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

October 23, 2022October 23, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 7 Comments

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

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

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

“Hey, Greg!” she said.

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

“I know!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She replied about a week later.

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

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

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

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

-Melissa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I laughed. “Thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

(May 2022. Year 3 recap.)

May 30, 2022June 1, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 14 Comments

If this is your first time here on Don’t Let The Days Go By, welcome. DLTDGB is a continuing story set in 1997 (currently), about a university student making his way in life. I am currently on hiatus from writing; the story will continue sometime in June. Today’s post is a recap of the highlights of year 3.

(Also, in case you need it, here is the recap of year 1, and here is the recap of year 2.)

I spent a week at my parents’ house at the beginning of summer, in which my brother and I made a board game based on all of our silly inside jokes. I then returned to Jeromeville to take a summer school computer science class.

June 25-27, 1996. The first week of summer session. (#89)

After making lots of new friends the previous year, summer was more lonely. Jeromeville Christian Fellowship did not have their weekly meeting, although there was one Bible study for students still around in the summer. Many of my friends had left Jeromeville for the summer, including my crush, Haley Channing. A few interesting things happened around my apartment complex, including accidentally hitting someone’s taillight, a friendly new neighbor, and an interesting conversation with the TA for the computer class, whose girlfriend lived at the complex. Ramon, Jason, and Caroline, my friends from freshman year whose apartment I could walk to in five minutes, were still around for the summer, and I shared with them a new creative project I began.

July 18-20, 1996. A new creative project and a new cheeseburger. (#92)

The college pastor of Jeromeville Covenant Church got married that summer. I did not attend J-Cov, nor did I know this pastor, but many of my friends did, and I got to see a lot of them that weekend. I also got to see Lawsuit, my favorite local independent band, two more times that year before they broke up. Shortly before I moved out of my little studio apartment, my Bible study surprised me with cupcakes for my 20th birthday.

August 15-21, 1996. My final week in Apartment 124. (#97)

I went to my parents’ house again for a week. My brother and his friends had a tournament for a game called Moport, a hybrid of several sports that we used to play in the yard. When I returned to Jeromeville, I moved into a three-bedroom apartment with three other guys. I shared the large bedroom with Shawn Yang, my Bible study leader from the previous year. Brian Burr, one of Shawn’s previous roommates, also lived with us; he was working part time for Jeromeville Christian Fellowship while applying to medical school. Josh McGraw, the boyfriend of our friend Abby, lived in the other room; I did not know him as well, because he kept odd hours. Shawn and Brian and I pulled off an epic toilet-papering prank, the first one I was ever involved with; then the week after that, Brian and I went to Outreach Camp with dozens of other JCF students.

Late September, 1996. Outreach Camp and the first JCF meeting of the year. (#101)

I began classes for the fall the week after that. Notably on my schedule, I was in University Chorus for the first time. I did not have a background in voice or classical music, but I had been singing at Mass at the Newman Center for about a year at the time, and I had several friends in chorus who had been encouraging me to participate.

End of September, 1996. The time I joined chorus. (#102)

I had grown up Catholic, and I had been attending Mass more regularly since coming to Jeromeville. But I had also gotten involved with JCF, which was nondenominational, and after learning more about what it really means to follow Jesus, I noticed some things happening at the Newman Center that left me feeling like it might not be the best place for someone really wanting to learn about Jesus and the Bible. But I also did not want to start going to church with my new friends just because it was the cool place to be; I wanted to make the right decision. So for about a month, I went to church twice every Sunday, at Jeromeville Covenant with my friends and then at Newman where I had been for two years. After much thought and prayer, I decided to attend J-Cov full time.

October 13, 1996. I might be looking for something new. (#104)
Late October, 1996. Together with You, I will look for another sea. (#105)

The more I got involved with JCF, I started to see a lot of cliques within the group, and despite being more involved there, I was still on the outside of the cliques. A ministry within JCF purporting to train students for future leadership selected its students by invitation only, and I felt excluded sometimes by the students in this group. It was a particularly sensitive issue for me because Haley was in the group, and other guys seemed to be paying attention to her. I got brave and told her during the last week of the quarter how I felt about her, and she did not feel the same way about me.

Early December, 1996. We were all just kids. (#111)

A lot of other, less depressing things happened that December. I had my first concert for chorus, and my parents came up to see it. And I traveled farther east than I ever had before, the first time I remember being on an airplane although Mom says I was on one once as a baby. Intervarsity, the parent organization of JCF, hosts a convention every three years in Urbana, Illinois, and as a newly practicing Christian, I wanted to learn more about ministry opportunities. I was not ready to serve Jesus in some other country myself, but many of my friends were doing those kinds of projects during the summer, and I wanted to learn more.

December 27-31, 1996. You are my witnesses. (#113)

I found my place to serve soon after that, but it was not through any connection I made at Urbana. One Sunday afternoon after church at J-Cov, three teenage boys randomly walked up to me and asked if I wanted to go to McDonald’s with them. I said sure, and we had a great time hanging out that afternoon. Taylor Santiago, one of my friends from freshman year, was a volunteer with the junior high school youth group at J-Cov, but he was going to be gone all spring and summer doing urban ministry in Chicago. After Taylor noticed me hanging out with those guys, he suggested that I try out being a youth group leader, taking his place while he was gone. I did, and I loved it. I knew several of the other youth group leaders from church, and my roommate Josh, the one I barely knew, was a leader too.

February 5, 1997. Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young. (#118)

That winter was when the Star Wars movies were rereleased with new footage, and Brian was a huge Star Wars fan. I was not anti-Star Wars, but I did not grow up with Star Wars like many other boys born in the 1970s did. But with the movies in theaters again, and Brian as a roommate, I was instantly hooked. I had never seen Return of the Jedi as a child; I saw it for the first time on the day it was rereleased, one of the few times I ever skipped class. But that night, my Star Wars-fueled excitement fizzled as I struggled to deal with my lingering feelings for Haley and her apparent interest in Ramon.

March 14, 1997. The Lord gave you the one he took from me. (#124)

I had been doing a lot of thinking about my future that winter and spring, since I was well into my third year of university studies without a clear goal for what to do after graduation. Two of my favorite professors offered welcome suggestions. Dr. Thomas told me about the federally funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates programs at various schools all over the country. I applied to some of those, got accepted to two, and chose the one in Oregon because it was the closer of the two. My other favorite professor, Dr. Samuels, had done a lot of work with education and suggested that I would make a good teacher. I had never considered being a teacher, because of all the politics involved, but I decided to give it a chance. Dr. Samuels set me up with an internship helping out in a precalculus classroom at Jeromeville High School.

March 29-April 3, 1997. A montage of the new quarter. (#126)

During the time I was frustrated with the cliques within JCF, I got to be friends with people from University Life, the college group of another local church. I attended their group a few times, and although ultimately I stuck with JCF and J-Cov, I made some new friends through that experience.

April 12-13, 1997. Alaina’s coffee house party, and a plan for next year. (#127)

I also got to be friends with the other youth group staff. Although we were primarily there to teach the students about Jesus and build relationships with them, part of what made the group so great was that we were also close with each other as a staff. Sometimes, my relationships with the other staff involved pranks.

April 27, 1997. A legendary prank for Erica’s 18th birthday. (#129)

Ever since Haley’s rejection, I was without a girl to think about and try to get to know. I’d had a few random encounters with cute girls that never went anywhere. Toward the end of that year, two freshmen girls from JCF caught my eye: Carrie, who was sweet and easy to talk to, and Sadie, whose outspoken conservatism was a breath of fresh air to a conservative-leaning student like me at a liberal secular university. The year ended on a good note; I was not as awful at this year’s Man of Steel competition compared to the previous year, and JCF threw Brian a nice going away party as he prepared to move to New York for medical school. I myself was headed off to Oregon to do mathematics research, but I was only leaving for eight weeks. I looked forward to whatever new adventures awaited me.

June 13, 1997. Brian’s going away party. (#134)

Of course, since I’ve just finished another year, that means another playlist of the music I used for this year.

So what did you guys think of Year 3? Do any of you have any burning unanswered questions going into Year 4? Thank you again for all of your support this year, and I hope that my stories have brought something positive into your lives. Let me know how you’re doing in the comments, and what you are up to these days.

(Interlude. Your turn: assumptions about me!)

May 15, 2022May 15, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 11 Comments

For those of you new to Don’t Let The Days Go By, this is a continuing story set in 1997 about a university student making his way in life. If you came here looking to read some nostalgic fiction, I’m taking a break for at least a month, but you can start here with episode 1 (set in 1993) and then keep reading up until you finish episode 134. Unless you have no life and you are a very fast reader, I’ll probably be writing new episodes again by the time you finish. If you don’t have time for all of that, I’ll be doing a Season 3 recap soon.

