Robby Prenkert

Memory #32: Buncha Bethel

I’ve been around Bethel a fairly long time, now. This is actually my seventeenth year on campus. Here’s a buncha Bethel memories.

I remember when…

• the acorn was in the dining commons, which was then called the campus center.
• the campus center doubled as the chapel three days a week.
• Reflection Pond was a mud volleyball pit.
• there were two dormitories on campus--Shupe and Oakwood.
• there was one computer in Oakwood, and no one knew what the Internet was.
• you had to get to a Bethel basketball game at least thirty minutes before tip-off if you wanted to get in.
• the soccer field was a sort of garbage dump.
• the tennis courts were a soccer field.
• the parking lot by the soccer field were tennis courts.
• Wiekamp was a parking lot.
• the Wiekamp parking lot was a practice soccer field.
• the fine arts building was a terrifying wilderness.
• God showed up at Spiritual Emphasis week, 1991.

Memory #31: Three Pages a Week

When I was fifteen and a sophomore in Mrs. Yoder’s English class, I started to keep a journal. Not because I thought it would be good to keep a journal or because I had a lot to say. I did it because it was an assignment. Mrs. Yoder made us write three pages a week, every week, all year in a little spiral steno notebook. There were no other requirements for the journal. You just had to write three pages a week about anything you wanted to write about.

I will be thirty-nine years old next week, and I have been writing in notebooks (sometimes in notebook computers, but more often in notebooks) for twenty-five years. It is a habit that borders on obsession.

You got bonus credit in Mrs. Yoder’s class if you wrote more than three pages a week. For most of the weeks during the past twenty-five years, I would have gotten a lot of bonus points.

I would thank Mrs. Yoder, if I knew where she was. I wonder whether any of her other students took the gift she gave us–the gift of habitual journaling–and ran with it as I have.

Old journals sit in a big box in my basement office, piles of them.

And just today, while writing in my journal, I figured out what to do with them.

Memory #30: Softball at “The Campgrounds”

My dad played church league fast-pitch softball in a league of mostly Missionary Church teams on the back diamond at Prairie Camp. I remember the smell of mosquito repellent.

I also remember one night when my dad, who played right field, leaped high in the air near the fence to take away a homerun from some poor sucker. And the time he hit a long flyball that landed on the roof of the concession stand just beyond the rightfield fence for a homerun.

I got to play in some games with him by the time I turned fifteen. I wonder, what on earth would I do in the summer now if I hadn’t been introduced to this game when I was so young?

Last summer I played about fifty games. This summer, Lord willing, I’ll play in at least that many again. I’d play a hundred and fifty if I could.

This is no exaggeration: I think about playing fast-pitch softball every day. It’s a dying sport, and they haven’t played fast-pitch at the campgrounds for almost twenty years. But there was a day when the Wakarusa Missionary Church had no trouble fielding two fast-pitch teams in that league.

I guess people have a lot of tv to watch these days, instead.

Memory #27: Skunked

So this fall, Anne and Joel and I are sitting around the campfire in our back yard, and Morgan is behind the giant compost pile maybe ten yards away rooting around in the dark for something, the way he always does, when I hear him let out a sharp yelp and I slowly start to smell the most potent burning tire odor ever, and Morgan comes staggering out of the dark, frothing at the mouth and stinking to high heaven and clawing at his face and sliding his body and head around on the grass trying to get the skunk stink off.

Apparantly some sort of peroxide mixture works. We bathed him using that stuff; the house smelled like skunk for a little while.

You can still faintly smell skunk on Morgan’s face if he gets his head rained on. They say it can take as much as a year for the smell to go away entirely.

Memory #28: Yellow Jacket

A few days later, Morgan ate a yellow jacket. He’s eaten roughly four thousand bees in his life, and never had any kind of reaction. This time, though, his face got all bumpy and mumpy and swollen and he acted like he wanted to scratch the inside of his skull. He was on the brink of berserk.

A hundred and fifty bucks, a short trip to the emergency vet, and two shots later he was ok, though he still smelled like skunk.

Later that week he crashed into Jeanie while playing ball in the back yard, giving her a lovely black eye.

Memory #25: Zapallo Grande

Allow me to continue the story from my previous post.

