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

October 3, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 9 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pretty good. Ready to go in?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes. Tell him I said hi.”

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

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

“That’s a great story.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s exciting,” I said.

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

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

“That was awesome!”

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

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

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

“I will. Drive safely!”

“You too!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gregory Dennison,” I replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“University of Jeromeville,” I replied.

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

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

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

“I’ll look into that.”

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

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

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

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

“Thank you for the ride,” I replied.

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

“Sounds good. I’ll see you then.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes. I’m Greg.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where is home?”

“Plumdale. Santa Lucia County.”

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

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

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

“Wow,” I said. “Funny.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Simpsons,” Mike replied.

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

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

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

“Yeah! Nice to meet you.”

“You too.”

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

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

“I love that rake scene,” Ivan commented.

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” I said. “Have a good night.”

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

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

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

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

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May 23-25, 1997. Canceled plans and a trendy haircut. (#132)

April 24, 2022April 24, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 8 Comments

For the last few months, I had been volunteering as a leader with The Edge, the junior high school youth group at Jeromeville Covenant Church. Every year, the students go to Winter Camp over a weekend in January or February, and Adam, the youth pastor, gives them all a mixtape of Christian music from many different artists and genres. Back in 1997, there was no Spotify or YouTube for people to share their favorite music with friends. Instead, we Generation X-ers would play songs from compact discs or cassette tapes, one at a time, and record them on blank tapes. I had begun volunteering with The Edge shortly after Winter Camp that year, so I did not get a copy of Edge Mix ’97, but I borrowed it from the youth group music library and made a copy for myself. I discovered many Christian bands and musicians through Edge Mixes over the years.

One of the more intriguing songs on Edge Mix ’97 was called “Hitler’s Girlfriend,” by a band based in Bay City called the Dime Store Prophets. It was a slow rock song, with lyrics that I found a little mysterious. The chorus said, “I’m not myself until you are you, if I close my eyes, I’m killing you.” I thought the song had something to do with lamenting the un-Christlike tendency to look away when others were in need. The song also contained the line, “I feel like Hitler’s girlfriend, I’m blind to this and numb to that.” Some have suggested that Eva Braun, the real-life Hitler’s girlfriend, lived a sheltered life and did not know about the Holocaust, although other historians find this unlikely.

I played that song three times last night while I did math homework. Although it was the only Dime Store Prophets song that I knew, I wanted it to be fresh in my mind, because the Dime Store Prophets were playing a free live show right here at the University of Jeromeville today, outdoors on the Quad. University Life, the college group from a large church nearby, not the church I attended, had put this show together, and they had been promoting it at all the local churches and college ministries. Nothing was going to stop this from being the best day I had had in a long time.

Except maybe for pouring rain.

I did not expect rain this week. Last Monday had been the first day of hundred-degree heat for 1997, and it felt like the hot, sunny, dry weather of summer had arrived for good. But today was cool with heavy rain. A dramatic cooling trend in late May was rare for Jeromeville. As I rode the bus to school, and sat through my early class, the rain continued to fall, the thick gray sky showing no signs that the rain would clear up any time soon. Would I have to stand in the rain to watch the Dime Store Prophets? Was the band even coming anymore? Would the show be moved indoors? None of those sounded preferable.

After class, I walked to the Memorial Union to find a place to sit. The tables were crowded, as was usually the case on rainy days. Alaina Penn and Corinne Holt from U-Life were sitting at a table with empty seats; I walked over toward them and sat down.

“Hey, Greg,” Alaina said. “What’s the capital of Morocco?”

“Rabat,” I replied. I was about to ask why she wanted to know when I saw the campus newspaper, the Daily Colt, on the table in front of her, opened to the page with the crossword puzzle. Alaina started filling in letters in the puzzle, then paused. “How do you spell that?”

“R-A-B-A-T,” I said. “Hey, is the Dime Store Prophets show still happening? You guys were putting that on, right?”

“It’s canceled,” Corinne answered. “They canceled yesterday when they heard it would rain.”