I decided to do something fun this week. I’ve seen other bloggers and social media personalities do this. Usually I give snarky replies when others do this, so I guess I deserve it if you guys give snarky replies, but I would like to see some real replies as well.

Here is how this works: You share your assumptions about me. Tell me in the comments some things you’ve always assumed about me, and then in a later post I will share your assumptions and reveal whether or not they are true. That’s it. I’m curious what you think about me.

But… there’s a twist. I’m writing this post in character. Today is June 15, 1997, and I just woke up at my parents’ house in Plumdale after finishing my third year at the University of Jeromeville. So you are sharing your assumptions about Greg, the character from Don’t Let The Days Go By, and I will answer them from June 1997. If you say for your assumption, for example, “You like blogging,” I will reply, “What’s blogging?” since blogging wasn’t a thing in 1997. I first heard that term in 2000 when Brody Parker had a new girlfriend (whom he married a few years later, and divorced several years after that) and she showed me her blog.

Anyway, let me know your assumptions, and I will answer next week. Also, while you’re waiting for new DLTDGB episodes, follow my other projects, Greg Out Of Character and Song of the Day, by DJ GJ-64. And if you have assumptions about adult Greg, the writer of this blog, as his life is in 2022, I’ll be doing an assumptions post on the Greg Out Of Character blog soon.

Also, just for fun, here’s a picture of me all dressed up. This was June 6, 1997, on the way to my chorus performance.

February 13-14, 1997. Fall away. (#119)

January 23, 2022January 30, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 6 Comments

I clicked Print and watched the printer run, then I stapled the three pages of my story together. I glanced over it, proud of my little creation, feeling especially clever since I had hidden a secret message in the story.

“Fall Away”
by Gregory J. Dennison, February 1997

Here we go again, I thought, as I opened the door and saw her sitting there, her hair gently blowing in the light breeze. She was talking with someone I did not recognize. I wondered how I should react. It seemed like a little devil and a little angel had appeared on my shoulder, as if in a cartoon. The former told me to walk on by and say nothing, and the latter told me I should try to be friendly and at least say hello. I wasn’t sure how to act, since I still had trouble dealing with the time she rejected me. I have tried my hardest not to be bitter. I watched her as I walked by. She did not see me, so I kept right on walking.

Also, over the past few weeks, it seems like she and I have been drifting apart. We were once such good friends, and I had hoped so much that our friendship would turn into something more. When I finally got brave enough to ask her out, she rejected me. It was a friendly and sympathetic rejection, but a rejection nonetheless. A movie was playing on campus that night, and we had mentioned that we both wanted to see it. I asked her if she wanted to see it with me, and she said she would, but she had to get up early the next morning. She did not want to stay out late. That was kind of the last straw for me. A couple weeks later, I told her how I felt about her, and she told me she did not feel the same way back. I decided, though, that our friendship seemed too important to throw away, so I would try to stay friends with her rather than avoid her.

Love never works like that, though. Another month had passed, and my feelings for her were coming back. In light of this, I became hesitant to pursue our friendship, because I feared that my feelings would get in the way like they did before. Also, in the past month or so it has seemed like she and I have naturally drifted apart. When she and her friends are all together, it seems like they stick together and don’t really include me as much. I would still consider them my friends on a one-to-one basis, but as a group they seem kind of exclusive.

Every table seemed full as I scanned the room for a place to sit and eat lunch. I spotted two of my friends next to an open seat, but it looked like they were busy talking about something serious, so I didn’t want to bother them. I continued looking and saw someone else I recognized, but I heard someone calling my name first. I looked up and saw a girl who I had met about a month ago, sitting with a bunch of her friends who I barely knew. She asked me if I wanted to sit down, so I did.

“You look tired,” she said. I agreed. I proceeded to get out the lunch I had packed, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a bag of tortilla chips. After saying a short prayer, I began eating. I thought about the situation. I looked at the people around me at the table. I didn’t really know them well, but they seemed really friendly. This was also the second time this week that I had sat with them at lunch time. Maybe this group was destined to become my new friends.

Curious to see what was happening around me, I looked up. I saw the girl I saw earlier that day, the one who had rejected me. She was talking to the two friends I had almost sat with. I looked down, unsure of what to do. Friendship is a valuable treasure, and I really hate to lose a friend. But ever since that day she turned down my offer for a date, I have found it so difficult to connect with her. We had talked a few times in the weeks since that happened, but it never seemed the same as it was before. We rarely hung out together anymore, and when we talked, it was rarely anything more than hi and how are you.

Her pretty blue eyes looked in another direction, away from my table, as she began walking toward me. I quickly moved my head down and looked intently at my food for about thirty seconds, so that when I looked up again I could be sure that she was gone. I began to regret my decision after it happened. I felt like a really unfriendly jerk. I wondered what had come over me. I’m not exactly the most friendly person in the world, but I have never noticed myself consciously avoiding a friend either.

Although I convinced myself after the rejection that nothing would ever happen between us, and I was comfortable with this decision at first, I seemed to feel worse about it every day. Something had gone wrong. I had wanted to remove my desire for a romantic relationship with her in exchange for a continued friendship.

Nothing I tried was working, though. I had discussed my feelings with a close friend of ours. He had felt the same way toward the same girl at one time. He finally told her the truth, and although she did not feel the same way toward him, they had grown closer as friends.

None of this happened in my case. I never told her how I felt about her, but more importantly we have not stayed friends. I have a really hard time carrying on a conversation with her. Maybe I should just have a long talk with her, apologize for avoiding her, and let her know that I wish we could talk more like we used to.

I finished eating and decided to go to class some time later. I made up my mind that I would deal with this situation again as soon as I had an opportunity to talk to her. A friend is a terrible thing to lose. God would want me to face my problems and not run from them like this.

Now, though, might not be the time to stay friends. It would make it harder for the feelings to go away, for me to get over her rejection. I did not know what I should do. As I walked along, thinking about what I really felt toward her, I saw her, sitting at a table eating lunch. She did not see me. I started to go talk to her.

Going that way suddenly felt like a bad idea; I took one step toward her and chickened out. I looked at her, to see if her eyes would drift up in my direction. They did not. I had run away from her again, the third time that day. And somewhere, off in the distance, a rooster crowed.

It was late afternoon on Thursday, and I had been working on this story off and on for a week. Most of the events in the story actually happened to me. One day last week, I saw Haley Channing three times during my lunch break at the Memorial Union, and I just could not bring myself to talk to her. I thought that telling her how I felt two months ago was the best course of action to get over her. There was an outside chance that she liked me too, but if she did not, at least I would know. It hurt to hear that, but some things have to hurt before they feel better, like ripping off a bandage quickly. Things had not gotten better; now I just felt awkward around her, and my rejection felt like another painful reminder of the cliques at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship and my position on the outside.

After the third time I ignored her, I thought about Jesus’ prediction that Peter would deny him three times before the rooster crowed. The title of the story was taken from Jesus’ words preceding this incident: “You will all fall away.” Peter insisted that he would never do such a thing, but he did, and he heard a rooster crow afterward. I had just denied Haley three times, and I added the part about the rooster at the end of the story to allude to Peter’s denials. I did not actually hear a rooster in real life.

The new friend who called me over to sit with her on that day was Alaina from University Life, the college ministry of a different church from the one I went to. A while back, on another crowded day in the Memorial Union, I was looking for a place to sit. I saw Ben, an acquaintance who was involved with U-Life but also attended JCF sometimes, and he was sitting with Alaina. Since then, I had often seen one or both of them at lunch, and I had met some of their other friends.

Two days ago, I took a significant step closer to this other group. I headed to campus in the evening and paid two dollars for a parking spot in the public lot on Davis Drive near the Barn. I hated paying for parking. A daily parking permit cost one dollar my freshman year. The following year it increased to two dollars for the day, but still one dollar for evenings for people arriving after five o’clock. This year the price increased to three dollars for the day and two for the evening, and I heard next year it would be three dollars any time. The cost was increasing much faster than inflation, tripling in three years. If this exponential increase continued, the cost of a daily parking permit in the year 2021 would be $19,683. (The actual cost of a daily parking permit in 2021 was twelve dollars, increasing twelvefold in twenty-seven years; I still found that outrageous.)

I crossed the street and walked into Harding Hall, looking for the big lecture hall inside. I followed the faint murmur of voices down the hall. As I approached the room, I saw a large sign that said WELCOME TO UNIVERSITY LIFE with a large Christian cross on the left. The setup looked very much like that of Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, with people filling out name tags near the entrance and a live band in the front, probably to play worship music.

“Hi,” the guy with the name tags said. “What’s your name?”

“Greg.”

The guy wrote my name on a name tag, unpeeled it, and handed it to me. I stuck it on my shirt in the center of my chest. I walked into the large lecture hall, looking around for a seat, but before I sat down, I heard someone calling out, “Greg!”

