name of a villain character from a TV show.  I used that password for over a decade, long after she was no longer a daily thought.  And almost two years after she rejected me, when I was ready to buy my first car with my own money, I decided to make a decision on a car that day instead of sleeping on it, because the next day was Sasha’s birthday, and I did not want my car to have the same birthday as a girl who rejected me.

When Sasha first met the guy she ended up marrying, who was also one of my church friends at the time, it felt a little awkward being around them.  But Courtney was right about one thing: after a while, things would start to feel okay again.

Readers: Do/did you share with your friends who you are/were interested in romantically? Tell me why or why not in the comments.

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July 24-26, 1998.  The baseball weekend, and a silly claim to fame. (#187)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 6 Comments

“Thanks again for driving,” Taylor said, handing me a ten dollar bill.  “This is for gas.”

“Yeah,” Noah added, giving me another ten dollars.  “Here you go.”

“I’ll pay you when we get there,” Cambria explained.  “My money is in the back.”

“Thanks,” I said, putting Noah’s and Taylor’s money in the cup holder because I could not reach my own wallet while I was driving.  Taylor asked me a few weeks ago if I could drive, since I had the most cargo space of any of our cars, and I did not mind at all.  I enjoyed road trips, and parts of Highway 100 between Jeromeville and Bay City were still relatively unfamiliar to me.  I had been to Bay City many times before, but growing up in Plumdale, I always approached the city from the south; today we approached from the east.  And tonight we would be staying with Noah’s parents in a suburb called Palos Colorados; I had never been there.

“You excited for the game, Greg?” Taylor asked.  “When was the last time you’ve been?”

“September.  Right toward the end of last season.  One of my teachers back home who I’ve stayed in touch with, she’s a season ticket holder, and she invited me to one.  And that was my first game since before the strike.”

“Wow.  But you said you used to go with your family before that, right?”

“Yeah.  We’d go to three or four every year, on average.”

“I’ve been to twenty-eight games already this year,” Taylor said, chuckling.  “It’s been crazy!  I’ve never been to this many in a year.  And there’s still two months left in the season.”

“And I’ve been to twenty-six,” Noah added.  “Because I was with you for all of those except two.”

“I’m excited,” I said.  “It’s been fun following baseball again this year.”

We crossed a bridge after passing through the city of La Yegua, then about twenty miles later we crossed another bridge across the bay for which Bay City was named, putting us right among the tall buildings of downtown Bay City.  As we entered the city, the freeway still elevated and traffic moving at a crawl, Taylor pointed to our left and said, “Right down there, that’s where the new stadium is going to be.”

“Really?” Camrbia asked.

“Yes.  You can’t see much now, but it’s under construction.”

“Have they said yet when the new stadium will be ready? ” I asked.

“2000,” Taylor said.  “So next season will be the last year at Bay Vista Park.”

Highway 100 ended at an interchange a mile later, and I followed the crawling traffic south on Highway 11.  The current stadium, Bay Vista Park, was at the very southern end of the city.  Heavy traffic made road trips much less fun..

“So what’s this book you were talking about the other day?” Noah asked Taylor.

“It’s called I Kissed Dating Goodbye, by Joshua Harris” Taylor explained.  “Basically, he’s making the argument that dating isn’t Biblical, and it’s not a good foundation for marriage.  People don’t date with the end goal of marriage and family in mind.  The best foundation for a Godly marriage is a Godly friendship.”

“Interesting,” Noah said.

I quickly took a dislike to Taylor’s suggestion.  It made sense that friendship was the best foundation for a strong relationship and marriage, but I had enough trouble with dating and meeting girls.  I feared that if some new trendy book was telling Christian girls not to date, I would have even less of a chance of ever having a girlfriend and getting married someday.  “How are you supposed to meet someone and get to know her if you can’t date?” I asked.  “Dating isn’t in the Bible because marriages back then were arranged, weren’t they?  Is this what this Josh guy wants?”

“You can get to know someone by spending time in groups,” Taylor explained.  “Bad decisions and temptation happen when a guy and a girl are alone.  Being with other people takes a lot of that away.  So you spend time in groups, you pray about someone you might be interested in marrying, and when God’s timing is right, you start planning for marriage.”

“Hmm,” I said.  I still did not like it.  I was an introvert, and I did not get to know people well in groups.  I often did not say much in groups because others were dominating the conversation.  And, although this Josh guy was probably right that I needed to pray about my future relationship, I had been doing that for years already and still had not found anyone.

“Turn here,” Taylor said, one exit before the normal exit for the stadium.  “I know a place to park for free.”  Taylor directed me off the freeway onto a slightly sketchy-looking residential street, with houses built close together on one side and a hill steeply dropping down on the other side, covered with grass except for a worn dirt path.  I could see Highway 11 below.  Street parking was very difficult to find in Bay City, but Taylor was right; there were open parking spaces on this street.

“Are you sure it’s safe to park here?” I asked.

“I’ve parked here every game I’ve been to this year,” Taylor explained.  “Nothing has ever happened to me.  We’ll be fine.”  The fact that Taylor immediately began walking down the hill instead of on the street did little to bolster my confidence.

Another residential street was tucked between the bottom of the hill and the freeway.  We walked on this street to the next intersection, then turned left, crossing under the freeway where street musicians played their instruments for tips and people sold knock-off Bay City Titans merchandise.  We continued for about a mile, past office buildings and parking lots, before we finally reached the entrance to Bay Vista Stadium.  The stadium was built in 1960, named for the surrounding neighborhood, but the actual vistas of the Bay from the stadium were blocked a decade later.  At that time, the stadium was remodeled so that the Bay City Captains football team could share it with the Titans baseball team.  The trend at the time was to build large multi-purpose stadia with concrete and steel façades and no character.  Recently, things had begun to shift away from this trend as a few baseball teams had moved into new baseball-specific stadia, like the one the Titans were currently building across the city.

The Family Section was in right field, just behind the fence where it was hard to see fly balls to right being caught.  These tickets were affordable, as little as five dollars for most games, and no alcohol was served.  Taylor and Noah, best friends since their early teens who both grew up near Bay City, decided on a whim to buy season tickets for this year in the inexpensive Family Section, and they had been to many Titans home games this year.  Season ticket members would occasionally have access to other deals, such as this opportunity to buy additional tickets to this weekend’s three-game series against the Ohio Redcaps at a deep discount.  Taylor and Noah asked around to get a group together to go to all three games, and Cambria and I were interested and available.  I had never seen all three games of a series before.

The additional tickets that Taylor and Noah bought for these games were a few rows away from their actual seats, in varying locations depending on what was available.  Tonight’s game was not very crowded, so we were easily able to find four empty seats together, even though they were not our assigned seats.  The game looked good for the Titans from the beginning.  Second baseman Jeff Kent started the scoring with a home run in the first inning, getting the crowd excited early.  He hit another home run in the fourth inning on his way to seven runs batted in by the time the game was over.

In the fifth inning, with the Titans leading by nine runs, I stood up and put my jacket on.  Bay Vista Park, being so close to the water, was notorious for being cold and windy, especially during night games.  I was shivering in my seat by 10:11pm, when the game ended with a final score of 12 to 2.  We walked back to the car as Taylor and Noah discussed Jeff Kent’s performance tonight overshadowing that of Barry Bonds, who most people considered the Titans’ star player.  Cambria added to the discussion when she had something to say.  I was mostly silent.

Traffic was much lighter at this time of night once we got away from the stadium.  Noah directed me across the bridge, then another nine miles along a different freeway that led east into the hills.  I had never been this way before.  We turned off on Palos Colorados Boulevard, then onto a residential street near a golf course, and onto a smaller street leading up a hill.  “Park here,” Noah said as the street dead-ended at a large, well-kept Victorian estate.  I never knew Noah’s family lived in a place like this.

A middle-aged woman wearing a nightgown walked out onto the porch as we were unpacking our bags.  “Glad you made it, Noah,” the woman said.  “Everything is all ready for you.  I’m going to bed.  Hi, Taylor.”

“Mom?” Noah replied.  “This is Cambria, and this is Greg.”

“Hi,” Cambria and I said.

“Martha Snyder,” Noah’s mom said, shaking our hands.  “Nice to meet you, Greg.  And Cambria.  We’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Thanks,” Cambria replied.

“Nice to meet you too,” I said.  Turning to Noah, I added, “What was the story with this house?  You went to high school with Taylor in El Arcangel, so you didn’t live here then, right?”

“This was my grandparents’ house,” Noah explained.  “It’s been in Mom’s family for over a hundred years.  Grandpa passed away in ’96, and Grandma moved into an assisted living home, so Mom and Dad and my brothers moved here.”

“It’s a really nice house,” I said.

“My mom was a Stewart.  The Stewarts were one of the families that founded this town.”

“Wow!” Cambria explained.

“Wait a minute,” I said.  “So your mom’s maiden name was Martha Stewart?”

“People say that to her a lot,” Noah said.  “And it’s even funnier because she’s a fan of the other Martha Stewart.  We’re not related, as far as I can tell.”

“That’s funny,” I said.  “Kind of like whenever people ask us if we’re related to the people who make Dennison’s Chili, Mom says, ‘No, but it would be nice to have their money.’”

After we unpacked, the four of us played a game of Settlers of Catan at the dining room table, quietly so as not to wake Noah’s parents.  I started the game without anywhere left to place settlements near good resources, and the ones I did have did not get rolled very often, so I just found myself more and more frustrated as I continued to fall behind.  Noah ended up winning, but the game was relatively close between the three others.

“I’m gonna go to bed,” Taylor said.  “Let’s be ready to leave by 10 tomorrow.  It’s going to be crowded, and I want to get there in time to see batting practice.”