Our transportation from Borbon to Zapallo Grande was this long canoe thing with an outboard motor that rattled your teeth and tickled your nose. The woman and child beside me were hitchikers; we simply gave them a ride from one village to the next. Our ride was in the neighborhood of four hours long, mostly in the hot sun, and then four hours back, only a small part of it in the rain.

Can you see how narrow that board is that I’m sitting on? I don’t have a lot of cushion down there, so to say the least, my bum was sore after this trip.

Jim Stump took this picture (and the picture in the previous post). Not pictured, then, is his everpresent Boston Red Sox hat. When we got to the jungle village we were showered by a chorus of “Boston sucks! Boston Sucks!"

Apparantly, even in the remotest equatorial jungle, they know.

Memory #24: The Best Literature Class Ever

It was all about context. I’m the one in the orange jacket, looking professorial. This is the first class meeting of the course–Multicultural Literature for students in the Ecuador semester abroad program. We’re sitting in an open courtyard of our hotel in the mountain town of Otavalo, Ecuador.

What did we do? Simple. We read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” a story you should read right now if you never have, and maybe even if you have. Click here for the story: http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/garciamarquezoldman.html

After we read the story, someone said, “Tomorrow, when we get to Borbon and then when we go up river into the jungle to Zapallo Grande, WE will be the ‘very old man with enormous wings.'”

I liked that.

Other people said many insightful things. I said, “Sometimes stories signify; sometimes they are also self-reflexive. This is a story about the way we interpret stories. This story itself is ‘a very old man with enormous wings,’ and this story has dropped into our little western village, and here we sit trying to make sense of what to do with it in the only way we know how.”

The next morning we went out into the marketplace in Otavalo and bought alpaca wool sweaters and blankets. Later we drove to Borbon.

I love my job.

Memory #23: Warm Christmas

On December 24, 1982, the high temperature was 60 degrees in Wakarusa. A day later it was 65. I remember this. I played basketball outdoors in shorts. On December 25, 1998, it was 87 degrees in Kingston, Jamaica. I remember this as well; I played basketball outdoors. On December 25, 1981, it was 86 degrees in Campinas, Brazil. I played basketball outdoors.

I’m sure I played basketball outdoors on many other colder, snowier Christmas days, but those are much more forgettable.

One of the best parts about waking up every morning in Kingston was looking out the window toward the hills of upper St. Andrew, and in the deep distance, the peaks of the Blue Mountain range.

Eleven years ago today, Jeanie and I hiked Blue Mountain Peak in Jamaica, and that is where we squat, smiling, in the picture above. On a clear day, you can see Cuba from this spot. I must tell you, a breezy 50 degrees felt like heaven, after months of relentless, hellish heat in the dusty asphalt jungle that is the city.

The peak is a seven mile hike (an ascent of 3000 feet through a stunningly fertile and dense forest) from where we stayed the night before–a quaint cottage among giant eucalyptus trees called Whitfield Hall with our friends the Allens and their three children.

The walking was easy compared to the drive from Mavis Bank to Whitfield Hall–another seven miles of one-lane dirt, carved into the side of a mountain.

Trying to turn around on that road I nearly drove the pick-up off a sheer cliff to an inglorious end. For some reason, my heart still races and I twitch nervously when I think about how close a call that was. But I have not the words to describe it well.

When people ask me what is one thing not to be missed on their Jamaican vacation I always say Blue Mountain Peak. I don’t think anyone I’ve ever said that to has bothered to make this trek.

Memory #21: “I’m a Rebel”

It was July and I was driving home from mowing the lawn at Church on a Saturday evening a couple summers ago. “Prairie Home Companion” was on the radio. Garrison Kiellor introduced a group I’d never heard of–no big surprise there. He called them the Old Crow Medicine Show.

Have I mentioned that sometimes I really miss Jamaica?

The guy said, “We’re gonna take you on back to the Caribbean for this next number.” And then they played this…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUU6jbBmJ6U

In some mysterious and secretly unique way, I was taken on back to the Caribbean with that little number.

I love that song; I love reggae music. And now I love bluegrassed reggae.