I looked around and saw Alaina waving at me. “Hey,” I said, walking toward her.

“You made it! Come sit with us!” Alaina led me to a seat near the center of the lecture hall, next to her roommate Whitney, our friend Ben, and a few others whom I had met but needed to look at their name tags to remember their names.

The rest of the night at U-Life was structured much like JCF; I would not have been able to tell the difference, other than the presence of different people there. The group was led by an adult, the college pastor from the church that ran U-Life. The band played a few worship songs, someone made announcements, the pastor gave a talk about something from the Bible, and they finished with more songs. I saw a few other familiar faces around the room. Carolyn Parry, whom I knew from being in chorus last quarter, was in the worship band. I also recognized another math major named Melissa Becker, several people from my Introduction to New Testament class last quarter and New Testament Writings of John class this quarter, and Rebekah Tyler from my freshman dorm.

I enjoyed U-Life, with the intent to come back some other time. But I did not want to give up on JCF, even though it was cliquish and I would run into Haley there. Yesterday, the day after I went to U-Life, I finished writing my story, “Fall Away,” which I had been working on over the last week. I printed it just now, when I got home from class. I was still holding the printed copy of Fall Away when my roommate Shawn walked into the room.

“Hey, Greg,” he said. “What’s that you’re reading?”

“I wrote a story,” I replied.

“Really? What’s it about?”

“Something that happened to me last week that I thought would make a good story.”

“Can I read it?”

I debated whether or not to let Shawn read the story. My desire to share and discuss my work won out over wanting to keep the details of my romantic pursuits private. I handed Shawn the story as I got out my textbook for Euclidean Geometry and began working on homework.

“‘By Gregory J. Dennison,’” Shawn read aloud. “What’s the J for?”

“James. It was my dad’s brother’s name. He died in an accident before I was born.”

“I’m sorry. But you have a story to go with your name.”

“Yeah. And Gregory was after one of my dad’s good friends.”

“That’s cool,” Shawn said. “My parents named me Shawn because they liked the name. And they spelled it right too. None of this ‘Seen’ stuff.” Shawn had intentionally mispronounced the traditional spelling of Sean as if it rhymed with “mean,” and I chuckled. “I mean, I know it’s Irish, but hey, do I look Irish to you?” Shawn definitely did not look Irish; he was born here in the United States, but he was of Chinese descent. This made me laugh even harder.

Shawn continued reading my story as I turned back to my math homework. A few minutes later, he said, “That was pretty good. So there’s a girl you liked, and she didn’t like you back, and you can’t get her out of your head? And you didn’t want to say hi to her?”

“Pretty much.

“Is it someone I know?”

“Maybe.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Come on, you can tell me.”

I had a feeling Shawn might want to know whom the story was about. I could have told him I did not want to reveal this information, but I had a feeling he would keep bugging me about it. Besides, my story had a secret, which could make this fun. “Promise you won’t tell anyone. Or make fun of me.”

“I promise.”

“I hid a secret message in the story.”

“What?” Shawn said. I put my math homework aside, watching Shawn’s reaction as he searched for the secret message, looking carefully at the words on the page. “I can’t find it,” he said finally.

“Read it out loud,” I said with a mischievous grin.

“‘Here we go–’”

“Stop,” I interrupted. “Now go to the next paragraph.”

“‘Also, ov–’”

“Stop. Next paragraph.”

“‘Love ne–’”

“Stop. Next paragraph.”

Shawn looked over the entire story, then began reciting the first words of each paragraph. “‘Here, also, love, every, you, curious, her, although, nothing, none, I, now, going.’ I don’t get it.”

“Try again. Start from the beginning.

“H–”

“Next paragraph,” I interrupted, as soon as I heard Shawn make a sound.

“A–”

“Next paragraph.”

“L– Oh, wait a minute.” Shawn flipped the three printed pages back and forth quickly, with a look of understanding on his face. He had figured out that I was trying to tell him to look at only the first letter of each paragraph, not the first word. “Haley Channing,” he said. “It’s too bad she didn’t like you back. She’s a cutie.”

“Yeah, she is.”

“You know what they say. Women… can’t live with ‘em…”

“Can’t live without ‘em?” I added

“Can’t shoot ’em,” Shawn replied, finishing a famous comedic quote.

I chuckled. “I’ve never heard that.”

“Women are always trouble. If it weren’t for women, O.J. Simpson wouldn’t be in the news all the time. You heard he lost the civil case, right?”

“Yeah. And now he owes the families millions of dollars.”

“He totally did it. He should be in jail.”

“Yeah.”

“Seriously, though, don’t give up. If something was meant to be, God’ll make it happen somehow. And don’t let it get you down. Just live your life.”

“I know.”

Despite Shawn’s advice not to let my romantic failures get to me, I still decided to wear black for Valentine’s Day the next morning. I did not wear solid black, though; I wore faded blue jeans with the black t-shirt from Urbana that said “What have you seen God do lately?”

The bus was crowded today; the air was damp, the sky was gray, and the weather forecast called for rain by mid-morning at the latest. No one I knew got on at this stop, although I recognized some people from previous bus rides: a pale-faced guy with a big blond beard, an Asian guy with unkempt hair, and a pretty girl with wavy brown hair and big brown eyes. When the bus arrived, I was one of the last from our stop to board. Even though this was only the second stop on the route, the 8:35am bus on a cold, rainy day filled up fast, with over half of the seats already taken.

I looked up and breathed in sharply when I saw the pretty brown-haired girl right in front of me, next to an empty seat. “May I sit here?” I asked her.

“Yeah!” she replied. She smiled.

“Thanks.” The bus stopped once more on Maple Drive, then turned left on Alvarez Avenue and stopped twice more. I looked up and saw that the girl next to me was looking in my direction, so I turned and made eye contact. “How’s it going?” I asked.

“Pretty good. How are you?”

“I’m okay. Glad it’s Friday.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Trying to think of something else to say, as we headed south on Andrews Road, I asked, “What class are you headed to?”

“Bio 101. It’s really hard.”

“I’ve heard.”

“What about you? What classes do you have today?”

“Advanced calculus, Euclidean geometry, and New Testament Writings of John.”

“How is that John class? I’ve heard good things about it.”

“It’s good. I have a lot of friends from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship in that class too.”

“My roommate and I were talking about looking for a church.”

“I go to Jeromeville Covenant,” I said. “The one right back there, on the right. And Jeromeville Christian Fellowship too, but that isn’t affiliated with a church.”

“Maybe I’ll check those out sometime.”

“Yeah. That would be cool,” I said. “Hey, what’s your name? I know I’ve seen you on the bus before.”

“Tara.”

“I’m Greg.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Tara said, motioning to shake my hand.

“Nice to meet you too,” I replied as I shook Tara’s hand. She smiled, and I smiled back. Maybe this Valentine’s Day would not be so bad after all.

Author’s note: Did you find the secret message? Have you ever written something with a secret message hidden inside?

“Fall Away” is an actual story I wrote when I was younger. I hope I have grown as a writer since then, because reading it again now, it really wasn’t that good. I only made minimal changes to it for inclusion in this episode, in order to resolve continuity errors between the original story and the way I have told the backstory now.

(October 2021. Interlude, and a new blog.)

October 24, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 11 Comments

Welcome! If you are new here, this is not my usual kind of post. Don’t Let The Days Go By is a continuing story set in 1996, about a university student. In the fictional timeline, after final exams in June and December, I take a break from writing for a month or so, and the last episode included December finals, so I am on a break.

I started yet another blog, called “Greg Out Of Character.” In this blog, I will write about pretty much anything that isn’t an episode of DLTDGB. Maybe some of the events in my past that inspired DLTDGB, maybe thoughts about other writing projects, maybe I’ll share some other writing I did in the past unrelated to DLTDGB, I’m not really sure yet. We’ll see. I don’t plan on posting there on a schedule. But any of you who regularly interact with me, I would appreciate if you followed that blog too, especially if you actually find me interesting.

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing on this site during the hiatus. I’m thinking I should probably update the About This Site and Dramatis Personae pages, so watch for those soon. I might also make an organized and categorized list of episodes. I’ve also thought it would be fun to draw maps of the University of Jeromeville, and possibly of Jeromeville and the surrounding region. I started this a while ago, but whenever I try drawing maps, it just ends up looking too much like the actual place that inspired my fictional universe, and it feels like I should at least make it a little bit different. We’ll see what I come up with.

So, back to my original point, if you are new here and interested in this story, you can read all 111 episodes. Start with the first episode (July 5, 1993) by clicking here, and then just click Next at the bottom of each one. If that’s too much, you can read the summary of Year 1, then the summary of Year 2, then start with the first episode of Year 3 (June 18-21, 1996) and continue from there. You can also listen to the music for Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3 (in progress).