“Sounds good,” I said.  “I’m going to bed too.”  Noah and Cambria wished us good night.  I often had trouble sleeping in an unfamiliar place, and I hoped that this would not be the case tonight.  The house seemed relatively quiet, although as I climbed the stairs I could hear Taylor brushing his teeth in the upstairs bathroom and Cambria softly giggling about something downstairs.  I went to the bedroom that belonged to Noah’s brother who was away at school and fell asleep surprisingly quickly.




We arrived early to Saturday’s game.  “We should take our group picture now,” Taylor observed, “because these seats are going to fill up.”

A few months ago, Taylor and our mutual friend Brent Wang, who was not in Bay City with us this weekend, had made a joke about starting a group where Christians could talk and learn about issues related to male-female interpersonal relationships.  They jokingly called the group the Brent Wang Fellowship and made T-shirts with Brent’s face on it.  All four of us were wearing our BWF shirts to the game today.  We stood against the railing, with the field in the background, and asked someone else sitting in our section to take our group picture.  “Who’s that guy on your shirt?” the woman holding the camera asked.

“That’s Brent Wang,” I said, as if it this had been the most obvious thing in the world.

“He’s a friend of ours,” Taylor explained.  “It’s an inside joke.”

“That sounds like fun,” the woman said.

After she snapped the picture and gave Taylor back his camera, Noah said, “We should probably sit in our assigned seats today.  It’s supposed to be crowded today.”

“Yeah,” Taylor replied

“The extra tickets today are in row 6,” Noah explained as he pointed to the seats.  “How about if Cambria and I sit in the regular seats, and Taylor and Greg sit back there?  Are you all okay with that?”

“Sure,” Taylor replied.  “But we can hang out in row 2 until it fills up.  You good, Greg?”

“Sounds good,” I said.  The four of us sat together to watch batting practice.  Just after the singing of the national anthem, the people who actually held tickets to the seat I was in arrived, so Taylor and I moved to our assigned seats four rows back, after explaining to the people who arrived to take our seat who the guy was on our matching T-shirts.  “That’s Brent Wang,” I said with no further explanation; this had become my regular response to that question.

“I was thinking sometime in November, we’ll have the first BWF Seminar,” Taylor said as we found our correct seats.  “We’ll have a discussion about the purpose of dating.”

“This is awesome,” I replied.  “You’re actually making the BWF into a real group.”

“Dan Keenan said we could use one of the Sunday school rooms at church.”

“Nice.  That book you were talking about yesterday, are some of the ideas from that going to be discussed?”

“Yes.  I have a few books I’ve read, or want to read soon, on that topic.  I’m going to put together a BWF recommended reading list.”

“That sounds good.  I think this is a great idea.”

Today’s game was much more disappointing than yesterday’s.  Ohio took a big lead a few innings in.  Bay City started to come back, and Jeff Kent continued his hot streak, hitting a home run in the ninth inning.  However, it all came up short; Bay City lost by one run.  I enjoyed yesterday’s game much better, when Bay City was winning decisively, and the four of us were all sitting together.  Taylor and I talked quite a bit about dating and the BWF, and about school, but Noah and Cambria were four rows in front of us, and I could only speculate what they were talking about.

When we returned to the Snyders’ house in Palos Colorados, Noah’s parents had made dinner for all of us.  After dinner, we gathered around the kitchen table to play Catan, as we had the night before.  We rolled to see who would go first, and I had the highest roll.  “Hmm,” I said, studying the board, trying to find the best place to put my first settlement.  “I’m thinking this place looks good,” I said as I put a settlement next to a wood with number 5, brick with number 9, and wheat with number 8, all numbers that got rolled relatively often.

“Yeah, I was thinking that’s clearly the best spot on the board,” Noah said.

“Me too,” Cambria added, chuckling.

My initial placement worked out well; all of those numbers got rolled often, and the wood and brick enabled me to expand quickly.  I built on an ore tile with number 6 and quickly expanded my settlements into cities.  This was the first time I had won a game of Catan against Taylor and Noah in quite a while.

“Good game,” Taylor said.  “Getting that 6 ore really worked out for you.”

“Yeah, it did,” I said.

We played several more games, staying up past midnight.  By then, I was tired.  “I’m gonna go to bed now,” I said.

“Sounds good,” Taylor replied.  “And I think I’m going to go read.  Good night.  See you all in the morning.”

“Good night, Greg,” Cambria and Noah said.  They moved to the living room couch; I was amused to notice a copy of Martha Stewart Living magazine on the end table next to where Noah sat.  Martha Stewart Snyder really was a fan of the more famous Martha Stewart.  Taylor and I headed upstairs to the rooms where we were staying.


I woke up six hours later as one of my great fears in life was coming to fruition.  It was 6:01 am, I was the only one awake in a strange house, and I had to poop.  I quietly tiptoed to the bathroom, hoping that Taylor, Noah, Cambria, Noah’s parents, and Noah’s youngest brother who still lived at home were all sleeping soundly enough that they would not hear me.  If they did hear me, no one ever said anything.

I looked out a window when I got back to my room.  I could see Palos Colorados Boulevard running along a creek below, and the light from the rising sun shone on a grove of redwoods on a ridge across the creek.  Palos Colorados meant “red trees” in Spanish; presumably the town and road were named after the redwoods in these hills.

We packed everything into my car before we left, because we were going to leave for Jeromeville right from the game.  We parked on the same street where we had parked for the other two games and walked to the stadium.  Today’s game was not as crowded as yesterday’s, so we were able to find four open seats together, but they were a section away from our assigned seats.

“You guys are over here today,” a voice unfamiliar to me said.  I looked up to see the same stadium usher who had greeted us the previous two days, a friendly older man with a beard.

“Yeah,” Taylor replied.  “Trying to find four seats together.”

“I’m glad you got to bring friends this weekend,” the usher continued.  “Enjoy the game!”

“Thanks!  We will!”

“Is he going to make us move back to our seats?” I asked.

“No,” Taylor explained. “He knows us.  He’s our buddy now.  He doesn’t care unless it’s a really crowded game.”

This game was more crowded than Friday’s, but not as crowded as yesterday’s.  As the game progressed, it looked more and more like a classic pitcher’s duel.  Orel Hershiser pitched seven innings for the Titans.  It still felt a little strange to see him in a Titans uniform; a decade ago, when I was first following baseball closely, he was the star pitcher for the California Blue Waves, the hated rivals of the Titans.  Ohio’s starting pitcher went even deeper into the game, also allowing only one run.  The game was tied at the end of the usual nine innings.  Ohio did not score in their half of the tenth inning, and the Titans began their half of the inning with Jeff Kent.  The crowd erupted into a frenzy when he hit a home run, his fourth of the weekend, winning the game for the Titans and keeping up his hot streak.

On the drive home, Taylor told me more of his plans for the Brent Wang Fellowship.  I was intrigued; maybe these discussions would help me finally figure out how to meet girls and tell them that I was interested in them.  Cambria began to nod off, resting her head on Noah’s shoulder; Noah fell asleep as well shortly afterward.  They both woke up as they felt my car turn from Highway 100 east to Highway 117 north, as if they knew we were almost home.

I wanted to read this I Kissed Dating Goodbye book; Taylor said I could borrow it sometime.  I would have many strong feelings about this book in the upcoming years.  I had no objection with the premise that the goal of dating should be marriage.  But I did not like this idea that guys and girls should only hang out in groups.   If I was in a group that included a girl I liked, others in the group might find out and embarrass me over it, like in eighth grade when Paul Dickinson found out that I liked Rachelle Benedetti and told the whole school.  I just could not picture a world where I could get to know a woman without spending alone time with her, talking to her without others interfering.

The book itself would prove to be controversial over time, with many people feeling hurt by the book’s teaching for a variety of reasons.  The author himself would go on to renounce his own teaching and then renounce Christianity altogether about twenty years later.  But that is a story for another time.

Jeff Kent left the Titans on bad terms a few years later, after frequent arguments and tension with other players on the team.  He got booed whenever he returned to Bay City as a member of opposing teams, particularly after joining the despised Blue Waves in 2005.  But for that weekend in 1998, he was our team’s hero.  We were in the hunt for a playoff spot, and he was hitting home runs, as was outfielder Barry Bonds.

That weekend is still to this day the only time I have ever been to all three games of a three-game baseball series.  It was a lot of fun, seeing the same players on both teams multiple times.  And something else productive came unexpectedly from this trip, a silly claim to fame.  When playing icebreaker games where I had to name an interesting fact about myself, now I could say in complete honesty that I’ve pooped at Martha Stewart’s house.

Readers: Do you know anyone whose name is the same, or sounds like, someone famous? Tell me a funny story about that in the comments.

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 10 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I agree,” Jenn replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.  I guess I did.”


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: click here to go behind the scenes.

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

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

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

August Fog

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

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

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

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


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

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

“You’re Allison, right?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

“Your break is earlier than ours.”

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

“Great!  I got straight As last quarter.”

“Congratulations!”

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

“So you still have one more quarter?”

“Yeah.  I need three more classes.”

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

“Probably stay there.”

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

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

“What’s that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I guess.”

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

“Really?” Dan asked.  “How come?”

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

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

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

“I don’t know.”

“I do.  Just ask her out.”

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


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

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

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

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

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

“Hello?” Allison said.

“Hi, Allison?  It’s Dan.”

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

“Are you seeing anyone now?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

I was very wrong, of course.