Have I mentioned yet that I love bluegrass music, also? I love it all the more because a lot of it is the best happy-feet before bedtime dance music any two and half year old blondie of a little girl ever heard. One of my best memories from this past summer is the early evening Jeanie, Syd, and I spent at the Osceola Bluegrass festival. We ate rib tips. We bought a one dollar piece of junk toy for Sydney–a fuzzy wire spider attached to stick with elastic like string that helped you to make the spider dance.

And we all danced–Sydney and the spider the least self-consciously–as the sun set in Fern Hunsburger Park.

What can I say. “I’m a soul adventurer.”

Memory #20: Blizzard

On the television today I saw the words “Blizzard Warning.” A closer inspection of the fine print revealed that the Blizzard Warning was not for us, but for our neighbors to the northwest, across the state line. But that word, Blizzard, always makes me think of the winter when I was eight. The snow drifts were enormous, and I don’t remember the facts, but it must have taken my dad hours to shovel the four feet of snow off our driveway, only to have the end of the drive buried in another six feet of snow when the snow plows finally got around to clearing C.R. 1. It seemed like school was cancelled for a week. So we went sledding and made tunnels in the drifts and never once worried that anyone would make us make up lost school days in June.

Memory #19: “Boston Sucks”

So it’s July of 2001, and we’re walking to our seats in right field at Yankee Stadium: Jeanie and I and all of the Stumps–Chris, Connor, Trevor, Casey, and the philosophy professor/dad, Jim. The Yankees are playing the Blue Jays this day; we arrive just a little late for the start of the game because the traffic was horrible.

Anyhow, we’re making our way to our seats, up the stairs in the right field bleachers, when a guy stands up in the middle of the crowd and starts pointing somewhere behind me and chanting “Boston sucks! Boston sucks!"

Professor Stump (did I mention he’s a very smart guy?) is a huge Red Sox fan. When I get to my seat, I realize that pretty much the entire section of bleachers is now standing, chanting wildly: “Boston sucks! Boston sucks!” pointing at James B. Stump, PhD, who happens to be wearing his Red Sox hat to the game between the Yankees and the Blue Jays in Yankee Stadium.

Allow me to shift tenses here. I think I’m not mistaken that his beloved wife, Chris, removed Jim’s hat before he was able to sit down, and his loyal sons showed their support of their father by laughing hysterically.

Philosophically speaking, there was but one conclusion to draw from the experience: Boston sucks.

Memory #18: Pretending

Sometimes when I hit the wiffleball to Morgan in our backyard–if by sometimes I can mean practically every day–I pretend that I play for the Cubs, that some pitcher tried to sneak a fastball “up and in” past me, that I see it coming, turn on it, and watch it sail over the rightfield ivy and onto Sheffield Avenue.

Memory #17: Thunder

Sometime in February of 1998, about half way through our first year serving as missionaries in Jamaica, the good people at Grace Missionary Church in Kingston decided it was time to host a basketball tournament on their new basketball court. So we put together a 3 on 3 tournament, invited teams, and roughly thirty teams showed up. The tournament lasted three Saturdays, and culminated in a grand party and feast with food and drink and gospel reggae.

I treasure this picture above. I can’t stop myself from staring at it. They called themselves the “Tower Hill Thunder”–Tower Hill for their neighborhood church in Olympic Gardens. Thunder for no other reason than that I suggested it and everyone liked it. They called me “Coach."

Andrew (they called him “tall-ite”–don’t ask me how that’s supposed to be spelled) holding the ball in one hand near his head had one of the ugliest jumpshots you could ever imagine. He could dunk the ball ferociously for someone who was 6'5” and an unhusky 180 pounds soaking wet. But anything outside of five feet from the basket was an adventure.

So as the clock wound down in the championship game that day, with the Thunder losing by two, I was on the sidelines, trying to look impartial in my role as tournament director. But I was of course hoping that Andrew (tall-ite) would take the ball to the hoop and try to get a lay-up or a foul. Instead, he launched a twenty-five footer from just left of the top of the key that floated ludicrously high in the tropical breeze, paused for a second at its peak, and then fluttered basketward. It clanged violently against the backboard.

And then swished through the net.

You ever wonder what the angels do when some sinner comes home? I like to think it looks like grown boys wildly dancing, hooting and chanting, with the sheer ecstasy of the impossible shot that somehow found its mark.