That’s right, I thought. Some people check weather reports in advance to find out if it will rain, so they would be less surprised than I was right now. “Bummer,” I said.

“What are you up to this weekend, Greg?” Alaina asked.

“I was gonna see the Dime Store Prophets, but now that’s not happening. So just studying, I guess.” I could tell that the irritation in my voice was showing.

“JCF meets tonight, right?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there.”

“See? You are doing something. Enjoy that.”

“I will.”

The rain had lightened up a bit by the time I got home from campus, and it was not raining at all when I got to Evans Hall in the evening for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship. The worship team was about to begin playing, and I had not yet decided where to sit, since I had been mingling and talking. I looked around and saw Carrie Valentine sitting alone not too far from me. My brain began overthinking, trying to decide if asking to sit with her was too forward, if it sent the wrong message, if I was setting myself up for disappointment. I thought about what I would say to save face if she said no. I took a deep breath, told my brain to shut up, and walked toward Carrie. “Hey,” I said.

“Greg! Hi!” Carrie replied.

“Mind if I sit here?”

“Go ahead!”

Carrie was a freshman; I had seen her around JCF for much of the year. Two weeks ago, we had had a long conversation at a party after JCF, alone in someone else’s house while we waited for the rest of the partygoers to return from the grocery store.

After the opening song, announcements, and a few more songs, Liz Williams walked to the stage and mimed turning off an alarm clock. A skit. I liked skits. JCF’s skits had been unusually good this year. Liz looked at a Bible and said, “I need to read the Bible and spend time with God, but I’m gonna be late for class! What should I do? I’ll just take the Bible with me and squeeze in some time between classes.” I definitely resonated with what Liz’s character was feeling.

I got excited when Ajeet Tripathi and his roommate Darren Ng entered the stage, dressed in suits and ties with dark glasses. These were recurring characters who had appeared in several other JCF skits this year. They called themselves Angels of the Lord, but they dressed and acted more like secret agents.

“Time to help her out?” Darren asked.

“Affirmative,” Ajeet replied.

Brent Wang walked past the Angels of the Lord, carrying books and notebooks. Ajeet and Darren lightly tapped his back. Brent started coughing and said, “I’m not feeling well. I need to cancel my class.”

Liz’s character returned to the stage area and looked at the wall, as if reading a note. “My professor is sick and had to cancel class,” she said. “Now I have time to do what I’ve been meaning to do all day!” Liz searched through her backpack, but instead of getting her Bible, she pulled out a folded copy of the Daily Colt. “The crossword puzzle!” she exclaimed excitedly. The crowd chuckled at this humorous turn of events. Liz sat down looking at the newspaper, holding a pencil, as Eddie Baker walked by. Liz looked up and asked Eddie, “Hey, what’s the capital of Morocco?”

I laughed loudly, remembering my conversation with Alaina earlier, but then stopped suddenly when I realized that this quote was not as hilarious to everyone else. Carrie looked at me, wondering why I found this so funny; I wanted to explain, but I did not want to interrupt the performance. Now was not the time.

The skit continued, with Liz continuing to make excuses not to read her Bible. This led into a talk by Dave McAllen, one of the full-time staff for JCF, giving a talk about making time to be with God. He referenced Luke 5:16, in which Jesus, despite being God in the flesh, still made time to get away from the crowds and pray to his Father.

I turned to Carrie after the final song. “That was a good talk,” I said.

“I know,” Carrie replied. “It’s so easy to get caught up in everything you have to do and forget to read the Bible.”

“I’ve been doing a little at this lately, at least during the week. I take my Bible to the Arboretum every day after my first class and read and pray for a while.”

“That’s so cool! I should find a spot like that.”

“It’s a peaceful little spot in the middle of God’s creation,” I said. “But, yeah. The skits have been really funny lately. This morning, I walked up to some friends who aren’t from JCF, and one of them was doing the crossword puzzle, and when she saw me walk up, the first thing she said to me was, ‘What’s the capital of Morocco?’ So I laughed when they put that same clue in the skit tonight.”

“Oh my gosh! That’s hilarious! I don’t usually get very far when I try to do the crossword puzzle.”