(To be continued…)

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

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

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

Early April, 1998. Trash. (#168)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 14 Comments

I wore shorts to class on the Thursday of the first week of spring quarter.  I had read in the newspaper this morning about an arriving heat wave, with the warmest days of 1998 so far coming this weekend.  Today was supposed to reach 87 degrees, with temperatures in the 90s possible for the weekend.  In most years, the Fake Spring of early March gives way to cooler temperatures for much of the rest of March and April, but that had not happened this year.  March stayed mostly warm, and April was looking to begin warm as well.

I had two classes on Thursday, Fiction Writing and the discussion section for Christian Theology, with a break for lunch in between.  I arrived on my bike early and sat in the Memorial Union, reading the Daily Colt and studying until it was time to go to class.  I got up and walked south across the Quad.  I saw a girl with straight brown hair and glasses approaching me; I instinctively got ready to wave and say hi, but as she got closer, I realized that this was not Sasha.  Sasha wore those glasses with the lenses that automatically get darker in sunlight, and it was bright enough outside that her glasses would have been dark by now.  This girl’s glasses were not.

I looked around to see if Sasha was anywhere nearby; I did not see her.  That made sense, though.  My schedule had me walking from the Quad to Orton Hall every day this quarter, but it was on Monday and Wednesday when I had seen her walking the other direction, and not on Tuesday.  Sasha was a friend from church.  She was a senior at Jeromeville High School, but in a special program for high-achieving students where she took classes here at the University of Jeromeville while still in high school.  My schedule on Tuesdays and Thusdays was different from my schedule on the other days, and hers probably was too.

Yesterday, when I saw her, she was wearing this black hat that kind of looked like a beret.  I normally did not like that kind of hat, but on her it looked cute.  “Nice hat,” I blurted out as she approached.

“Thanks!” Sasha replied, smiling.  We proceeded to make small talk for several minutes, and I was almost late to class because of that.

Fiction Writing met on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so today was the second day of class.  I had gone into the first day not entirely sure what to expect.  It was a small class, meeting in the smallest-sized classroom.  The instructor was a Ph.D. student in the English department named Serena Chang.  Students working on advanced degrees at the University of Jeromeville often worked part-time as teaching assistants, graders, and laboratory assistants, but some departments actually allowed graduate students to teach lower-level undergraduate classes.  I had not had a class taught by a graduate student since the first two mathematics classes I took freshman year.

Serena said to call her Serena, not Ms. Chang, probably because she was used to teaching freshmen, who in turn were used to calling their teachers Mr. and Ms. in high school.  Serena was short, slim, and of Asian descent.  I was expecting the class not to be too difficult, since it was an introductory class and I was a senior, but Serena seemed to want to set the tone early that this would not be the case.  “Don’t expect this class to be an easy A,” she said.  “I taught this same class last quarter, and I only gave one A in a class of twenty-five.”  I’m in trouble, I thought.  English was not my strong point.

I recognized one familiar face in the class, Tim Walton, a freshman whom I knew from church and Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, with dark curly hair and glasses that reminded me of pictures I had seen of Buddy Holly.  Today, there was an empty seat next to Tim. “May I sit here?” I asked, motioning to the empty seat.

“Hey, Greg,” Tim replied.  “Sure.”

Today’s class was all about setting.  The textbook for the class was an anthology of short stories compiled specifically for use in creative writing classes.  Serena lectured on the importance of setting to a story, then assigned us a story to read from the textbook and a worksheet with writing exercises on establishing setting.  By the time I left class, I was already thinking about my responses to the exercises, what I could write in order to establish a setting for a story.


I said hi to Sasha again on the way to class on Friday, but I did not see her in the usual place on Monday.  Saying hi to Sasha on the way to Dr. Hurt’s Christian Theology class had already felt like part of my routine this quarter, and although it should not have been a big deal, it kept bugging me all day that I had not seen her today.  I hoped that she was all right, and that she was not sick.  I also hoped her schedule had not changed, and that I would be seeing her around campus regularly again.

That night, my roommate Sean was on the couch in the living room watching television, and I was sitting alone in the bedroom that we shared, at the desk under my lofted bed.  I worked on mathematics homework while listening to music, and the computer was on although I was not doing anything with it at the moment.  After finishing a particularly long problem, I stood up to take a study break, stretched, and got an idea.

I knew Sasha’s email address.  I could write to her and just say hi, and say something about not seeing her on campus.  I could try to make it sound humorous that talking to her had become part of my routine.  It would be another several years before I realized that some women would find such an unsolicited email creepy, especially since Sasha had never explicitly given me her email address.  I emailed Internet friends to see how they were doing all the time, and I occasionally did so with real life friends as well, especially if I had seen them recently and remembered something I forgot to say to them.  So I saw no problem with emailing Sasha just to say hi since I did not see her in person today.  And I did not consider it creepy that I knew Sasha’s email address.  I had a contact list of all the youth staff from church, since I was a volunteer with The Edge, the group for junior high school students, and Sasha was on the list as a volunteer with Next Generation, the preteen youth group.  Sasha’s email also appeared in the To: field of group emails that I had received from Erica Foster.

I opened a new email window and began typing.

To: sdtravis@jeromeville.edu
From: gjdennison@jeromeville.edu
Subject: hi

Hey!  How are you?  I just wanted to say hi since didn’t see you on the way to class today.  Saying hi to you feels like part of my routine now.  Everything ok?  How was your weekend?  I’ll talk to you soon!

-gjd

I went back and deleted the sentence about part of my routine, since that sounded a little awkward.  I clicked Send.


When I got home from class the following afternoon, I checked my email, and felt the adrenaline rush through my body when I saw that Sasha had written me back.  I had experienced that feeling before when I got a message from someone I was nervous about hearing from.

From: “Sasha Travis” <sdtravis@jeromeville.edu>
To: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1998 12:07 -0700
Subject: Re: hi

Hi Greg! Yeah, I was at class yesterday morning, but I didn’t have to hurry back to Jeromeville High because they’re on spring break this week. So after class I went down to the Arboretum to read for a while.  It’s so pretty there!  It’s kind of annoying having two different spring breaks that don’t line up, but at least I don’t have class all day.

Last night was Next Gen.  Do you know Mariah Foreman?  We were playing a game called Human Foosball, where it’s like soccer but everyone is holding hands so you can only move side to side like the people on a foosball table, and Mariah was lined up right in front of the goal, but she tried to kick the ball and ended up tripping on it… I felt so bad for her, but it was hilarious!

How are your classes? I’m going to go run errands with my mom now.  Thanks for writing! I’ll see you soon!

Zee,
Sasha

That made sense about the different spring breaks.  Jeromeville’s spring break falls a certain number of weeks after the start of winter quarter, which always puts it in late March.  Most of the public school districts in this area, however, tie their spring breaks to Easter, typically the week before Easter, even though they cannot legally refer to it as the Easter holiday since Easter is a religious observance.  Easter was this coming Sunday, April 12, so most of the public schools would be off this week.

As I read Sasha’s email, and read it again, and thought about my encounters with Sasha over the last week, I came to a horrifying realization: I liked Sasha.  No.  This could not happen.  Sasha was too young for me, and that just felt wrong.  She was only seventeen years old, and still in high school.  She was born in 1980.  I was born in the ’70s, and that was a whole other decade.  We lived in completely different worlds.  Yet I enjoyed talking to her.  She was funny, and friendly, and the kind of talkative person that I needed to draw my introverted self out of my shell to a reasonable degree.  And I seemed to be seeing more and more of her around these days.

I went back to my math homework, but I kept thinking of Sasha, wanting to write her back and tell her about my day, and wanting to ask her what “zee” meant at the end of her message.  I decided to focus on homework and write her back at the end of the day, just before I went to bed.

I took a nap on the bed after I finished math, with my mind still full of thoughts about Sasha.  Could this work?  Could we be together?  Or did I need to stop thinking about this?  I was about to finish my bachelor’s degree, and she was in high school.  We lived in two different worlds.  I live on Earth, but not in her world.

I repeated that thought to myself, but slightly reworded: I live on Earth, but not within her world.

Iambic pentameter.

I may have been taking Fiction Writing that quarter, but I felt a poem forming in my mind, a poem about Sasha, and so far it was taking the form of a Shakespearean sonnet.  I jumped back down off the bed and grabbed a pen and paper and wrote that line down.  I climbed back up to the lofted bed and lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, occasionally rolling over to write more Sasha-related lines of iambic pentameter when they came to mind.

I know I’ve had some crazy thoughts before

Your half-dark glasses and that stupid hat

No, I thought, not stupid hat. I crossed this out and wrote “dumb beret,” but I did not like this either.  It would have looked dumb on anyone else, but it looked cute on her.  “Black beret,” that was better, and emotionally neutral.  Calling her fashion sense dumb would definitely be out of place in this poem.


Later that night, just before I went to bed, I opened Sasha’s email from earlier and clicked Reply:

From: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
To: “Sasha Travis” <sdtravis@jeromeville.edu>
Subject: Re: hi

What exactly does “zee” mean at the end of your message?

That totally makes sense about the two schools having different spring breaks.  I forgot about that.  I might have to deal with that next year when I have student teaching.  The school where I end up will probably have a different break than Jeromeville.  I’m supposed to find out before the end of the year where I’ll be next year.  I’ve heard we usually don’t place student teachers at Jeromeville High, because Jeromeville isn’t representative of what public schools in most of the state are like.  More kids from educated backgrounds in Jeromeville, I would think.

That’s hilarious about Human Foosball… I hope Mariah is ok.  I don’t know her, but she’s Shawna and Cory’s sister, right?  My classes are okay.  This math class isn’t too hard.  Christian Theology is really interesting; a lot of historical stuff that’s deeper than what comes up at church or Bible study.  I really like the Fiction Writing class.  We’re going to have to write two stories later in the quarter and share them with people in the class.  I’m a little nervous about that, but curious to see what kinds of things other people write.