How is everyone’s October going?

October 23-25, 1996. A pen pal on another continent. (#106)

August 30, 2021December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

The way people communicate has changed radically over the course of my life. When I was young, telephone calls outside of one’s own city cost a lot of money, so when friends moved away, I often never heard from them again. Writing letters in the mail was an option as well, for people committed enough to do so. In high school, my friend Catherine went to Austria for a year to be an exchange student, and we wrote letters the whole time she was gone. When the young people of today have friends who move away, they stay in touch through texting and social media. Some of them have thousands of followers on social media all over the world, some of whom they have never met before. Many of them do not want to be bothered with traditional voice-based telephone calls, and many of them do not know how to address an envelope or use a stamp.

I attended the University of Jeromeville during an awkward transition period when both of these worlds existed simultaneously. Some of my friends used email, some of them communicated by writing letters, and some I never heard from again once I moved. I spent a lot of time on text-based Internet Relay Chat, usually looking for girls to talk to, because I was not good at meeting girls in real life. I stayed in touch with some of them by email, but I also sometimes got handwritten letters from them. Sometimes we wanted to exchange photos, and in an era when flatbed scanners were relatively uncommon and digital cameras were not yet mainstream, it was easier to send a photo in the mail. Other times, someone I know would lose access to email temporarily, and stay in touch by writing letters. That was the case for many of my university friends when they went for the summer. That was also the case with Laura Little, although her story was a bit more interesting.

I met Laura on IRC in the spring of my sophomore year at UJ. She was seventeen years old, and she lived in upstate New York, on the other side of the United States from me. In one of our first conversations, she told me that she was going to be leaving in July for a year, to be an exchange student in Switzerland, where she would not have Internet access. I had been getting letters from Laura regularly since she left; she had a difficult transition to life in Switzerland, and her German was not good, so she wanted to get letters to read in English.

Laura and I had never met, obviously. I did not know what she looked or sounded like. Right before she left for Switzerland, a romantic interest named Adam whom she also met on the Internet had come to visit her for a few days. Whenever she mentioned Adam, her answers were a bit inconsistent and evasive; first she said they had a good time but decided to just be friends, but then in the next letter she said something about having to get her mind off of what happened with Adam, and then she said something about regretting what she did with him, that she felt stupid and that she should have known better. Clearly I had not gotten the entire story, so the last time I wrote to her, I asked exactly what happened.

I got home in the late afternoon after a long Wednesday of classes to find a letter from Laura on the kitchen counter next to the phone; one of the other roommates had apparently gotten the mail earlier. Shawn was in the kitchen loading the dishwasher. When he saw me pick up Laura’s letter, he asked, “Hey, who are all these girls who write letters to you? You’re getting letters from all over the world! You’re a ladies’ man!”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Laura is someone I met on the Internet; she’s from New York but studying in Switzerland this year.” I conveniently left out the part where she was only seventeen. Even though that was only a three-year age difference between Laura and me, Shawn was turning twenty-three next month, so to him, she would seem significantly younger.

“And you got a letter from Hungary last week.”

“That’s Kelly Graham. You know Kelly. She was roommates with Haley Channing and Kristina Kasparian last year, on Baron Court. She’s studying abroad in Hungary this year.”

Shawn thought for a minute. “Kelly! Oh yeah. And don’t you have a girlfriend back home?”

“Wait, what?”

“Yeah. That girl from Gabilan who has written to you like four times already. That’s where you’re from, right? Plumdale is right near Gabilan?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Cecilia, or something like that.”

Cecilia? From Gabilan? I laughed loudly as I figured out who Shawn was talking about. “That’s my grandma!” I said.

“Your grandma!” Shawn laughed. “This whole time, I thought you had a girlfriend back home.”

“I wish I had a girlfriend back home who wrote me as often as Grandma did.”

“She sure likes to write.”

“She does. And my cousin Rick, the second-oldest grandchild, went away to North Coast State this year, so he’s gonna get just as many letters from Grandma now too.”

“That’s nice of her, though.”

“Yeah, it is.” I walked upstairs to read Laura’s letter. Laura had very small handwriting; she sometimes wrote in cursive and sometimes printed, sometimes both in the same letter, and she often did not bother to separate her letters into paragraphs. This letter was handwritten on tan stationery, with a typed paper inside the envelope as well. The typed paper appeared to be a math assignment of some sort.

Greg,

Guten tag! Meine Deutsch ist besser. (My German is better.) I understand more than I did before at least. I’m doing well. The weather here is getting colder. I just spent 200 francs on sweaters and a long sleeve shirt. My mom would kill me if she found out how much money I spent. I’m supposed to be taking this test, but it’s a take home test so I’ll make a copy and send it to you. I’m so lost and I have told the teacher that I don’t understand any of this. He just told me to do my best but I just sat for half an hour debating if I did the problems correct but I left half of them blank because I don’t know what to do. Maybe you can help me. I’ll write what it means in English if I know it. I would really appreciate it if you could help explain these. I know it is really sad how lost I am. I told my mom about you and said that I was going to ask you for help with math, and she says thank you. I do too. So anyway, last weekend I went away on a trip with the other exchange students in my program and I got to talk in English all weekend. It was so good. We went to the mountains and in the morning we took a cable car to the top of a mountain and it snowed. I love it. And we had a big party that night. It was cold, but we had a snowball fight and took a lot of pictures. We have Herbstferien here, it’s a fall school holiday, I CAN’T WAIT! I’m going to go skiing, I’ve never been before. I hope you don’t think different of me after I tell you what happened with Adam because I know it was a mistake and I should have just been friends with him but I’m so stupid. Sometimes when I’m put in a pressure situation I don’t think straight. Only you and one of my friends back home know about this because I don’t want anyone to know. I was so stupid to let it happen but it’s too late to fix it now and I just want to forget about that.

I had a feeling I knew what was coming next. It was pretty obvious where she was going with this. I continued reading.

Well I kinda slept with him. Only once though but we also did some other stuff. I don’t want to say anything more, I’m so stupid to let it happen. But on a lighter note I got my ear pierced at the top. It didn’t hurt as bad as I thought it would but I couldn’t sleep on that side for a few days. One of my friends from school here and I got it done together. I like it. I’m not feeling homesick as often. I know how to prevent it now and I don’t think it will happen again. I know my writing is messy but I haven’t slept much. I hope you don’t think of me different because of all that. Oh yeah, you’ll be happy to know my butt doesn’t hurt as much when I ride my bike to school. I’m happy now but I can’t ride long distances like you do sometimes. How are you? Have you met anyone yet? It made me sad when you said you felt like giving up on girls. Just talk to someone. Ask her to coffee or ice cream or lunch or something. And tell me all about her. Any girl would be lucky to spend time with you. I hope to hear from you soon.

❤ Laura

I was not entirely sure how to react to what she said about Adam, although I had a feeling that was what she was going to say from the moment she told me in her last letter that she regretted what she did. Part of me was disappointed that this happened; Laura was not the kind of nice Christian girl I was hoping to meet. She had never claimed to be Christian, though, so that was just wishful thinking on my part.

But I also did not blame her or Adam one bit. If I had been Adam, I probably would have been having fantasies about going to bed with Laura the whole time I was visiting her, even though I knew it was wrong. I must admit, I had had those fantasies about her before, although I could not bring myself to tell her that, of course. This sounds paradoxical, but such are the trials of a lonely, girl-crazy Christian young adult like me.

I only had one class the next day, and one of my students for my tutoring job did not show up, so I had plenty of time to get homework done during the day. After dinner that night, I went upstairs to my room and began writing my next letter to Laura.

October 24, 1996

Dear Laura,

Thank you for your honesty. Don’t worry about me thinking differently of you. Everyone does things they wish they hadn’t afterward. And please don’t call yourself stupid. You aren’t. You said you regret what you did, so learn from this. You told me that you know you don’t think straight in pressure situations, so when you know you’re going to be in a pressure situation, set boundaries in advance. If there’s a guy who likes you, for example, don’t be alone with him if you don’t want to feel pressured.

I wish I got a fall break. That sounds like it’ll be fun. I’ve never been skiing either. I don’t know if I want to try it. I’m not usually good at things like that where I have to keep my balance by going fast, and I would probably just get frustrated. But tell me how it goes. Your ear piercing sounds cute.

I started going to a new church a couple weeks ago. I really like it. A lot of my friends from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship go to that church. But I don’t want to start going there just because I have friends there. That shouldn’t be what church is about. So I decided for the rest of October to go to both churches every Sunday and pray about it. So far I like the new church. People there seem more serious about following God and reading the Bible.