“I can usually finish most of it,” I said. “But there’s usually a few letters at the end that I can’t get. I finish the puzzle maybe once every week or two.”

“Wow! That’s good!”

“Ajeet and Darren are funny when they play the Angels of the Lord.”

“I know! Remember the one where they shaved Todd’s head? I had no idea they were gonna do that!”

“Me either! That was amazing! And remember that series of skits they did at the beginning of the year, where Brian or Lorraine would interrupt and put up a sign with the night’s topic?”

“Yeah. Kinda.”

“And at the end of that series, when they both started appearing with signs. I thought that was funny.”

“I think I missed that one.”

“There was one where Brian put up the sign, then a few minutes later Lorraine walked out to put up the sign, and she tore down Brian’s sign and put up her own. Then the next week, they both showed up with signs at the same time. They saw each other, and they started fighting with lightsabers.”

“Whoa,” Carrie exclaimed.

“Yeah. They were fighting, then they stopped and looked at each other, and they embraced and made out.” Carrie gave me a horrified and confused look as I said that last part, and I realized that I had misspoken. “Made up! I meant made up!” I hurriedly explained. “Like they weren’t fighting anymore!”

“Oh!” Carrie replied, laughing. “I was gonna say, this is a Christian group; they did what?”

“Wow. That was embarrassing.” I hoped that Carrie would quickly forget that part of the conversation. “What are you up to tonight?” I asked.

“I should get home,” Carrie said, slumping her shoulders. “I have so much to do. I have a paper to write this weekend, and I haven’t started it.”

“Good luck.”

“But I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Yes. Take care.” I looked into Carrie’s dark brown eyes and smiled, and she smiled back. Whatever I did tonight after JCF, it would not include Carrie, but at least we got to talk again. Hopefully my accidental statement about making out would not do lasting damage.

Head-shaving had suddenly become all the rage over the last few months. It seemed like every week or so, another one of my guy friends had shaved his head. My brother Mark started shaving his head that year. Even Lorraine had shaved her head. A few weeks ago, Ajeet and Darren’s Angels of the Lord characters had appeared in another skit. Todd Chevallier, a third roommate of theirs, played a character who knew that a girl who really liked him, but he did not like her back. Todd prayed before he went to bed that God would make that girl realize that he was not the one for her. As Todd lay supposedly sleeping, Ajeet and Darren appeared in their secret agent costumes. Todd awoke and asked, “Who are you?”

“We are Angels of the Lord,” Ajeet replied. “The Lord has heard your prayers. We have come to make you ugly.” Darren pulled out an electric razor and shaved an asymmetrical stripe across Todd’s hair as the hundred-plus students in attendance gasped and cheered. Todd’s character woke up the next morning; the girl who liked him saw him, then ran away screaming. After the talk at the end of the night, Ajeet and Darren finished shaving the rest of Todd’s head, right there in 170 Evans in front of everyone.

On Sunday at church, two days after the rained-out concert, the high school youth intern, a guy named Kevin, got up to make an announcement. “Last week, the high school group had a car wash, to raise money for a mission trip this summer. I told them that if we made two thousand dollars, they would get to shave my head. Well, guess what? We shattered that goal and raised over three thousand dollars. So you can watch a bunch of high schoolers shave my head right after the service.”

Of course, I thought. More head shaving. At least this one was for a good cause. I hoped, as a youth group volunteer with the junior high school kids, that I would not get chosen to have my head shaved at any point in the future. I had read a column once by the humor writer Dave Barry, who wrote that black guys with shaved heads looked cool, but white guys with shaved heads looked like giant thumbs. I definitely did not want to look like a giant thumb, and I had no plans to follow everyone else into this shaved head craze.

Despite that, though, I was not opposed to watching others shave their heads. I wandered into the youth room after church, where Kevin sat in a chair in the middle of the room, and four high schoolers took turns running electric razors across his head, watching random clumps of hair fall to the floor.

A friendly and chatty girl from the junior high group named Samantha waved at me. I walked over to her, and she looked up at me and said, “You’re so tall.”