I’m going to bed now… have a great day tomorrow!

-gjd

Sasha explained “zee” the next day in her next email to me.  Apparently, none of the traditional endings to letters like “love” or “sincerely” or “your friend” ever seemed to work for her, so she just made up “Z” to represent the end, because Z was at the end of the alphabet.  But she spelled it “zee” so it looked like an actual work.  I liked that.  Maybe I would start using that.  (I did not, except for in a few other emails to Sasha.)

With my routine for the quarter becoming established, I was now trying to get back into the routine of reading my Bible every day between classes.  I was now in my sixteenth month of a plan I was following to read the Bible in a year, since I was not reading every day, but I was nearing the end: I was just now beginning the readings for December.  I also started praying for wisdom, to know whether being romantically interested in Sasha was a good idea, and if so, what to do about it.  I had heard many talks in those days about letting God guide my love life and not forcing things, so maybe I just needed to leave it in God’s hands and not do anything.

Over the course of the next few days, I carried around the paper with the poem on it, writing words and lines and rhymes as I thought of them.  By the weekend, I had this:

I live on Earth, but not within her world,
Our paths cross now, but may not cross again;
I looked, I spoke, and somehow she was hurled
Into the inmost reaches of my brain.
I know I’ve had some crazy thoughts before,
But certainly it ranks among the worst
To think that she’s the one I’m searching for
Whom, after God, I’ll give my life to first.
I can’t! For I know not what lies behind
Those tinted glasses and that black beret;
So far removed, not yet among my kind,
She’s just an extra in this tragic play.
For God, Who’s kept us far apart, knows best;
I’ll  lift this up to Him, and not Him test.

“Half-dark glasses” became “tinted glasses” at one point in the thought process.  That just flowed better.  I liked the way this poem turned out.  I liked Sasha, but it probably would not work out, since she was only seventeen.  I needed to trust God with my relationship status.

Now the poem needed a title.  I often took the titles of poems from words in the poem itself, usually something in the beginning so that the title would not give away the ending.  I was about to write “Not Within Her World” at the top of the page when suddenly I stopped, remembering something that Sasha had said a few weeks ago after church when I was standing around talking to her and some others.

I had said something about other kids being mean to me in elementary school and calling me every sort of name imaginable, and the others nearby began sharing ways they had been teased in childhood.  “I got called ‘Sasha Trash’ sometimes,” Sasha said.  “It’s so dumb.  These stupid people think they’re being so clever, just because my last name starts with the same letters as ‘trash.’  Like I’ve never heard that before.”

Trash.

The poem would be called Trash.

I wrote the title at the top of the page.  It was cryptic and mysterious on the surface, but that just made it better.  I often put hidden references and messages in poems, and the title of this one would be just another one of these hidden references.  Plus, by titling the poem after something negative associated with Sasha, maybe I would start to form a negative association with Sasha in my mind and talk myself out of this crush, since it  probably would never work.

I put the poem in the folder in my file cabinet where I kept physical copies of my writing.  I was not sure if I would ever share it with anyone.

For as much as I enjoyed talking with Sasha, I knew that I needed to put away all of those thoughts of ever being more than friends with her.  The rational side of my mind was convinced that it would not work, even though the romantic side enjoyed being with her.  I just hoped that these thoughts would go away eventually.  I had no immediate plans to act on these feelings; I would just wait and see what the next few months brought.  Unfortunately, now that I had actually taken the time to write a poem, that forever established that I did have feelings for Sasha.  To that, I now would never be able to say zee.

Readers: Have you ever been interested in someone who just seemed wrong for you on the surface, but you couldn’t get that person out of your head? How’d that work out for you? 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.

March 30, 1998.  My last first day of class as an undergraduate. (#167)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

I opened the door of 105 Wellington and sat down.  After four years here at the University of Jeromeville, so much was familiar about everything I was doing this morning.  I rode my bike to campus on the usual route.  Wellington Hall had two floors above ground and a basement, full of nothing but classrooms of all sizes, and I had had many classes in Wellington before.  I was pretty sure I had even had a class in room 105 at some point, although I did not remember for sure which one.  Most of the people taking this class were juniors and seniors majoring in mathematics, with a few computer scientists and engineers in the class too.  I recognized many familiar faces from other math classes.  Jack Chalmers.  Katy Hadley.  Silas Penfield, whom I also knew from church and Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  A guy named Alan, who bore a striking resemblance to the actor and comedian Norm MacDonald.

“Greg!” Jack whispered loudly, waving.  He motioned to an empty seat next to him.  I waved and nodded, walking toward the empty seat and waving to Silas on the way.  Katy was not looking at me.

What was unfamiliar was the subject itself.  The class was called Linear Programming, Mathematics 168.  I needed one more upper-division math class to finish my Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics, and the only prerequisites for this one were lower-division calculus and linear algebra, both of which I enjoyed and found relatively easy.  But I knew very little about what linear programming actually meant.  The word “programming” made me think of computers and writing code, but the description in the course catalog did not seem to mention computers.  It said something about solving optimization problems, which I assumed meant determining the best way to do something.

The professor, Dr. Wu, was also unfamiliar to me.  I had not taken a class from him before.  He began the class by giving an example of the kinds of problems we would be studying.  “Suppose you’re planning meals with two different foods,” he said.  “Each serving of food A contains 2 grams of fat, 1 gram of carbohydrates, and 5 grams of protein, and each serving of food B contains 3 grams of fat, 4 grams of carbohydrates, and 4 grams of protein.”  Dr. Wu paused to write these measurements on the board.  “And let’s say you know that the meal has to have at least 15 grams of fat, 20 grams of carbs, and 30 grams of protein.  And you know that each serving of food A costs, say, 35 cents, and each serving of food B costs 50 cents.”  After writing the rest of the problem on the board, he continued, “How many servings of each food should you buy to minimize the cost, but still have the required amount of protein, fat, and carbohydrates?  That is a basic example of a linear programming problem.  We have something we need to maximize or minimize, but it is subject to constraints.”  I nodded, writing an abbreviated version of all of this in my notebook.  Linear programming seemed fairly straightforward as a concept, something I could visualize in the real world and express symbolically using the language of mathematics that I already knew.

The rest of that first day of class was even more straightforward.  Dr. Wu quickly reviewed some key topics of linear algebra that would be important this quarter.  I remembered all of them well, but I still took notes anyway, because of my tendency to be overly cautious when it came to studying.

After that class, I had a two hour gap before my next class.  I walked across the street to the Memorial Union and read today’s Daily Colt, completing the crossword puzzle successfully. I tore out the completed crossword puzzle to hang on my wall at home with all the other crosswords I had completed this year.  With nothing else to do for two hours after finishing the crossword puzzle, I got an early start on math homework, reading the beginning of the book and working on the first homework assignment.  I found the same example about nutrition that the professor used; he took it directly from the textbook.

When it came time for my next class, I walked south across the Quad toward Orton Hall, the other major classroom building here on the older side of campus.  As I headed across the Quad, I saw a slim, bespectacled girl with straight brown hair walking toward me.  I noticed that this girl kind of looked like Sasha Travis from church, which made me realize sadly that I would not get to say hi to her every day this quarter.  Last quarter, I did an internship every morning helping out in a math class at Jeromeville High School, where Sasha was a student, finishing her last year.  I would always see Sasha in the hallway, or at her locker, as I headed to where my bike was parked after my class was done.  Even though Sasha was still in high school, I felt like she and I had gotten to be friends, through those conversations in the hallway, and the fact that she was Erica Foster’s best friend.  Erica, a freshman at UJ, was part of my social circle already, since we were both youth group leaders at church.

As I approached this girl who looked like Sasha, I kept looking at her, realizing more and more that it was not just a resemblance; I was pretty sure this actually was Sasha.  But what was she doing on the UJ campus during the school day?  She smiled at me and waved.  Yes, definitely Sasha.

“Sasha?” I asked.

“Hi, Greg!” Sasha replied.  “How are you?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Jeromeville High has a program for high-achieving seniors to take classes at UJ during the day,” Sasha explained.  “I just got out of English 10.”

“That’s cool!” I said.  “I’m pretty good.  Three classes today.  I’m on my way to Christian Theology, with Hurt.”

“I’ve heard such good things about Dr. Hurt!  Erica took one of his classes last quarter.  I didn’t see you this morning.  Are you still TAing with Mr. Gibson?”

“No.  That was just for a quarter.”

“I have to get back to the high school,” Sasha said.  “I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah.  Have a good one!”  As I continued walking to my class, I felt a little jealous that Sasha grew up in a university town where high-achieving students had opportunities like that.  Taking university classes as a high school senior was even better than taking AP classes for college credit.  Growing up in working-class Plumdale, I was discouraged from taking too many AP classes, and the nearest university was in Mount Lorenzo, forty miles away.

I continued walking toward Orton Hall.  Dr. Hurt’s class was in one of the larger classrooms of Orton Hall, with about sixty seats, and the class was about two-thirds full by the time I got there.  I expected a lot of my friends from church and from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship to be in this class, and while a few of them were, it was not as many as I had expected.  I sat down against the wall, on the opposite side of the room from the outdoors-facing windows, and looked around as Dr. Hurt prepared to begin his lecture.  My eyes moved toward a corner of the room I had not seen as I was walking in, where I saw Carrie Valentine sitting with a notebook on her desk.  She looked up and made eye contact and waved at me.  I did my best to smile, nervously, and waved back.  Dr. Hurt began speaking just at that moment, saving me from having to decide whether or not to go talk to Carrie.