Things are going well at the apartment. I’m adjusting well to having roommates. Four of us share a three bedroom apartment; Shawn and I share the big bedroom. It hasn’t been a problem so far. We both get up early for class, so I don’t have to worry about waking him up or him waking me up. Brian is really nice too. The fourth guy, Josh, he works weird hours, and I don’t see him very often.

I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m not good at meeting girls. I feel like I have a lot of acquaintances these days, but I’m kind of on the outside of a lot of my friends’ social groups. There’s this one girl I know from JCF who I would love to get to know better and spend more time with. She’s really sweet and she has beautiful blue eyes. I just don’t know what to do, though. I don’t get to talk to her very often, and lately she’s been acting a little different. I’m not sure why. Last week at JCF she was talking a lot with this other guy, but I couldn’t tell if they were together or anything. I met her in January when I was having a really hard day, and this guy invited me to hang out with some of his friends, and we hung out at her house. A couple months ago, around the time all the year leases run out, I rode my bike past their house and everything was dark, and that inspired me to write a poem. I’ll send it to you. It’s a Shakespearean sonnet; I’ve always liked that format for poems.

I continued writing, telling her all about trigonometric ratios on the next page, which apparently her mom wanted to thank me for. I wondered exactly how much Laura’s mom knew about me. I told my mom very little about all the girls I had met on the Internet, although she knew about one, Molly from Pennsylvania, because Molly wrote me letters the summer after freshman year when I went home for the summer.

Next I opened a file on my computer called “2234.” This was the title of the poem I had mentioned in my letter to Laura, about a time when I rode my bike past the house where Haley and her roommates lived, but Haley was home for the summer and everyone else had moved out by then. I titled the poem 2234 after the address of the house, 2234 Baron Court. I printed the poem and put it on my desk with the rest of Laura’s letter, which I would mail in the morning.

“2234”
by Gregory J. Dennison, 1996

Inside your walls, that January night,
My life began again, in joy and love;
My brand new friends had shown to me the light;
Set free from gloom, I praise my Lord above!
Today your door is locked, your curtains drawn,
Along your quiet street you make no sound,
Your residents, and all their friends, are gone,
No sign left of the friendship I once found.
But though the cast has left, the show is done,
The drama rests forever in my heart;
This friendship still is shining like the sun,
We’re miles away, but not so far apart;
Though now, O house, you’re empty, cold, and dark,
My night in you forever left its mark.

I took a long time to fall asleep Thursday night. I kept thinking about Laura, having sex with Adam and partying with all of the other exchange students, probably getting drunk in the process. I wondered if she made any other decisions she regretted on her weekend with the other exchange students. I knew consciously that that line of thinking was horribly judgmental, and that I was being a bad friend by entertaining those thoughts, but I could not help it. I woke up tired Friday morning, still dwelling on these dark thoughts.

I was not feeling angry with Laura, though. My brooding was directed more toward myself, at my failures with girls, and at a society where fake people with loose morals always got the girl or guy they were after, and guys like me were ridiculed and made outcasts. I did not know how meeting girls and dating worked. Laura tried to encourage me, but her suggestions just were not easy for me. I did not know how to talk about things that girls would be interested in, and sometimes I felt like I was on the outside, or at best on the outer fringes, of cliques that seemed to spend a lot of time together.

During a break between classes, I went to the Post Office to mail Laura’s letter. There was a small Post Office in the Memorial Union building, around the corner from the campus store. Four people were in front of me in line, and with two friends in Europe that I was writing to that year, I had spent enough time in this line to know that I would be here for at least fifteen minutes. Usually only one employee worked at the desk, and whenever he had to get something behind the desk, or place a package where the outgoing packages went, he seemed to move so slowly that I wondered if he was exaggerating his slow movements on purpose. Did he have special training to learn how to work so slowly and inefficiently? If I had been working behind that desk, I would be moving a lot faster, just because it was in my nature to get things done. It probably would have saved time to buy stamps in the denomination of what it cost to send a letter to Europe, but sometimes I wrote long enough letters that it cost more, and I would have had to stand in line anyway to get the right postage.

I finally mailed my letter and walked toward the other end of the Memorial Union looking for a place to sit. I was thinking about Laura’s encouragement to talk to girls and not be afraid, and as if on cue, I saw Haley walking toward me. Before I could overthink myself out of it, I said, “Hey, Haley.”

Haley stopped and looked up at me with her bright blue eyes, smiling. “Hi,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Not much,” I said. “Glad it’s Friday.”

“I know! I had a big midterm yesterday. It was a long week.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Hey, what are you doing this weekend?” The words just came out; I was not sure where I was going with this line of conversation, but it felt right to ask.

“Not much. But I’m going to play games at the Albert Street house tonight. Did you hear about that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“After JCF tonight. Just hanging out and play games. I’m sure you’re invited.”

“Eddie and Raphael’s house? That Albert Street house?”

“Yeah. I have to get going, but will you be at JCF tonight?”

“I will. I’ll see you there?”

“Yeah! See you there!”

I did go to the game night after JCF that night, and it was a lot of fun. About ten of us were there, and we played Uno and Taboo until well after midnight. Nothing special happened between me and Haley, although we did get to talk a bit more. That felt like progress. Maybe next time I would ask her to do something specific, just me and her.

After the game night ended, I headed home on the nearly empty streets of Jeromeville under the dark night sky, driving over the overpass with trees on it and flipping around the stations on the car radio. As I heard Alanis Morissette singing about how “you live, you learn, you love, you learn” in her pain-inducing voice that sounded like the sound some sort of bird would make as it was being stabbed, I instinctively reached over to change the station. But just before I pressed the button, I stopped. Maybe Alanis was right. I was living my life and learning from my missteps and mistakes. And so was Laura, on another continent. I was not doing myself any favors when I got down on myself because of my social and romantic failures, and neither was Laura when she called herself stupid because of what happened with Adam. Laura was my long-distance friend, and friends were there to encourage each other, and help each other learn and grow.

Dear readers: What are some experiences you’ve had with learning not to be so judgmental? Or learning from your mistakes?

Also, I know this is a day late. I might be taking an unplanned week off from writing here and there, because I’m behind on real life right now. Next time I skip a week, you can always read an episode from the archives.

(April 2021. Interlude, part 4, and Year 2 recap.)

April 11, 2021April 18, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

If you’re new here, this is not a typical post, but this is the perfect post for you. Don’t Let The Days Go By is an episodic continuing story about a university student figuring out life. I am currently on hiatus after finishing writing about Year 2. Sometime later this spring I will start writing and posting about Year 3.

This week I will be recapping and summarizing Year 2. Last week, I did the same for Year 1. Many of my current readers have not been with the story since the beginning, so this is an opportunity to catch up. I will also include links to some, but not all, of the episodes, so you can read an abridged version of the story more detailed than this recap. As always, you can start from the first episode (here) and keep clicking Next if you want to read the entire story, 88 episodes so far. If this is your first time here, and you do not want to read all 88 episodes, you may want to read the recap of Year 1 first.

I went home to Plumdale for the summer and worked in a small bookstore. I got the job through the connection that one of the two other employees was a family friend. Mom volunteered me for the job without asking me, and while I hate when she does that, this time I did not mind because I needed something to do, and getting paid would be nice. I thought at first that working in a bookstore would be fun, but the store was very slow, and not exactly my clientele.

June 22, 1995. The first day on the job.

I had lost touch with most of my high school friends, although I saw a few of them. I watched a roller hockey game with Rachel, and I saw Catherine and Renee and some of Catherine’s friends from Austria in a choir and orchestra performance that she put together. I kept in touch with a number of Jeromeville friends, mostly through writing letters, although a few of them had access to email during the summer. My cousins Rick and Miranda came to visit for a week, and I went with them, my mother, and my brother Mark to Jeromeville for a day, to show everyone around. I got to see Taylor and another guy from my freshman dorm on that day.

July 18, 1995. The day we went to Jeromeville with Rick and Miranda.

I turned 19 in August. The lease for my apartment began September 1, and I moved back to Jeromeville the first weekend of September. Classes did not start until the end of September, but I preferred being bored in Jeromeville to being bored in Plumdale. I spent that September going on lots of bike rides and talking to lots of girls on Internet Relay Chat. As the school year approached, I was encouraged as I started seeing familiar faces around campus and town. Megan, the resident advisor from a nearby building whom I had gotten to know (and like) the previous year, was now an RA in a building in the North Area, and she invited me to have lunch with her at the dining commons.

September 26, 1995. My lunch date with Megan.

I had plenty of new experiences that fall. I got a job tutoring calculus for the tutoring center on campus. Also, Danielle, my friend from last year who also went to Mass at the Newman Center, finally talked me into singing in the choir at church. Another student in the choir, Heather, lived near me, so we usually carpooled to choir practice and to Mass.

October 11, 1995. A busy day.