“I know,” I replied. “You say that to me a lot.”

“You should shave your head!”

“No, I really shouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

I had a lot of reasons why not. Instead of telling Samantha about the giant thumbs, I told her about something that had happened two months earlier. “When I went home for spring break, my brother had shaved his head, and I told my grandma about how all my friends were shaving their heads. And Grandma told me I better not shave my head.”

“Oh!” Samantha said, an understanding smile breaking out on her face. “So you have to wait until she dies!”

Wow, I thought. Out of the mouths of thirteen-year-olds… “That’s not exactly what I was thinking,” I replied. “Wow.” I turned back to watch Kevin as the kids finished shaving his head, not really sure how to follow up Samantha’s comment.

When I got home after church, I turned on music while I finished my math homework. Edge Mix ’97 was currently in the stereo; I left it in and pressed Play. The Dime Store Prophets song came on midway through the second side, and hearing that song made me feel disappointed all over again that I had not gotten to see them. The weather that led to the show’s cancellation was just strange. Two days later, the weather turned sunny and warm again, like it was at the beginning of last week.

The opportunity was not lost forever. The band rescheduled their show and came to Jeromeville in September, the first weekend after classes started, and I saw them a second time later that school year. In my late twenties, two counties away, I attended a church where one of the former band members was the worship leader. I found a box of old Dime Store Prophets CDs when I was helping him throw away old things he did not need anymore, and he let me keep one of each album.

The conversation with Samantha, about my grandmother not wanting me to shave my head, had an odd postscript. I would soon learn that my grandmother, whom Samantha had practically wished death upon, shared a birthday with Samantha, sixty-three years apart. And although I never shaved my head completely, as my brother and many of my friends had, I did start gradually getting it cut shorter as I got older. I typically would go to one of the cheap walk-in haircut places, and depending on who was available to cut my hair, some would cut it shorter than others. Once, in 2021, my hair got cut longer than I wanted, so the next time I went to get it cut, I got brave and tried having it cut with clippers. This was the closest I had ever come to shaving my head. And my grandmother died a few hours later.

I made the connection between Grandma’s death and using clippers on my hair later that week, as I was thinking about everything that had happened. Of course, it was a complete coincidence; I do not blame my grandmother’s death on my use of hair clippers or on Samantha’s statement twenty-four years earlier. My grandmother was one hundred years old, her health had been declining for quite some time, and sometimes a body just gives out after such a long life. But the coincidence still stuck out in my mind.

Author’s note: Have you ever gone along with a hairstyle that was trendy for its time? Share an interesting story about that in the comments.

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March 1, 1995. Exploring. (#27)

August 18, 2019December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 26 Comments

The weather for the last few days here in Jeromeville had been unusually pleasant. It had been a wet winter, with large puddles appearing all over on campus. After almost four months of some combination of cool, cold, overcast, and rainy weather, the sun had finally come out, and temperatures approached 80 degrees. I was sick of winter, and this felt really nice.

I walked into Building C, unlocked the door to Room 221, and put my backpack down. I needed to work more on that paper for the South Africa class, and I had a pre-lab to write before chemistry tomorrow. I got out my textbook and lab notebook and started reading about tomorrow’s experiment. I usually kept my window curtain closed, but today I opened it, so I could see the sunny sky outside, beyond the skyline formed by the tall trees of the Arboretum.

I wrote my name, date, and section number on the top of my lab report paper. That was as far as I got. I didn’t belong here in this room today.

I got on my bike and started riding south toward the Arboretum. I crossed the creek and turned right, past the Lodge and the grassy area surrounding it. The Arboretum Lodge was an event hall-like building that held various conferences and fancy luncheons and such. The day before classes started, the Interdisciplinary Honors Program hosted an event at the Lodge where all of us in the program got to meet some of the professors we would work with this year. I remember meeting Dr. Dick Small, the professor for the South Africa class I was currently taking, at that event. I remember because you just don’t forget meeting someone with a name like Dr. Dick Small.