Last year, Carrie was always friendly to me, but things seemed a little tense the last few months ever since she turned me down for a date.  She had said that everything was okay, that I had done nothing wrong, but I was not sure if she really was treating me differently, or if it was mostly in my head and I was avoiding her.  I felt relieved that Dr. Hurt had started class before I could talk to her, which I guess meant that I ultimately did not want to talk to Carrie right now.  I wondered if things would ever feel normal with us.

Dr. Hurt explained an overview of the class.  We would be studying the development of Christian theology from the period of the early Church through modern times.  Our study would include different schools of thought for subjects in which different branches of Christianity had slightly different beliefs, as well as some rejected schools of thoughts that had been deemed to be heresy over the years.  We would learn about the natures of God, Jesus Christ, and the Trinity; salvation, sin, and grace; and the role of the Church, among other topics.

I was still fairly new to practicing my Christian faith, and while this class did not satisfy any specific requirements other than giving me enough units to be classified as a full-time student, it was definitely something I wanted to learn.  Jeromeville was a secular public university, but our Religious Studies faculty included Dr. Hurt, a renowned New Testament scholar.  It was nice that I could still learn about Christianity in this context, even though secular public education did not include things like prayer and worship time.

When class ended, I looked up; Carrie was talking to someone I did not know, absorbed in conversation.  I got up and left before she saw me, avoiding the question of what to say to her and whether or not things would be awkward.  My next and final class on that Monday was in an hour, back in Wellington, on the other side of the Quad from Orton.  I began walking back toward the Memorial Union looking for a place to sit, but decided to just sit on the grass of the Quad instead.

The Quad was a square lawn about five hundred feet on each side.  The University of Jeromeville was founded in 1905 as an agricultural campus, with crops growing on the area that later became the Quad.  After becoming surrounded by buildings over the first three decades of the campus’ growth, the Quad was converted to a permanent lawn.  It was ringed by tall, mature European cork oaks, with other trees scattered across it at irregular intervals.  To the east were the oldest surviving buildings on campus, Old North and Old South Halls.  The Quad also bordered the Memorial Union building on the north, Wellington Hall and one other building on the west, and the library on the south, with Orton Hall on the southeast corner.

The weather was pleasant, on the warmer side but not uncomfortably hot, mostly sunny with blue skies dotted with a few clouds.  People sat on the Quad, reading, talking, napping, and eating.  I sat cross-legged and took the lunch I had packed out of my backpack, and I ate as I watched people walk past.

About ten minutes before class was scheduled to start, I walked across the street to the west to Wellington Hall, then took the stairs down to the basement.  The class was in room 6, which was a small lecture hall with around a hundred fixed seats, sloping toward the front of the room as in a theater, with an aisle down the middle.  Physical Education 43, Healthful Living, was not a class that would have been on my radar to take.  My lifestyle would not exactly be considered healthful, but the class was required for the teacher training program that I would be in next year.  And it was only two units, meeting for one hour twice a week, so it would not be as much work as most classes.

I sat in a row that was still mostly empty, one seat in from the aisle.  As the room gradually filled over the next few minutes, I looked around to see if anyone I recognized was in the class.  I saw two or three faces that I recognized from various places, but no one I knew in particular.  Then my eyes reached the door in the back of the room.

You have got to be kidding me, I thought.

Carrie Valentine walked through the door.  She saw me and immediately made eye contact, smiling and waving, noticing the empty seat next to me.  I waved back.

“Hey, Greg!” Carrie said, sitting in the seat next to me.  “Looks like we have two classes together!”

“I know,” I replied.  “What did you think of Hurt’s class so far?”

“Looks like it’ll be interesting.  There’s a lot of that kind of stuff I don’t really know.”

“Yeah.  Same.  I grew up Catholic, and going to Jeromeville Covenant now, I’m always interested to know about differences between Catholics and other Christians.”

“How was your spring break?”

“It was good.  I went to see my family for most of it.  We had an 80th birthday party for my grandpa.”

“Oh, how nice!  Are you and your grandpa close?”

“Yeah.  This is Mom’s dad, and they always lived just a mile away growing up, so we saw them all the time.  I got to see some relatives I don’t see often.  Some came all the way from Oregon.  A lot of Grandpa’s friends were there too.  What did you do over break?”

“Really nothing.  Just relaxed at home.  Hung out with my parents and my sister, and saw one of my friends from high school.”

“That’s nice.”

The professor, Dr. Payton, began speaking, introducing herself first, and telling us to make sure that we were all in the right class, PE 43, Healthful Living.  “The class is always around this size every quarter,” Dr. Payton explained, “so I am not going to get to know every one of you personally.  But if you ever see me around campus, feel free to wave at me and just say, ‘Forty-three!’  That way, I will know that you were a student of mine in this class.  I’ve been doing this class for twenty years, and you wouldn’t believe some of the places I’ve run into people who recognized me.  I’ve had strangers on airplanes come up to me and say, ‘Forty-three.’  My husband and I went to an opera in Bay City, and one of the ushers at the theater remembered me.  The strangest one of all was when we were on vacation in France, and we toured a historic monastery.  Some actual monks walked past the tour group, and one of the monks leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Quarante-trois.’”  A few in the room chuckled.

As Dr. Payton continued outlining the class, it became apparent that I was not sure what I was expecting from this class, but what she was describing was not exactly it.  I expected somewhat of a rehash of what I had learned in high school health class: nutrition, exercise, hygiene, and of course sexuality.  But in addition to that, this class would cover other topics, including stress management, relationships, and alternative medicine.  “Please be respectful if there is anything you don’t agree with in this class,” Dr. Payton said.  “One year, I was reading the teacher evaluations at the end of the year, and in regards to the homeopathic medicine presentation, someone wrote, ‘I don’t believe in voodoo.’  Homeopathic medicine is not voodoo.  It is a type of medicine with theories and methods practiced by people around the world.”

Since UJ was a secular public university, and I was a Christian, I expected that I would probably have disagreements with some of the material in the chapters on relationships and sexuality.  But Dr. Payton’s request to be respectful certainly seemed reasonable.  And while I generally associated homeopathic medicine with New Age hippie nonsense, I would even approach that with an open mind when we got to that chapter, since I knew little about it.

I stood and stretched when class was over.  “Do you have any more classes today?” Carrie asked me.

“No.  I’m done.  I’m headed home now.”

“Nice!  I have a discussion now on Mondays, but I’m done after this class on Wednesdays.”

“Enjoy your class,” I said.  “I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah!  Have a great afternoon!”

I walked back to my bike, unlocked it, and rode north to the end of West Quad Avenue, where I turned left onto a road heading generally northwest.  I passed more classroom and lab buildings, then rode through the North Residential Area to the intersection of Fifth Street and Andrews Road.  I continued north on Andrews Road for almost a mile, then turned left and zigzagged through the neighborhood to my house at 902 Acacia Drive.  The house was quiet; I was the first one home today.  I connected to the dialup Internet and got on Internet Relay Chat.  A nineteen-year-old girl from Texas named Melody, whom I had met in this same chat channel a few days earlier, was on; I messaged with her for about half an hour, telling her all about my day, about my new classes and the uncomfortable situation of having two classes with a girl who said no to going out with me a couple months ago.  Melody told me about a party she and her friends went to over the weekend.  I heard someone else get home and told Melody that I needed to go, but I would email her later.  I did not want to tie up the telephone line during the day with other people in the house. 

I had finished my last first day of class as an undergraduate.  So far, this quarter did not seem too difficult.  I had one more class that did not meet today, Fiction Writing, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10:30.  That class sounded like fun, and hopefully it would not be too tough, especially since I liked writing fiction to begin with.  This would be a good way to finish off my bachelor’s degree.

About a month later, we reached the lesson in health class about homeopathy, and we had a guest speaker that week.  About five minutes into that lecture, I completely understood why the anonymous former student had called homeopathy voodoo.  Nothing about the presentation made any sense from a scientific perspective.  I questioned why this belonged in a serious class at a prestigious university, but Jeromeville was enough of a hippie town and school that I was not entirely surprised either.

Although none of these classes had assigned seats, it was human nature for most people to sit in or near the same seat each time class met.  Because of this, Carrie and I typically sat on opposite sides of the room in Dr. Hurt’s class, but we almost always sat next to each other in health class.  By the second week of the quarter, I genuinely felt that whatever awkwardness might be lingering between Carrie and me was gone.  We did not talk about my failed attempt to ask her out; I just did my best to put that in the past and move on, and Carrie never did anything to make me feel bad about what happened.  That incident did come up in conversation once, three years later, in a respectful and productive way that gave me a lot of closure regarding why she said no.  That mutual respect is part of the reason why Carrie is the only one of my many unrequited crushes from my Jeromeville years with whom I am on speaking terms today.

Readers: Have you ever had an experience where you were in close proximity to someone with whom you had issues in the past? How did that go? 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.

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 11 Comments

A few days before my high school graduation, our class took an overnight trip to Disneyland, in California.  For a few designated days in May and June, the park closes early to the general public and stays open late for these all-night graduation trips.  On the way home the next morning, near the start of the long all-day drive, we drove past a fast food restaurant on a frontage road within view of the freeway.  The restaurant had the familiar white and red building, and red and yellow sign, used by many fast food establishments, but the name on the sign was one unfamiliar to me: IN-N-OUT BURGER.

“That place looks like such a total ripoff of McDonald’s,” someone on my bus said.

“No way!” someone else replied.  “Have you ever been to In-N-Out Burger?  It’s way better than McDonald’s!”

I would learn eventually that In-N-Out Burger had been a southern California mainstay since the late 1940s, when they opened their first location based around a concept that was new for the time period: the drive-thru lane.  The earliest In-N-Out Burgers only had drive-thru lanes, a walk-up window, and a couple of picnic tables; indoor seating came eventually with future locations.