Liz, another friend from last year, had invited me a few times to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship. I was hesitant , since I was Catholic and I knew that other Christians did things differently and sometimes looked down on Catholics. I was not sure that JCF would be the first place for me. But I finally decided to take her up on her invitation that fall; since I was living alone, I knew that I needed to do all I could to stay close with my friends. I quickly decided that JCF was a wonderful place for me. In addition to already having several friends who attended there, I started making new friends, and in addition to learning more about the Bible, I also started socializing with JCF people.

November 17, 1995. What’s a but stop?

I started a new creative project that fall: a novel, about an 18-year-old who is not ready for high school to be over. He goes away to live with relatives and pretends to be younger so he can go through high school again and get a second chance at having a social life. I got the idea because I felt that way sometimes. As the winter went on, my classes continued, I worked on the novel, and the holidays came. I spent Thanksgiving with my family visiting the relatives in Bidwell. I spent Christmas back home in Plumdale with my family, where Mom volunteered me for something yet again without asking me. We made a last minute trip to Disneyland for the New Year, and on that trip we decided on a whim to drive by the house of an infamous celebrity.

December 30, 1995 – January 1, 1996. A family vacation that did not involve boring relatives.

I had still never had a girlfriend, and things never seemed to work out for me. It seemed like every girl I met always seemed to have a boyfriend. I was disappointed when Megan, the older girl who was an RA, mentioned at one point that she was dating someone. I found out something later that made me realize that Megan and I never would have worked out anyway.

January 19-20, 1996. A dangerous glance.

While many positive things had happened so far that year, I still got discouraged and had bad days sometimes. One of those bad days happened on a Friday, the night that JCF met. As everyone trickled out of the room, I sat alone by myself. Two guys, Eddie and Xander, came over to talk to me and invited me to hang out with them afterward, along with Haley, Kristina, and Kelly, three girls who lived down the street from them. I made new friends that night, some of whom I am still friends with today.

January 26, 1996. Pieces falling into place.

The winter quarter was not easy academically. My classes all had their midterms on the same day. Then, a few days later, some jerk decided to steal my clothes out of the laundry. Just when despair was starting to get to me, I saw one of the JCF staff on campus; she told me exactly what it means to follow Jesus, how he died for our sins to bring us eternal life with God. I made a decision that day to follow Jesus.

February 15-16, 1996. And hope does not disappoint us.

With this new outlook on life, I started attending Bible study. I was learning more about my faith, really paying attention to God’s Word for the first time. My friend Melissa from high school told me in an email that she went bowling and got a score of 178, her best ever. This was exactly the same as my best bowling score ever, from the fall when I took bowling class. Melissa and I agreed to meet over spring break to see who was truly the better bowler, and that one game was legendary.

March 28, 1996. At the bowling alley and coffee shop during spring break.

In April, the University of Jeromeville got a new ID card system. We all had to take new pictures, and mine was the worst ID card picture I have ever taken in my life. The following week, I got invited along on a road trip to Bay City with a mix of old friends, including Sarah and Caroline, and new friends, including Eddie, Xander, and Haley. We ate at the Hard Rock Cafe, walked uphill to an amazing view, and then drove down the coast to Moonlight Cove and slept illegally on the beach.

April 12-13, 1996. The road trip to Bay City and Moonlight Cove.

Finding a place to live in Jeromeville is a very stressful endeavor. I heard Pete and Charlie say that they needed a third roommate for next year, but Mike Knepper came along and took that spot just as I about ready to commit. I asked for prayer about it at Bible study a couple weeks later. Shawn, the senior who co-led the study, almost immediately mentioned that he and his current roommate Brian were staying in Jeromeville another year with no place to live yet. God answered the first part of my prayer pretty quickly, giving me roommates for next year. I had trouble finding a house to rent, since we waited so long, but I found a nice apartment on the northern edge of Jeromeville, about two miles from the campus core.

May 1996. Looking for a place to live.

I went to the Spring Picnic again, and I saw the band Lawsuit play. I also worked the Math Club table for a while, which took away from my time to wander around and have fun, so I learned that day never to volunteer during the Spring Picnic. I saw the Olympic torch pass through Jeromeville on its way to Atlanta. I saw Sarah and a few other students from JCF get baptized. And Haley had become my newest love interest, so of course I had plenty of awkward moments in front of her, as well as in front of other girls.

May 11-16, 1996. A montage of awkward moments.

I was still doing very well in classes. Being a math major, I was now taking two math classes every quarter, and started taking upper division math classes in the middle of that year. Dr. Gabby Thomas was my favorite math professor so far; she spoke clear English and felt like a normal human being more than many of my other professors. As the year ended, I participated in the Man of Steel competition, a decade-old tradition among the men of JCF involving disc golf, a hamburger eating contest, and a game of poker. I did not do too well. Fortunately, my finals went better than the Man of Steel competition, and I ended the year on a positive note, at a huge graduation party hosted by my new friends who were graduating, Brian and Shawn.

June 15, 1996. The graduation party at the Valdez Street house.

Here is the playlist of songs I used in year 2. As always, please leave comments or suggestions or questions for me. I love hearing from all of you. I’m not sure what, if anything, I’ll be doing next week; I will continue the story into Year 3 soon, but in real life, things are going to be a little crazy over the next month or two, so I might need some more time off.

(Interlude – March 2021, part 2)

March 28, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 9 Comments

Hi, friends. I’m still on hiatus. I probably will be for a while, until I get some things figured out in real life. I promise I’ll have new episodes by the beginning of May at the latest, possibly sooner. Last night I worked on outlining what would happen in the start of season 3, so that’s progress.

If you’re new here, this is not a typical post. Don’t Let The Days Go By is an episodic continuing story set in 1996 about a university student figuring out life. Finish reading this post first, then please read some others. There are currently 88 episodes, listed either to the right or at the bottom depending on your device, so even if you’ve been following me for a while, most of you will have some that you haven’t read. So you can read those over the next few weeks while you’re waiting for me to write new ones. The episodes are best read in order, but can be read out of order, so if you’re new and ready to commit to be a fan of this site, you’re best off starting from the beginning, so you can experience the story as it unfolds. But, still, read this post first.

So I’ve been thinking about a few DLTDGB side projects, and I’d like your opinions on whether or not you’d be interested in these:

(1) A recap. I could do one post where I outline the entire plot of DLTDGB from the beginning of the prologue on July 5, 1993 until the most recent episode on June 15, 1996. I would summarize the highlights of Greg’s life so far, in a post no longer than one typical episode. I could also include links to a few episodes about the key turning points in Greg’s life, for those people who want to go more in depth without reading 88 full episodes.

(2) Avatars/Bitmoji/some kind of artwork depicting the characters visually. I can’t draw well, just to let you know. I made a bunch of fake email accounts and started using them to sign up for multiple Bitmoji accounts, with the purpose being to create Bitmoji for the main characters and show my readers what these characters look like. I did that for Eddie and Kristina and put the Bitmoji faces on top of the real faces in the photo I used for the most recent episode. I was having a hard time getting the Bitmoji to look exactly like the real people, but I know that I don’t have to make them look exactly like the people they were based on. In fact, it might be better to have them not exactly the same, for anonymity purposes. Most of the people that these characters are based on do not know that I am writing about them.

However, another glitch is that Gmail does not like that I made a bunch of fake email accounts, for obvious reasons. It makes me verify by text that I am a real person, and now it won’t even let me do that because I’ve used the same phone number too many times. I could start making fake emails with Yahoo or other free email services, I suppose. But there are so many characters that I could not possibly do this for every character, at least not with Bitmoji. I was planning on doing this for Taylor, Pete, Sarah, Liz, Ramon, Caroline, Eddie, Xander, Haley, Kristina, Brian, and Shawn, at least for now, adding others as needed if I needed to cover their faces in photos. I would not do every character, since the cast of characters for DLTDGB is just far too large. But those twelve are definitely among the most significant supporting characters at the current point of the story.

What do you guys think… is this something you would want to see? Also, if anyone knows a way to make characters similar to Bitmoji without having to have an account for each one, that would be helpful.

(3) Maps. Fantasy books with detailed geographical settings, Tolkien for example, often have maps to help the reader. Since I tend to describe Jeromeville and the surrounding Capital Valley Region in detail, I thought maybe I could do the same thing. The problem is, every time I’ve tried to draw these maps, they end up looking just like a slightly distorted version of the real-world places that inspired these stories, and while DLTDGB is based on true stories, I also want to make it my own fictional world, and I have not yet figured out how to make the maps not look like real places but still be true to the story so far. Any thoughts? Do any of you want to see maps of my semi-fictional world?

Finally, in addition to sharing any thoughts on anything above, please ask me anything you want in the comments. Questions about things happening in the story, questions about me as an adult, about the writing process… whatever you want. I’ll answer it, unless it would involve major spoilers.