The banks of the creek became steeper, and the trail climbed and descended a few times, by about fifteen feet, as I continued west through a grove of pine trees. Eventually the trail climbed to the top of an earthen dam, making a 180 degree turn from the south bank to the north bank. The creek running down the middle of the Arboretum was actually a very long and narrow lake, not a creek at all, collecting storm drain water in a dry creek bed that had been dammed at both ends. Arroyo Verde Creek had been diverted a century ago, before the university existed, to direct floodwaters away from the town of Jeromeville, which at the time had a population of around 1000.

Some people say that they are bothered by the term “ATM machine,” because the M in ATM already stands for machine, so “ATM machine” actually means “automated teller machine machine.” I felt the same way about the name Arroyo Verde Creek, which translates from Spanish as “Green Creek Creek.”

At the west end of the Arboretum, on the north bank, was a grassy park-like area with benches. To my left was a grove of oaks, different kinds of oaks from all over the world, without the landscaping of the lawn area that I was riding through. I stopped to look at the oak grove, which had a wild, rustic look to it, somewhat out of place on a large university campus, but in a good way. I saw giant towering valley oaks from California with moss on the bark, gnarled white oaks from the East Coast, wide spreading live oaks from the Deep South, European cork oaks with thick pockmarked and ridged bark, and many others. Some of the oaks were types that kept their leaves through the winter; others had shed their leaves and looked like they were just beginning to sprout for the upcoming spring.

Instead of continuing east on the north bank of the Arboretum, I turned left on Thompson Drive and crossed an overpass to the west side of Highway 117. Highway 117 runs north-south through Jeromeville below the elevation of the surrounding land, so that roads crossing the freeway become overpasses without having to climb upward. I knew that there was an overpass here, but I had never been on Thompson Drive west of 117.

The University of Jeromeville was founded in 1905 as an extension campus of the University of the Bay, specifically for agricultural research. The Bay campus is in the middle of an urban area, with water on one side and mountains on the other, and nowhere to actually practice farming. Agriculture was and still is a major industry on the other side of those mountains, so the university regents chose a small town called Jeromeville as the site of their new agricultural campus. The Jeromeville campus grew over the years, eventually adding academic departments other than just agriculture and becoming an independent university within the same system as Bay, Santa Teresa, and San Angelo. The campus, as it is now ninety years later, primarily exists in the space between 117 and downtown Jeromeville, but the majority of the campus property actually lies west of 117, on three square miles of fields used for agricultural research.

This is what I saw before me now as I crossed to the other side of 117. Despite the history of the campus, most UJ students today get degrees in subjects that are not related to agriculture, and many of these people barely know, or don’t know at all, that the part of the campus west of 117 exists. On my right was a field of what appeared to be corn, and a patch of dirt with nothing growing and a mysterious-looking building off of a side road. On the left, the dry bed of the former creek had been fenced off and used as a sheep pasture. The road on this side of campus was notably rougher, probably because it gets much less traffic.

A street called Environmental Lane branched off to the right, past a number of buildings with metal siding, a few buildings that resembled portable classrooms, and some kind of large radio tower. I never did learn what those buildings were used for.

Thompson Drive then crossed the dry creek bed and turned along the south bank of the creek, making a wide gradual turn to the left following the creek. A grape vineyard was on the left, and a bunch of very tall trees stood along the creek bed to the right. Next to a large oak tree on the left were a cluster of benches and what appeared to be those white boxes that beekeepers used. I could see the creek bed on the right through the trees at some places, and at one place there was a pool with marshy-looking plants growing in it.

Thompson Drive ended at a T-intersection with a road called Arroyo Verde Road. The road was gravel to the left and paved to the right. Arroyo Verde Road ran alongside the actual free-flowing Arroyo Verde Creek; where I was right now appeared to be the point where the creek was originally diverted from its original flow. I turned right onto the paved section, crossing the dry fork of the creek for the last time today. A cluster of tall, leafy trees grew on both sides of the road, with their leaves and branches partially hanging over the road. Beyond this, on the right, was a small building with a sign that said “Aquatic Weed Research Facility.” That would explain the marshy-looking pool.