On that day I first heard the name In-N-Out Burger, they had around ninety locations spread out throughout southern California.  Unbeknownst to me, in the last couple years, In-N-Out Burger had begun expanding beyond southern California, and a month or so after that graduation trip, I would learn that In-N-Out Burger had a location under construction not far from my house.  I never got to eat there, though, because I moved to Jeromeville for school the same weekend that it opened.  My parents went there a few months later, and Mom said she liked the burger but the fries were not very good, so I spent the next three years thinking that In-N-Out Burger was not a big deal.

A few months ago, early into my senior year at the University of Jeromeville, I started hearing people say that a new In-N-Out Burger was under construction in Jeromeville.  My friends who had grown up in places with In-N-Out Burger locations all seemed excited.  In November, I took a road trip in the church van to a convention for church youth group leaders in San Diego, with the youth pastors and a few other volunteers.  On that trip, when Taylor Santiago found out that I had never eaten at In-N-Out Burger, he insisted that we go to In-N-Out Burger on the way home, so I could experience this cheeseburger.  I was instantly hooked, although by now, two months after that trip, I had only eaten In-N-Out Burger one other time, at a different location on the way home from winter break.

The last few times I had driven past In-N-Out Burger in Jeromeville, the building had looked complete, but it was clearly not open yet.  One day earlier this week, I took a walk there between classes and saw an employee outside of the closed building.  I asked him when it would open, and he said Friday, at 10:30 in the morning.

Last Wednesday, I was at church in my role as a youth group volunteer, and I mentioned to the others that In-N-Out Burger opened on Friday.  “I want to eat there as soon as possible,” I said.  “It’ll probably be crowded, but it would be fun to go on the first day.”

“I can’t go Friday,” Noah Snyder, replied.  “I’m busy all day.  And I’ve heard the lines can be pretty long on the first day.  Last year, someone I know back home drove up to Valle Luna to eat at the one there on the day it opened, and he said he had to wait almost two hours.”

“I’ll go with you,” Taylor said.  “What time are you free on Fridays?”

“I have a three-hour gap from 11 to 2.  So even if there is a two hour wait, we should make it back in time.  Hopefully if we get there early, though, the wait won’t be that long.  The guy said they open at 10:30.”

“Sounds good.  You want to walk over from campus?”

“Yeah.  That works.  Where should I meet you?”

“The flagpole at 11?  Does that work?”

“Sure!”


On Friday morning, I had my internship in Mr. Gibson’s geometry class at Jeromeville High, then I returned to the UJ campus for Abstract Algebra.  I had trouble concentrating that whole time.  It was Friday, I had Jeromeville Christian Fellowship that night, and I was looking forward to relaxing and catching up on studying over the weekend, but right now all I could think of was In-N-Out Burger.  I just wanted that hot and fresh hamburger, dripping with melted cheese and soaked in special sauce, in my mouth right now, accompanied by the hot French fries that my mother did not like for some reason.

When Abstract Algebra got out, I walked across the Quad to the flagpole outside the Memorial Union.  It was a cool and cloudy day; I was wearing a jacket, the big one that I had gotten a year ago for the trip to Urbana.  I looked around; Taylor had not yet arrived.  I stood near the flagpole, slowly pacing and looking in different directions, unsure from which direction he would be coming.  A number of other people were standing around the flagpole, presumably waiting for their friends also.  The flagpole was a common meeting point on campus, particularly in 1998 when the technology of text messaging was in its infancy.  Most university students did not have cellular phones, and the phones and phone services available in 1998 typically were not capable of sending text messages. Students looking to meet face to face had to agree on a location and a time in advance.  I started to get nervous that Taylor would not show up, or that I had misunderstood and arrived at the wrong time.  Maybe Taylor had left already and was going to In-N-Out Burger without me.  What would I do if that were the case?

It was not.  Taylor showed up around 11:10.  “Hey, man,” he said.  “You ready?”

“Yes.  Let’s go.”

Taylor and I walked diagonally southeast across the Quad, toward Orton Hall, passing Old North and Old South Halls on the left.  We turned left, to the east, on the street in front of Orton Hall, called Shelley Avenue, which then became First Street off campus.

“So how are classes this quarter?” Taylor asked at one point.  “You’re graduating in June, right?”

“Yeah, and I don’t need to overload my schedule in order to complete everything.  I’m only taking 14 units.  Two math classes, Ed Psych, and interning at Jeromeville High.”

“How’s that?  You did that last year too, right?”

“Yes.  This class isn’t all college-bound students, like the one from last year was. It’s a different experience.  A lot of them are tuned out during class and don’t do their work.”

“That would be me if I were in that class,” Taylor said, laughing.

“Ha,” I replied.

“You’re not taking the Paul class with Hurt this quarter?”

“No,” I replied.  “I couldn’t fit it into my schedule.”  I had really enjoyed all of Dr. Hurt’s other Religious Studies classes on the New Testament, but the Paul class was at the same time as Abstract Algebra.  “I’ll be able to take Christian Theology next quarter, though.”

“That’s a good one.  I took it last year.  So what will you be doing next year?”

“I’m staying at UJ for the teacher certification program.”

“Oh, good!  You’ll still be around.”

“Technically I haven’t heard yet if I’m accepted, but I know the professor who runs it.  He’s the supervising professor for my internship at Jeromeville High.  And he said he doesn’t see any reason I wouldn’t get in.  What about you?  Are you graduating in June?”

“December.  I’m gonna need one more quarter.”

“And your major will be Religious Studies?” I asked, uncertain because Taylor had changed his major multiple times in the last three and a half years.

“Yeah.”

On our left, across First Street, we walked past hotels, old houses made into office buildings, and a couple of fraternity houses.  On the right, our side of the street was lined with olive trees.  When I started at UJ, a vacant field of dirt, technically part of the university, sat between these olive trees and the eastern end of the Arboretum, but last year a new housing development, around thirty small houses specifically for university faculty, opened on that lot.

“Last week,” Taylor said, “I was hanging out with Brent one night, and we were thinking of taking a road trip this summer to go to every In-N-Out Burger.”

“That’s awesome,” I said.  “How many of them are there?”

“Like a hundred and twenty, or something like that.  But they’re only in a few states, so we wouldn’t be going all the way across the country or anything.  We’d probably take about a month for it.”

“That’s still averaging four In-N-Outs every day.”

“It’s pretty intense, but it can be done.  It’ll be a memorable experience.”

“That sounds fun,” I said.  Part of me wanted to be invited along, but another part of me did not want to give up the summer after my graduation, a shorter summer than usual since my student teaching placement next year would not be on the same schedule as UJ, to eat the exact same thing multiple times per day.

“I’ve been hanging out with Brent a lot lately.  We stay up all night talking.”

“That seems exactly like something you two would do,” I said.

“Really.  Like another time recently, we were talking about women, and dating.  And how, you know, at church and at groups like 20/20 and JCF, all they ever teach you is to wait until you’re married and not rush into things.  But they never teach you the right way to form relationships.  So, we said, it would be nice if there were a group that encouraged emotionally and spiritually healthy dating among Christians.”

“That would be helpful,” I said.  “That’s a good idea.  I know I could use some guidance on that.  I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“We were talking about all these ideas, how the married couples could mentor the newly dating couples.  And everyone could encourage the singles.”

“I wonder if a real group like that could ever happen?”

“Oh, yeah, then we were talking about what you’d call a group like that.  I told Brent, ‘We should name it after you.  The Brent Wang Fellowship.’”  Taylor laughed.

“That’s hilarious!” 

“Yeah, and I told Brent we could make t-shirts with his face on them.”

“Ha!”  I laughed loudly.  “That would be awesome!”

“So we can count on you to be a member of the BWF?”

“The BWF,” I repeated.  “You even have an acronym.  Yes.  I’m in, for sure.”

By now, we had turned right onto Cornell Boulevard, under the railroad track, and we could see In-N-Out Burger across the street on the left, between the railroad track and Highway 100.  Murder Burger, an independent restaurant that had been an institution in Jeromeville for a decade, was on the right.  Many of the locals complained about In-N-Out’s proposed location, right across the street from an established local competitor, and portrayed them as a big chain store trying to put the little guy out of business.  Murder Burger countered by expanding their menu, which already offered more variety than the minimalist menu of In-N-Out.  This is the proper response to such a situation in the business world, rather than the regulations seeking to rig the system that many Jeromevillians support.

As we crossed the street, I could see a long line of cars in the In-N-Out drive-thru and a line of people extending out of the building into the parking lot.  It was long, but not as long as I had feared.  I would make it back to campus in plenty of time for my class at two o’clock.

“How is dating going for you anyway?” Taylor asked.  “Any women in your life?”

“No,” I replied dejectedly.  “I got brave and asked someone out at the end of last quarter.  She said no.”

“Aww.  Who was it?”

I hesitated.  I never liked to tell people who I liked.  I had a history of being made fun of and embarrassed on the few occasions when I did.  I trusted Taylor, though.  “Carrie Valentine,” I said in a slightly hushed voice.  “Do you know her?  She goes to JCF.”

“I’ve heard that name, but I don’t think I know her.  Sorry, it didn’t work out, man.”

“I don’t know.  Nothing about dating makes sense to me.”

“That’s why the world needs the Brent Wang Fellowship!”

“Exactly!”


We waited in line for about half an hour, but the wait for the food once we ordered was much more reasonable, about ten minutes.  It appeared that In-N-Out Burger had anticipated the large crowds and scheduled more people than usual to work today, so that all of the customers would receive their food quickly.