Have a great week, everyone! Like I said, if you’re new here and you want to start from the beginning, go here, then click Next at the end of each episode. https://dontletthedaysgoby.home.blog/2018/12/09/july-5-1993-prologue-my-first-visit-to-jeromeville/

(Interlude – March 2021.)

March 21, 2021March 21, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 17 Comments

Welcome! If you are new here, this is not a typical post. Don’t Let The Days Go By is an episodic continuing story about a university student, set in 1996. It is a story of living, learning, growing, and self-discovery, amidst a world of alternative rock and the emergence of the Internet into the mainstream.

Last week’s episode was the Year 2 season finale. I will be taking some time off, during which I will be planning for year 3. Also, in real life things may be kind of busy and unpredictable for the next few months, so I could use one fewer commitment. I do not know right now when I will start writing again, but I will someday soon. If you are new here and hoping for more episodes soon, you can always go here to read the first episode and then just read in order from there by clicking Next.

Just as with Year 1, I made a playlist with all of the music I used in Year 2:

I also added a new “Music” page to this site, with links to the playlists for each year. And I updated the Dramatis Personae, adding character bios for Abby Bartlett, Amelia Dye, Josh McGraw, and Dr. Gabby Thomas. I also added a number of new characters to the lists of other characters, and updated some other characters’ bios. I will be starting a new Dramatis Personae for Year 3 soon, removing people who are not part of the story anymore. I wonder sometimes if the large cast of characters makes the story more difficult to read or follow, or if I need more character development for the other main characters. However, in real life a university student is likely to know a lot of people, and this is primarily one person’s story, not a story with an ensemble cast. On a related note, I have considered, someday when I am done telling the main story, going back and retelling some of the more interesting episodes from another character’s point of view. Or maybe I could start doing that during these interludes, when I am taking a break from the main story.

I take a break like this after every June and December in the fictional timeline. One of the recurring topics has been the community shared by some of the Jeromeville Christian Fellowship students. Eddie and his housemates had Haley and her housemates right down the street, and Shawn and Brian and their housemates around the corner, to the point that it was almost like living in a Christian dorm. In real life, I have come to learn that that kind of community among Christians is very difficult to find in adulthood, outside of the context of being a university student. I have had a lot of struggles finding a church and a community as an adult, and in talking with people I have come to the conclusion that most Christians just do not have this as adults. Instead, they have families of their own around which their lives revolve, and outside of that, church friends are just one among several compartments into which life has been divided. Will I ever find that sense of community again in real life? I do not know (and COVID has thrown more complications into this, of course).

I have often found that I need to keep reminding myself that, first and foremost, DLTDGB is a work of fiction. Much of it is based on true stories, but I stress too much about getting every detail right. Maybe two people who are in the same Bible study in DLTDGB weren’t in real life; that’s okay.

Thank you all for your support. Please leave comments. I wish people would comment more often on this blog; I enjoy interacting with my readers. If you have any questions at all for me, about anything, please ask. If I get a lot of interesting questions, maybe I’ll share them as a question-and-answer post next week. Or offer suggestions and thoughts on my writing. Some of you a while back told me that my posts were too long, and ever since then I have kept them under a certain length. Or just say hi and introduce yourself and tell me how you are doing. I want to hear from you.

Finally, I will leave you with this picture from the oak grove in the University of Jeromeville Arboretum, with different kinds of oaks from all over the world. I took it in February 2021, the last time I was in Jeromeville.

January 19-20, 1996. A dangerous glance. (#67)

October 25, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 23 Comments

A few months ago, during October of my sophomore year at the University of Jeromeville, I had gotten involved with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, a chapter of an international nondenominational organization called Intervarsity. JCF had weekly meetings on Fridays with worship music with someone giving a talk about the Bible, and attending these was the extent of my involvement so far. I knew that there were also small group Bible studies and a few retreats every year, but I had not gotten involved in those yet.

As a relative newcomer to the group, I was still learning the etiquette. Some people stood up during worship, some waved their hands, some sat quietly. I was having trouble doing any of those right now because I had to pee, and I was not sure if getting up to use the bathroom during the music was frowned upon. I walked quickly to the bathroom as soon as the last song and closing prayer ended, and when I got back to my seat, Liz and Ramon, Jason, Sarah, Caroline, and Krista were standing where I had been sitting. I stood quietly next to Sarah. All six of these people had been in my dorm freshman year, and they were how I first knew about JCF.

“Hey, Greg,” Sarah said. “What are you doing tonight?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“We’re going to 199 Stone to see Dangerous Minds. You want to come?”

“Sure,” I said. “When does it start?”

“10. We don’t need to leave quite yet, but we should probably leave soon, to get there early.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good idea.”

A little while later, the seven of us left Evans Hall and walked to Stone Hall. Evans and Stone were right next to each other on Davis Drive, so we did not have far to walk. A division of the Associated Students organization called Campus Cinema used the large 400-seat lecture hall in Stone as a second-run theater on weekends, showing movies that had played in theaters a few months earlier but were not released on video yet. Tickets were three dollars, less than even matinee prices at actual theaters.

Two lines extended from the front of the building, a relatively short line of people waiting to buy tickets, and a longer line of about 50 people who already bought tickets and were now waiting for the earlier show to get out. The seven of us paid for our tickets and moved to the back of the longer line. “This is based on a true story, right?” Krista asked.

“Yeah,” Sarah replied.

I did not know a whole lot about this movie, except that it was about an inner-city teacher, and that the song “Gangsta’s Paradise” came from this movie. I only knew that song because of Mark, my younger brother who loved gangsta rap. I did not realize that the movie was based on a true story.

About five minutes after we arrived, more people trickled in and moved to the back of the line where we stood. At one point, I spotted a familiar face walking toward me, and my mind flooded with thoughts. What do I say? I have not seen her in a while, and our last conversation was kind of awkward on my end. Maybe I should–

“Megan!” I called out, waving, interrupting the voices in my head.

Megan looked around for the source of the person greeting her. She saw me and smiled. “Greg! How are you?”

“I’m doing ok. Classes are going well. How are you?”

“I’m great!”

“How’s your building?”

“It’s good. It’s a pretty calm group of people so far. There hasn’t been a lot of drama. I have to go, I need to find the people I’m meeting here, but hey, it was good seeing you!”

“You too!” I said, smiling. Had I been asked yesterday, I would have said that I was making progress in getting over Megan. When she mentioned two months ago that she was dating someone, I was devastated, but I did not think of her as often since I did not see her as often anymore. Last year, she was an RA in a dorm in the same campus residential area as mine, and I saw her frequently around the dining commons. This year, she was an RA in a different residential area, and I lived off campus.

As I stood there in line, I found that I could not help but wonder if Megan and this guy were still together. Maybe that was who she was meeting. To my knowledge, Megan had no idea how I felt about her, since I never knew how to tell girls that I liked them. In the time since I found out that Megan had a boyfriend, I had also found out that another girl I liked had a boyfriend; this was a common theme in my life.

I saw a crowd of people leave the building as the early show ended, and a few minutes later, our line started moving. We climbed up to the building’s front entrance, walked across the lobby, and then down the aisle of the lecture hall. “Is this okay?” Liz asked as she gestured toward a mostly empty row in the center section toward the back.

“Sure,” I said, nodding. The others assented as well, and we sat down in seven consecutive seats. I watched as advertisements for other Associated Students services flashed on the screen, mixed with a few silly announcements. “Want to learn to be a projectionist? So do we,” one of them said. I laughed.

I looked around me at people filling in the seats. I saw Megan and her friends walk past us; they sat three rows in front of us. I looked back up at the screen, watching the advertisements, occasionally looking around but unable to stop myself from glancing at the back of Megan’s head. She was talking to one of the people she came with, an Asian girl with shoulder-length hair; they were laughing about something. Megan put her arm around the girl and leaned forward, and they kissed on the lips. Megan pulled back, smiling, then leaned toward the girl and kissed her again, leaving her arm around the girl after their lips separated.

Wait, I thought. What just happened?

Megan never told me that she had a boyfriend. Her exact words were “the person I’m dating,” and apparently the person she was dating was a girl.

The movie started, and I tried to pay attention to what was happening on the screen. Although it was dark in the building once the movie started, I could still see the outline of Megan and her girlfriend cuddling. I tried to look away. Looking at her felt wrong. Not only was she in a relationship, but it was a same-sex relationship, and that she was not even into guys in the first place. I forced myself to watch the movie, at times even putting my hands over my face to cover just enough of my field of vision so as not to be able to see Megan and her girlfriend.

I became more absorbed in the movie as it went on, watching Michelle Pfeiffer’s character, Ms. Johnson, struggling to connect with the city kids in her class and relate to their experiences. In one scene, the mother of one of the students called Ms. Johnson a vulgar name and told her that she should not teach these students to be academically successful. I could not understand how someone could possibly have such low expectations for her own child. I would have just as hard of a time as Ms. Johnson understanding the world that these students lived in, and she was much more patient with the students than I would have been.