I rode past more grape vineyards, corn fields, and fruit tree orchards on the right, and the small trees typical of a creekside riparian area on the left. I felt very peaceful out here. Had I not known, I never would have guessed that this bucolic country lane was part of a large bustling university full of people and bicycles trying to avoid running into each other. My unwritten paper and all the studying I had to do faded from my mind as I watched the trees and fields pass by around me.

About half a mile ahead, Arroyo Verde Road became unpaved again, with a paved road called Hawkins Road branching off to the right, heading north. Hawkins Road was lined with very old olive trees on each side, and pits and bits of olive flesh, remnants of years of uncultivated fruit production, had fallen along the sides of the road. (I would read years later in the alumni magazine that the university had begun making olive oil from these olives and selling it at the campus store. That was a great idea, but it wasn’t happening yet in 1995.)

Most of the buildings on the west side of campus lie along or just off of Hawkins Road, behind the row of olive trees. Some of them had signs indicating that they were used for very specific purposes; the signs said things like Honey Bee Research Facility, Historical Agricultural Machinery Collection, and University Plant Services. I also saw a large group of cows and pigs at feedlots on a side road to the right.

Hawkins Road was a little over a mile long, and it ended at Davis Drive, the main east-west road on campus. I had driven and biked on this part of Davis Drive before, but today was the first time I had seen any part of the west side of campus other than Davis Drive. I turned right, heading east toward 117 and the main part of campus, but then I turned left on the next cross street, Olive Way. Olive Way was about ten feet wide, only open to bicycles and pedestrians, and like Hawkins Road, it was lined with olive trees on both sides and littered with remnants of fallen olives. I headed north on Olive Way. There were no buildings on Olive Way, just fields behind the olive trees. I passed by someone running with her dog; I said hi, and she said hi back.

Olive Way ended at West Fifth Street, the northern boundary of the campus. The street was lined with walnut trees along the south side that lined the campus agricultural area, and another bike trail ran between the walnut trees and the fields. I turned right and followed the trail east, back across Highway 117, then turned right at Andrews Road and headed home from there.

I walked back into the building. Taylor, Pete, and Sarah were sitting in the common room, the two boys apparently making puns with Sarah’s names.

“I’m dying! Sarah doctor in the house?” Taylor said.

“Sarah way I could get my order to go?” Pete said, chuckling.

“Come on, guys,” Sarah said.

“My pants don’t fit. I need a Taylor,” I said. “What’s that? I can’t hear, because your voice Petered out.”

“Yeah,” Sarah added, glaring at the boys. All of us started laughing.

“What are you up to?” Taylor asked. “Just getting back from class?”

“Actually, I got back an hour ago,” I explained. “I was on my bike, exploring the west side of campus. I went out Thompson Drive and Arroyo Verde Road and Hawkins Road.”

“I have no idea where any of those are,” Pete said.

“What’s out there?” Taylor asked.

“Fields, and big trees, and the real Arroyo Verde Creek. The free-flowing one, not the fake one in the Arboretum. And what looks like agricultural research facilities. And sheep and cows,” I said.

“Interesting,” Sarah said. “I never thought about what’s out there. But you seem like you would. You and your maps and roads and stuff.”

“Exactly. It’s who I am.”

“And that’s what makes you special.”

“Yeah.”

“And it’s such a nice day today! A perfect day for a bike ride.”

“I know. I hope the weather stays like this for a while.”

The weather did not stay like that for a while. What I would realize over the next few years was that around late February or early March, Jeromeville and the surrounding area always experience a weather phenomenon that I’ve come to call Fake Spring. For about a week or two, the weather turns pleasantly warm and sunny, but then it cools off again with usually a few more significant rainstorms occasionally passing through during the rest of March and April. I always enjoyed Fake Spring while it lasted, though; it was a nice break from the cool weather, and the sunshine and lack of chill in the air always seemed to make me happier.