I sighed happily as that first bite of cheeseburger hit my taste buds.  The French fries were unusually hot as well.  I would realize over the next few months, as I made more visits to In-N-Out, that their fries have a very short half life.  They are wonderful when you eat them fresh, but they quickly become cold and turn into what are basically long potato chips.  I reasoned that this must have been why my mother did not like In-N-Out fries: they probably got cold by the time she got home and ate them.

We were done eating by 12:30.  There were many people wandering the restaurant waiting to take our table, so we went back to campus and let someone else sit in our spot.  As we were leaving, Taylor asked if we could take a picture.  He handed his camera to someone just arriving, who stepped back and took a picture of both of us outside the restaurant.

When we got back to campus, Taylor had other things to do, so we parted ways back at the Memorial Union.  I walked inside and sat down, finding a copy of the Daily Colt and turning to the crossword puzzle.

The rest of the day was a typical Friday, although I kept thinking of that wonderful lunch.  I had Educational Psychology at two o’clock, then I took the bus home and took a nap.  After I made a plate of spaghetti for dinner, I went back to campus for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  I arrived about ten minutes early and walked into the room, still mostly empty.  The first person I saw was Brent Wang, who was always there early because he was in the worship band.

“Hey, Greg,” Brent said.  “How was In-N-Out?”  It was no surprise to me that Brent knew that Taylor and I had gone to In-N-Out for lunch, since Brent was one of Taylor’s best friends.

“So good!” I said enthusiastically.

“What’s so good?” Scott Madison asked, walking up behind me.  He was with his fiancée Amelia and two freshmen from the dorm-based Bible study he led, a cute curly-haired blonde girl named Brianna and a tall, messy-haired guy named Blake.

“My lunch today,” I replied cryptically.

“Where’d you go?” Amelia asked.

“I know!  I know!” Brent exclaimed, smiling slyly.

“Did you make something or go out somewhere?” Amelia said.

As Brent continued, I realized what he was doing.  He was not saying “I know”; he was actually saying the letters “I-N-O,” the initials for In-N-Out Burger, in a way that intentionally sounded like he was saying “I know.”  “I-N-O!  I-N-O!”

“Taylor and I went to In-N-Out Burger,” I explained.

Brianna then joined the conversation, blurting out excitedly, “It’s open?”

“It opened today.”

“No way!  My roommates and I need to find a time to go!  I used to go to In-N-Out back home all the time!”

“That sounds delicious,” Amelia said.  “Glad you were able to make it.”

“We’ll have to go this weekend,” Scott added.


Taylor and Brent never did their In-N-Out road trip.  But that conversation planted a seed in my mind, a new ongoing goal in life: eat at as many different In-N-Out Burger locations as possible.  I started looking up In-N-Out Burger locations nearby every time I went on a road trip, so that I could go to one that I had never been to before.  Within a few years, I was having to make side trips or take less direct routes in order to find In-N-Out Burger locations new to me.  Sometimes, I have traveled through areas with In-N-Out Burger locations where I do not often go, stopping at multiple In-N-Out Burgers for the same meal, getting a cheeseburger at one place, French fries in the next town down the road, and a drink still somewhere else.

After a quarter-century of keeping track of all the In-N-Out Burgers I have been to, my total today, in the spring of 2023, stands at 125.  In-N-Out has been expanding steadily, now with almost 400 stores across seven states and plans to expand to two more states.  In-N-Out’s roots are in California, and most of their recent expansion has been focused on the states where Californians have fled in great numbers, as California’s quality of life has declined sharply in the 2010s and 2020s.  This is a brilliant marketing strategy, giving them a built-in fan base in their new cities.  On the average, they have opened about three new locations for every time I add one to my list.  I will likely never eat at every In-N-Out Burger in my lifetime, but this goal of finding In-N-Out Burgers new to me will nevertheless give me adventures to go on for years to come.

Taylor and Brent’s ideas for the Brent Wang Fellowship seemed silly at the time, something that a couple of girl-crazy but single university students might come up with.  But the more I thought about this over the next few weeks, it actually made a lot of sense.  Taylor was exactly right; there is a lot of discussion in church youth and college groups about what not to do as far as dating and relationships are concerned, but very little discussion about what to do.  I needed this kind of guidance.  No one had taught me anything about relationships in childhood or my teens, so I had no concept of how to express interest to a girl, or how to go on a date, or what kind of activities constituted a date and what did not.

I had not yet driven myself crazy with another unrequited crush, but there were a few girls I kind of wanted to get to know better.  Like Sadie Rowland from JCF.  I had not talked to her in a few days, she was not at JCF that week, but when we did talk, the conversation just seemed to flow naturally and effortlessly.  Or Brianna Johns, the curly-haired blonde freshman.  She had gotten excited when I said that In-N-Out Burger was open, so we definitely had one thing in common right there.  Yet something told me that if I had asked her on a date and chosen In-N-Out Burger as the destination, this probably would not be seen as particularly romantic.  But I did not know any romantic date restaurants, nor did I know what did and did not constitute a place to ask someone on a date.  This was all so confusing, and thinking about it just made me discouraged.  Maybe one day I would actually meet someone in a way that I would not have to worry about doing something stupid.

Readers: Have you ever been to In-N-Out Burger? Do you have any chain restaurants specific to your part of your country that you love? Tell me about it in the comments!

Also, this is not a sponsored post. In-N-Out Burger is not paying me to say any of this.

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.

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 14 Comments

Three more days, I kept telling myself as I stared out the window of the bus.  Three more days, and I could finally take a break from studying.  I could take a break from everything, in fact.  It was Tuesday morning, and by Friday afternoon I would be done with this quarter.  

I arrived at campus around nine-thirty, an hour before my first final.  I had been studying abstract algebra all weekend, and I felt ready for this final.  But I still found an empty seat in the very crowded Coffee House, across the street from Wellington Hall where my class met, and reread sections of the textbook over again.  That was just who I was when it came to studying.

A few minutes after ten, I saw a girl from my math class named Jillian walk by.  She was a thin, pale girl with shoulder-length straight hair that was dyed black, and she held a large chocolate chip cookie in a paper wrapper.  I did not know her well, we had never really said more than hi to each other, but I recognized her enough to wave.  She waved back and walked toward me.

“How’s it going?” Jillian asked.  “Ready for the final?”

“I think so,” I said.  “What about you?”

“I’m freaking out.  This is gonna be so hard.  Can I sit down?”

“Sure.”

“Quiz me on vocabulary.”

“What’s a group?”

“It’s a set with, um, an operation on the elements of the set, and the inverse property.”

“And?”

“Oh.  And the identity.”

“And there’s one more thing.”

“There is?”

“Another property that the operation has.”

“Commutative.  No, associative.”

“Associative, yes.  And a group with the commutative property also, what’s that called?”

“It’s that one that starts with A.  Crap.  I don’t remember.”

“You’re right, though.  Abelian group.”

“Oh, yeah!”

Jillian opened her textbook and skimmed through it as she took a bite of her cookie.  “It’s a little chewy,” she said after swallowing. “It’s like it isn’t cooked all the way through.”  She took another bite and continued, “I guess I should say it isn’t baked all the way through.”

“That’s weird,” I said.  “Why do they call it a cookie?  You bake it, you don’t cook it.  They should call it a bakie.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna start using that,” I said.  “Chocolate chip bakies.”

Jillian looked up at me.  “How are you doing this?  We have a final in a few minutes, I’m freaking out trying to cram as much as I can, and you’re over here talking about bakies!  I wish I could be as calm as you right now.”

I laughed.  “I guess I just feel ready for this final.”

“I wish I did.”

Jillian and I sat at the table for another fifteen minutes or so, occasionally quizzing each other about abstract algebra.  When I noticed it was almost time for the final, I asked, “You want to walk over now?  It’s almost time.”

“Sure,” Jillian replied, grabbing her bag and slinging it over her shoulder.  I put on my backpack, and we walked together across the street to Wellington Hall.

“What are you doing over break?” I asked.

“Just going home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Capital City.”

“That’s not far.”

“What about you?  Are you going home?”

“Yeah.  Plumdale.  Near Gabilan and Santa Lucia.”  By then, my fourth year at the University of Jeromeville, I no longer waited for people to ask “Where’s that?” when I mentioned Plumdale.

“How far is that?  Couple hours’ drive?”

“Yeah.  Two and a half.  Then for New Year’s, I’m going to see my old roommate at his parents’ house in Valle Luna.  He’s in medical school in New York now.  And apparently he always has these massive New Year’s parties at his parents’ house.  I’ve never been to one.”

“That sounds fun.”

The math final was straightforward, and I thought I did well.  I hoped that Jillian did well too; she seemed really worried about this final.  Although fourth-year university mathematics courses were not as easy to me as high school math was, I still felt bad for people who struggled so much with math when I did not.  Everything made so much sense, and everything followed consistent rules.  But those people who are not good at math are good at other things in life that I am not.  Unfortunately, not everything follows consistent rules the way math does.


Part of the reason I felt like the rules of life were so inconsistent were that I, like all people, was often not in control of the things that happened to me.  I had heard all of the clichés about making things happen and not being a victim of circumstances, but that could only go so far.  I was not in control, and I never would be.  But occasionally, the unpredictability of life worked out in my favor.

I had two other finals, my other math class tomorrow afternoon and English on Friday.  I wanted to find a quiet spot in the library and study this afternoon before I went home, but first it was time for lunch.  I walked back to the Coffee House where I had been sitting earlier.  The student-run Coffee House, despite its name, also sold burritos, pizza, sandwiches, and many other food items.  I got a slice of pepperoni pizza and a Coca-Cola and carried it over to the tables, and I saw something that had the potential to make this good day perfect.

Carrie Valentine was sitting at a table, eating lunch, alone.