At the end of the movie, Ms. Johnson’s character was unable to save one of the students from the dangers of street life. She seemed to feel that all her efforts were futile. Futility felt familiar tonight. All of my efforts to get closer to Megan, the late night conversations, sitting with her and her friends in the dining hall, exchanging birthday cards, the time we had lunch and hung out in her room, none of that mattered. I did the best I could, but I was doomed from the start just because I was a guy.

When the movie ended, people began standing and filing out of the theater. I realized that I could turn toward my friends so that Megan would be behind me, and I would not have to see her as she left the building with her girlfriend. But I also did not want to be conspicuous or rude about this. I stood facing forward as I normally would, waiting for the people around me to leave,and as Megan and her girlfriend walked up the aisle past me, I made eye contact with Megan and waved.

“Good night, Greg,” Megan said. “Have a good weekend!”

“You too,” I said, trying my best to act the way I always did, hiding the disappointment in my voice. I turned to my left, to the people I came with.

“What did you think of the movie?” Sarah asked.

“I liked it,” I said. “Sad, but that’s life sometimes. Sometimes, no matter what you do, things don’t work out.”

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” Krista added. “But I thought it was cool how much effort she made to relate to the students.”

“It wasn’t bad, but there are already a lot of movies like this,” Jason observed. “Kids from rough neighborhoods and teachers trying to relate to them.”

“Yeah,” Krista agreed.

“You ready to go?” Liz asked me. I realized that I was standing closest to the aisle, so I would have to leave first in order for the others to get out. The crowd of people filing out had begun to thin, so I nodded walked toward the aisle. We stood outside in the cool night for a few minutes, talking about weekend plans and classes. Eventually, we all said our goodbyes, and I walked back to my car and returned to my apartment.

The next day was Saturday, and I did not have to wake up early for class. I lay in bed for over an hour after waking up, processing the events of the previous night. Megan McCauley was a lesbian. I saw her kissing a woman. Sometimes, in the back of my mind, I was still holding out hope in my mind that things would not work out with the person Megan was dating, and that I might have a chance with her. Last night had put an end to that hope. All it took was one look, last night while I waited for the movie to start, for what hope I had left to be put to death quickly. I supposed, though, that finding out the way I did had its advantages. Had I actually been brave enough to ask her out, she would have had to tell me that she did not like guys, and that interaction would have been awkward and embarrassing.

I put on a sweatshirt and went for a bike ride, trying to clear my head. I rode south on Andrews Road toward campus, intending to ride the entire length of the University Arboretum east to west. But as I approached, I realized that my route would take me right past Carter Hall, Megan’s dorm, and the North Area Dining Commons where we had met for lunch in September. I turned left on Fifth Street and entered campus on Colt Avenue instead. I did not want to ride past Megan’s building and think about her and her girlfriend in bed together. But it was too late; the thoughts were already there.

One look. All it took was one look to ruin my hope and my weekend. What if I had not looked up while I was in line and seen Megan outside of Stone Hall? Or what if I had made an effort not to look at her once I got to my seat? What if I had not gone to the movie last night at all? Then maybe I would have still been blissfuly unaware of Megan’s sexual orientation, and I would not have felt this awkwardness over having spent a year of my life having a crush on someone whom I did not even realize was not into guys at all. One look can turn happiness to sadness. That sounded poetic.

I stopped when I arrived at the east end of the Arboretum, behind the art and music buildings. Perhaps my mind was giving birth to another poem; I had been writing a lot lately. I did not like the “happiness to sadness” part, though. I continued riding my bike a short distance through the Arboretum and sat on a bench overlooking the small lake next to Marks Hall. The sky was blue, without a cloud in sight, but it was still January, and many of the trees in the Arboretum had shed their leaves. One look can turn summer into winter. No, that was not quite right. One look can turn the blue skies into gray. Iambic pentameter, very Shakespearean, but still not quite right.

One look can turn the daytime into night.

That was it. That was going to be the first line of my poem. Two years ago, in high school, we had studied Shakespeare’s sonnets, and I had become fascinated with their rhythm and rhyme pattern. I also found it interesting how much had been speculated over the years regarding who they were written to, or about, although I had not studied this in great detail. I continued my ride west through the Arboretum, thinking about how one look ruined my night last night, and how if I were to gouge out my eyes, I would not be able to see uncomfortable truths in the first place.

When I reached the oak grove at the end of the Arboretum, I continued on Thompson Drive across Highway 117 to the rural part of campus, past the sheep barn in the middle of the agricultural research fields. At the south end of Hawkins Road, I stopped again and stood for a few minutes. Olive trees lined both sides of the road. Behind me was Arroyo Verde Creek, with oaks and sycamores and various small bushes along its banks. Riding my bike on this route always made me feel so peaceful. Despite still being on a large university campus, I felt like I was miles and miles from civilization, not worried about girls rejecting me, or upcoming exams, or my uncertain future.

In Mr. Jackson’s AP English class at Plumdale High, we studied a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets in detail. Sonnet 29, the one that begins “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” was my favorite. Today I felt like I was in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes. Life just sucked sometimes. Shakespeare used fourteen grandiloquent lines of iambic pentameter to say, essentially, that when he felt discouraged, hopeless, or envious of others, he simply thought of a certain special someone, and having this person in his life was more important than everything that was bringing him down. Scholars had spent centuries speculating about the identity and gender of this special someone and the nature of his or her relationship to Shakespeare.

But, now that I took the time to get out of my head and think about things, there was no mystery to the identity of my special someone, or in this case, multiple special someones. Sure, I had never had a romantic partner. Megan had a girlfriend. Sabrina Murphy had a boyfriend. Back home, I never got anywhere with Rachelle Benedetti or Kim Jensen or Melissa Holmes or Jennifer Henson or Annie Gambrell. But I had people who cared about me, and that really was important. Sarah and Krista and Liz and Ramon and Jason and Caroline had invited me to the movie last night. Taylor Santiago and Pete Green and Charlie Watson always welcomed me to their apartment when I just needed to get out of my apartment and interact with human beings. I had my friends from the Newman Center, I was making new friends at Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, I made friends in my dorm last year, and I had a few friends from classes or just from seeing them around campus. Sure, none of these people was my girlfriend, but they cared about me, and in my darkest moments, they had been there for me.

As I rode my bike back home, I continued thinking of ways to put my feelings into iambic pentameter. I was now modeling my poem on Sonnet 29, using the first eight lines to lament the illusion-shattering experience of seeing Megan kiss a girl, but then reflecting on the positive things in my life in the final six lines. I wrote down what I had so far when I got home, then after making lunch and spending a few hours studying, I logged onto an IRC chat in one window with my poem open in another window, writing my poem as I waited for people to reply to my messages. I finished a little after midnight.

“One Look”

One look can turn the daytime into night,
A happy day into a tedious chore;
One misdirected glance, and all’s not right,
The ships I’ve tried to sink arrive at shore.
I think that I will gouge out both my eyes
And lay this possibility to rest;
No more will I see through some grand disguise
To find that things are not as I’d have guessed.
But then my eyes would shut to all the love
My friends have shown in times of great despair,
And blind I’d be to gifts from God above,
And times I’ve persevered when life’s not fair;
One painful sight is quite a modest price
To pay to live a life of things so nice.

Megan and I did not stay close for the rest of the time we were at UJ. I had of course not ruled out the possibility that she was bisexual, interested in both women and men, but that was not something I wanted to think about, and it was beside the point. Although I did not grow up with much exposure to the LGBTQ community or lifestyles, I did not reject her out of prejudice. We had already started growing apart now that I did not eat at the dining hall anymore. I also made less of an effort to stay in touch with her once I found out she was dating someone, because I knew she would not be interested in me. I did not avoid her intentionally; I still saw her on campus over the years and said hi occasionally. But we just ran in different circles, and sometimes people just naturally grow apart.

After this, I only have one more specific memory of an actual conversation with Megan. It was early in my senior year, her fifth year, when I passed her on the way to class. She told me she had two more quarters left to finish her undergrad degree, I told her about what I had done over the summer, and she told me that a friend of hers had done the same thing as me a few years earlier. Additionally, in 2014, I was looking at the website for a place where I had a job interview coming up, and I saw a mention of an employee named Megan McCauley . I do not know if it was the same person, but Megan’s degree was in chemical engineering, and this person’s position was related enough to chemistry that it was possible. No picture accompanied the name. I decided to let sleeping dogs lie and not try to figure out if this was the same Megan McCauley; it did not matter in the end, because I was not offered the job. If Megan and I are ever meant to cross paths again someday, I will cross that bridge when I come to it.