I sat downstairs talking to Taylor and Pete and Sarah for a while, and we all went to the dining commons together for dinner. The sun had just set, leaving a spectacular pink-orange glow to the west, spotted with a few lines of small puffy clouds. All felt right with the world today. I was at peace, and I had plenty of time later to deal with the lab write-up, and next week to deal with the South Africa paper, and all my life to deal with the fact that I still felt like a scared little kid with no idea how to make it in this big scary world. But I had found a happy place. Today was a good day.

2019 hawkins road
Hawkins Road, photographed in 2019. This is still my happy place, when I happen to be in Jeromeville with time to kill.

November 9, 1994. The Freshman Stripe. (#13)

March 22, 2019December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 8 Comments

So far, for the six and a half weeks I had been in Jeromeville, the weather had been perfect. Summer in Jeromeville is hot and dry; I remember that from that one summer day last year when I was with my family, and we visited the campus. Also, I had been to Bidwell during the summer to see Dad’s relatives there, and I knew that the weather in Jeromeville was similar to the weather in Bidwell. By the time I arrived in Jeromeville, in late September, the warm days had cooled off a little; it was still shorts weather, but the heat was not quite as intense. Also, evenings were cool, a nice break from the heat of the day.

All of that changed suddenly this week. Monday night, the weather became cloudy and windy, and by the time I woke up today, Wednesday morning, it was cool and windy and steadily raining. I went to breakfast and read the newspaper after I got back to my room. The weather was terrible, but I was in a good mood, because yesterday was Election Day, I was old enough to vote for the first time, and my candidate for governor won. This also meant I would stop hearing all of the annoying political ads.

I got on my bike and headed toward my math class in Wellington Hall, next to the Quad. I didn’t have a jacket, and now that I think about it, I really don’t know why. For some reason, I did not own a jacket in the fall of 1994. I guess I just never really thought about it. I didn’t go outside in the rain very often. So now, here I was, riding my bike across campus, in the rain, wearing a light gray hoodie that said UNIVERSITY OF JEROMEVILLE COLTS in navy blue, and a t-shirt underneath, and jeans.

I locked my bike outside of Wellington Hall and saw a group of frat boy types walking toward the door from the other direction. I entered the building first, with the frat boys behind me. As I walked down the hall toward the room where my math class was, I thought I heard them laughing, and I thought one of them mockingly said, “Nice stripe.” Their tone brought back flashbacks of elementary school, when the other kids in class were so cruel to me. I didn’t know what “nice stripe” meant, though, so maybe they weren’t talking to me.

I walked into my classroom and took off my backpack. A guy named Jack Chalmers sat behind me; in addition to math class, I had also seen him at the dining hall. I think he lived in Building F. I wasn’t sure where he was from, exactly, but I got the impression he was a beach bum or a surfer dude. He wore shorts and sandals even today when it was raining. Another thing I always remember about Jack is that he talked unusually fast.

“Greg,” Jack said quietly. “You got a stripe on your back.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I felt blood rushing to my face in a mixture of anger and embarrassment as I realized that the frat boys in the hallway had been making fun of me after all. “What?” I replied.

“You were riding your bike in the rain,” Jack explained. “Water on the road splashed and made a stripe down your back.” I took off my sweatshirt; sure enough, the stripe was there. I was cold, but I didn’t put the sweatshirt back on. Too embarrassing at this point. “You should put fenders on your bike next time,” Jack said. I was about to ask him more about this when Jimmy Best, the instructor, walked in and started teaching. I quietly started taking notes.

I was a lot quieter than usual in class that day, and I spent the whole fifty minutes trying to concentrate on math, but being less successful than usual because of my dirty sweatshirt. When class was dismissed, I waited until most of the class had left before I got up; I didn’t want to take the chance that someone else would see my dirty sweatshirt. Rebekah from upstairs and Andrea from Building B were both in this class, and I especially didn’t want them to see me like that.

Even though I was cold, I left my sweatshirt off as I walked upstairs to the classroom for Rise and Fall of Empires. I had that class back to back with math, and it was in the same building, so I got there before most of the rest of the class. I had plenty of time to hide my sweatshirt in a way to make the stripe inconspicuous.