I walked closer to make sure it was her, since she was facing away from me.  The girl at the table was taller than average, with straight brown hair, wearing a dark red long-sleeve shirt and blue jeans that were frayed at the bottom of the legs.  I approached from the side, hesitantly at first until I recognized her for sure, then more purposefully.  Carrie saw me approaching out of the corner of her dark brown eyes.  As she turned to look at me, I said, “Hey.”

“Hi, Greg!” Carrie replied enthusiastically.  “Sit down!”

I smiled and sat across from her.  “How are you?  Did you have any finals yet today?”

“I had one this morning at 8, and I have another one at 4.  I’m staying here all day to study so I don’t get distracted.  But I’m taking a lunch break.”

“I just got out of a final, for abstract algebra.”

“Abstract algebra,” Carrie repeated.  “The name of that class makes my brain hurt.”

“That’s what a lot of people say,” I said.  “The final was pretty straightforward.”

“Good!  How many more do you have?”

“One tomorrow and one Friday.”

“That’s not too bad.”

“Yeah.  I’ve been working on a new episode of Dog Crap and Vince during study breaks at home  I should have enough time to get that done this week.”

“Dog Poop… what?”

“Dog Crap and Vince.  I haven’t told you about that?”

“No!  What’s that?”

“Did I tell you about the movie I made with the youth group kids from church?”

“Yeah!  That sounded like a lot of fun!”

“I do a website called Dog Crap and Vince.  It’s a series of illustrated stories about two weird teenagers and their friends.  I’ve been doing things with these characters for several years now.  And that movie was based on those characters.”

“What did you say it was called?”

“Dog Crap and Vince.”

“Dog Crap?”

“Yes.”

“One of the guys is named Dog Crap?  Why?”

“Because I was sixteen when I made them up, and anything related to poop is funny.”

“That makes sense.  I guess, at least.  I only have a sister, so I don’t know what goes through the minds of teenage boys.  So you write a story and draw pictures to go with it?”

“The drawings really aren’t that good.  It would probably work better as animation, but I don’t have the capability to do that right now.”

“That’s so cool, though!  What’s this next one about?”

“It’s a Christmas special.  The guys and their friends do a Secret Santa exchange.”

“Secret Santa?”

“Yeah.  They all get randomly assigned someone else in the group to buy a gift for.”

“Oh, okay.  I’ve heard of that, but I’ve never called it Secret Santa.”

“Dog Crap gets someone he doesn’t know very well, and he keeps buying exactly the wrong thing.  And Vince has to buy something embarrassing for the person he has.  And then when they meet up to exchange the gifts, all these weird things happen.”

“That sounds funny!   Are you looking to get this published someday?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “For now I’m just doing this for fun.  You want to read it?”

Carrie’s eyes lit up.  “Yeah!” she said, smiling.  “It’ll probably have to wait until I’m done with finals, but I’ll totally read it!”

“I’ll send you the link when I’m done.  I should be done later tonight.”

“Thanks!”

“So what are you doing over break?”

“Just going home.  And my sister is coming over.  She’s older, she lives on her own. What about you?”

“Same, going home.”  I told Carrie about going to visit my family, and about Brian Burr’s New Year party in Valle Luna.

“I remember Brian,” Carrie replied.  “That’ll be fun seeing him.”

“Are you doing anything for New Year’s?”

“Not really.  I don’t usually.”

“Nothing wrong with that.  Brian said everyone can stay over at his house, so I can try to sleep before I drive home.”

“That’ll be good.”

Carrie and I had both finished eating by then.  “I really should get going now,” she said.  “But it was good hanging out with you!”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “I’ll send you a link to Dog Crap and Vince.”

“Yes!  That’ll be good!  Good luck with the rest of your finals, and enjoy your break!”

“Thanks!  You too!”  Carrie gave me a hug, and I walked toward the library, to find a quiet place to immerse myself in number theory in preparation for my next final exam.

Later that night, after I finished the Dog Crap and Vince Christmas episode and posted it to the website, I opened a blank email and began typing to Carrie.  I copied and pasted the link to Dog Crap and Vince, then continued typing, “How did your final go?  How many more do you have?  I hope you did well!  It was good to see you today.”

Earlier today, an opportunity had fallen into my lap when I got to talk to Carrie at the Coffee House.  Now, it felt like time to seize that opportunity and use it to take a giant leap forward.  I paused, trying to think of exactly how to word the next part.  It had to be absolutely perfect.  After I deleted three or four attempts at the next sentence, I came up with this: “Would you ever want to get together for lunch again sometime?  If you’re busy with finals, we can plan for after we get back from break.  Take care, and I’ll talk to you soon.”

Now all there was to do was wait.


After I finished the number theory final on Wednesday afternoon, I felt confident.  I was pretty sure I answered everything correctly.  When I got home, the first thing I did was check my email.  I heard the sound that I had new messages, and I could feel my body tense up when I saw that one of the messages was from Carrie.  I took a few deep breaths, then double-clicked Carrie’s name to open the message.

From: “Carrie Valentine” <cavalentine@jeromeville.edu>
To: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 1997 14:06 -0800
Subject: Re: Dog Crap and Vince

Hi Greg!  Your Dog Crap and Vince story was funny!  Thanks for sharing!  Also, thank you for the offer, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to get together right now.  But good luck with finals, and have a great Christmas with your family.

– Carrie

I closed the message on the screen, then climbed up to my bed on the loft above the computer and lay down, face down.  What did I do wrong?  Why was this not a good idea?  I was confused.  Did this mean that Carrie did not want to talk to me at all anymore?  Was she only being nice to my face because it was proper, and she really hated me and did not like talking to me?  Should I leave her alone now?  Should I have left her alone yesterday?  Or was she just busy with finals?

As I thought about this, I realized something.  If Carrie really was just pretending to like me, and we were not really friends, then maybe I had nothing to lose by asking her why she turned me down and finding out what was really going on.  What would happen if I asked her?  She would get mad and never talk to me again?  Maybe that was for the best.  On the other hand, if there was some other reason Carrie turned me down, then she really was enough of a friend that she might actually be honest with me.  I typed another email before I went to bed that night, trying not to sound presumptuous, arrogant, or anything else that might jeopardize this friendship that may or may not exist.  It took several tries to get the wording right, and I still was not sure it came across the way I wanted.

To: “Carrie Valentine” <cavalentine@jeromeville.edu>
From: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Subject: Re: Dog Crap and Vince

I’m sorry if I did anything wrong.  May I ask what you meant when you said it wasn’t a good idea to get together?

I spent most of Thursday studying, although the English final tomorrow would not exactly be the kind of exam where I had to memorize facts.  I went to campus for a few hours just to get out of the house.  I checked my email when I got back, and this message was in my inbox.

From: “Carrie Valentine” <cavalentine@jeromeville.edu>
To: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 12:29 -0800
Subject: Re: Dog Crap and Vince

I just meant that it kind of sounded like you were asking me on a date.  I’ll see you after break.  Good luck with your last final!

I thought, what does that mean?  Of course I was asking you on a date!  Why is that a bad thing?  If Carrie really was not interested in dating me, why could she not just say so?  I noticed she did not answer the part of the question about if I had done anything wrong.  It would be nice to know if I did something wrong, so I could fix that for future interactions.  It was possible she was just not attracted to me that way; I had plenty of single female friends I was not attracted to as more than a friend through no wrongdoing of their own.  That answer would have been disappointing, since that seems to be the case with all girls I am interested in, but at least I would not be left to wonder what I did.

I thought I did fine on the English final, it seemed like a simple enough piece of writing, but when grades were released, I ended up with a B in that class.  It was my only B in five years at UJ, from freshman year through the teacher training classes I would be taking the following year.  I did not have a perfect 4.0 grade-point average before that, though, because I had gotten two A-minuses over the years and would get one more later that year, and an A-minus only counts as 3.7 grade points in UJ’s grading system.  There were now two reasons that 1997 was ending on a disappointing note.  Hopefully Brian Burr’s New Year party would be awesome enough to make up for this disappointment.

I still was not sure how to interpret Carrie’s remark about being asked out on a date.  Was the act of someone asking someone else on a date being construed as a bad thing in and of itself?  Why?  Was it not true that people asked other people on dates all the time?  If this confused me now, then it is little wonder that upcoming events of 1998 and the years beyond would find me even more confused and frustrated.  But that is another story for another time.

None of those things ended up being the reason why Carrie had written what she did.  I was a little distant for the next couple months, but Carrie and I did stay friends after this.  An opportunity arose a few years later to bring this up and ask about what happened.  By then, it was less awkward to discuss, since it was clear that it did not matter and I was not trying to rekindle anything.  Carrie and I lived sixty miles apart at that time, and she was already in a relationship with the man she would eventually marry.  I found out that the reason she rejected me was actually more complicated than any of the scenarios I had considered in my head, and her side of the story definitely cleared things up.  Because of that, it is no coincidence that Carrie is the only one of my many failed love interests at UJ whom I am still occasionally in touch with today.

But there was no such comfort in my mind as I packed my car and drove down Highway 6 through the hilly outer suburbs of Bay City to San Tomas, then down Highway 11 to my parents’ house.  All I knew was that I had failed again in making any meaningful steps toward finding a girlfriend.  This had been the story of my life so far, and I was learning nothing that would lead to more successful outcomes in the future.

Readers: Merry Christmas! I’ll be taking a break from writing for a while, as I always do whenever character-Greg takes finals in December and June. Keep in touch, and leave a comment about anything you want… something this story made you think of, something you’re doing for the holidays if you celebrate anything this time of year, or just something random and silly.

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.

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

~ Greg Dennison ~ 15 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 10, 1997.  A silly party game at Scott and Joe’s apartment. (#148)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 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.

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.