By the time class got out, I had forgotten about the events of two hours earlier. But when I put on my sweatshirt, Mike was behind me, looking at me, and said in his naturally loud voice, “Greg has a Freshman Stripe!”

“Yeah,” I said bitterly, sitting back down and staring off into space. “I know.”

Taylor noticed what was going on and walked over. “Greg? You all right, man?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry,” Mike said. “I didn’t mean it. Just get some fenders for your bike. Then the dirt won’t go flying up.”

“But how does everyone know about this but me?” I asked.

“I heard about it from my friend who’s a sophomore,” Mike answered.

“I got some fenders a few days ago from the Bike Barn,” Taylor said. “They weren’t very expensive.”

“I guess I’m going to have to do that, then.”

I put the dirty sweatshirt back on and got on my bike. There was no point in not wearing it at this point. I headed back home, the way I came, but I stopped at the intersection of Colt Avenue and Davis Drive. A cluster of buildings that had once been actual barns and silos had been repurposed; the area included a student union with tables and meeting places, a few fast-food express restaurants, and the Bike Barn. This was a full-service bicycle sales and repair shop, run by the Associated Students of the University of Jeromeville, the same organization that has the student President and Senate and runs a number of other student groups and business-like establishments on campus.

I looked around, trying to find fenders. I turned my back to the cashier for a minute, and he said, “Looking for fenders? Your back looks like it got splashed.”

“Yeah,” I said. He pointed out where the fenders were displayed and even offered to lend me a screwdriver to install them. I paid for them, brought my bike inside, screwed the fenders on, returned his screwdriver, and rode back to Building C.

I had one more class in the afternoon; by then it had stopped raining, so I didn’t wear the dirty sweatshirt, even though the air was still cold enough to make short sleeves uncomfortable. Later that afternoon, I went to the laundry room on the first floor and did a load of laundry, including the dirty sweatshirt. My laundry was still drying at dinner time, so when I went to the dining hall, I was still wearing just one layer of short sleeves.

I looked around to see if anyone I knew was eating. I saw Amy, the RA from the third floor, sitting next to three people I did not know: a guy with facial hair, who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent; a tall, thin Asian guy; and a girl of fair complexion with shoulder-length dark blonde hair. “May I sit here?” I asked, approaching them.

“Sure!” Amy said. “Do you know any of these people?”

“No.”

Amy gestured to them from left to right. “This is Ali, Victor, and Megan. They’re RAs in Building E, G, and K. Is that right?” The three of them nodded and murmured assents. “And this is Greg,” Amy continued. “He’s in my building.”

“Hi,” I said to all three of them collectively.

“Aren’t you cold?” Amy asked me. “You’re just wearing a shirt in this weather.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but my sweatshirt is dirty. I have laundry going right now. Apparently your back gets dirty when you ride your bike in the rain.”

“Oh, yes,” Victor said. “The Freshman Stripe.”

I looked down at my plate, the humiliation returning to my face.

“It’s okay,” Megan said reassuringly. “We all went through it as freshmen too. Some things you just don’t think of until they happen to you.”

“I guess. I got fenders from the Bike Barn on the way home.”

“Good! See, you’re learning.”

“You’re right.”

“And I’ll give you another pointer,” Megan continued. “Slow down. A lot more bike accidents happen when it’s wet. I know from experience.”

“Thanks for the tip.“ I smiled at Megan, and she smiled back.

After I was done eating dinner with the other RAs, I walked back to my room; it was dark outside now. I took my laundry, now clean and dry, back upstairs. The dirt had all gotten out of my sweatshirt, so I put it on; it was nice and warm. I sat on the edge of the bed, thinking, putting off my math homework, as I heard the rain start again. Today was a little embarrassing. I’m learning new things, and sometimes you have to learn the hard way. The frat boys walking behind me in Wellington tried to put me down in order to make themselves feel better. Screw them. I don’t need people like that in my life. There are plenty of more helpful older students, like the cashier from the Bike Barn, and Megan, the RA from Building K. I’m learning and growing. And someday, hopefully, I will be that helpful older students, passing on pointers of value to freshmen.

But first, I needed to get a jacket and an umbrella.