I cheered too. There was a relatively small cash prize awarded to the champions–the equivalent of 100 U.S. dollars. Divided five ways, that’s not much.

Though none of them at that point was a Christian, the next day they appeared in their neighborhood church–Tower Hill Missionary–and presented their trophy to the congregation. And half their cash prize.

Picture:

top row: Andrew Bloomfield; Bullah; Lionel Lamont; Cephas Miller

bottom row: Coach (me); Andrew Lamont

Not pictured: The angel that redirected that shot through the hoop.

Memory #16: Everything Is Illuminated

“I have reflected many times upon our rigid search. It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us, on the inside, looking out. Like you say, inside out. Jonathan, in this way, I will always be along the side of your life. And you will always be along the side of mine.” (Alex, in Everything is Illuminated)

Memory #15: An Unreliable Memory

I seem to be suffering from some sort of memory blank tonight. Since I can’t remember anything to write tonight, let me . . . um . . . construct a memory, instead.

Let’s suppose there was once a painfully shy first grader who found himself hopelessly attracted to the most beautiful little blonde haired girl from his class. One day, instead of playing football like normal, he chased her around the playground. At first, playfully. But then, for no reason he could ever fully understand, furiously.

He tripped her.

He felt the anguish of remorse before she hit the ground, before she burst into those heart-breaking tears, before she stormed off to tell the teacher.

The teacher, the little girl’s giant blonde doppelganger (could it have been that he was furiously attracted to her as well?), sat the boy and girl down and asked the boy: “Why? Why did you trip her? Do you not like her?"

He cried, but he could never make them understand, because he could not himself understand, that he had done it because he loved her.

How reliable, do you suppose, are these thirty-nine memories?

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Memory #14: I Am a Witness

For the past two years in FYE I have had my students read the novel Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. If you haven’t, by all means rush out and get a copy to read. Allow me first to quote a little passage from the first chapter–a little something about miracles. A memory will follow.

Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it’s been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week—a miracle, people say, as if they’ve been educated from greeting cards. I’m sorry, but nope. Such things are worth our notice every day of the week, but to call them miracles evaporates the strength of the word.

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave—now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle
contradicts the will of earth.

My sister, Swede, who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear miracles because they fear being changed—though ignoring them will change you also. Swede said another thing, too, and it rang in me like a bell: No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will. (p. 3)

Memory #13: U2: Zoo TV

I was in the house for this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sUXZ8RNzco

U2 and their Zoo TV tour came to the Pontiac Silverdome in September of 1992. The thing sold out in like 13 minutes. Luckily I called during the 13 minutes tickets were available and bought six. It wasn’t hard to find people who wanted to come along.

At this point in the concert, Bono starts clicking through the channels projected on the huge screens spanning the back of the stage and stumbles into Garth, who happensto be hosting the MTV music awards, live, this very night.

They closed the concert with a short rendition of “Unchained Melody” followed by “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Brought the house down.

I hear they signed an eternal contract as the worship band just beyond the pearly gates. Got tickets?

Memory #12: Crayfish

The once rocky part of the Baugo Creek, the part down by the bridge over C.R. 1, at my parents house in Wakarusa, was home to oodles of crayfish. I used to catch them.

The trick was to turn over a rock and have a big cup ready for when the thing tried to swim away. I liked to put two similarly sized crawdads into a tin bucket, shake the bucket up, and then watch them fight.

I liked it. But then I didn’t like it.

I don’t know what pain freshwater crustaceans feel when they are clawed to pieces by a brother. I just came to feel something like remorse for my cruelty.

Memory #11: Applause

Today was the last day of FYE this semester; it was also the end of ten year partnership I’ve had with John Dendiu as the “faculty mentors” of Block 10/7 (Block 10 for nine years; Block 7 this year). Next year, John will transition into a new role in the school of graduate studies at Bethel. Over the past decade, John and I have grown into a true team. While he was primarily responsible for Exploring the Christian Faith, and I primarily responsible to help students read and write better, we both saw that our primary purpose was in mentoring and discipling Bethel students to become more passionate, thoughtful, disciplined, and articulate followers of Jesus Christ.

I hardly knew John at all when I first met him a couple of weeks before our first block class together in August of 1999. He was the tennis coach then, and all of the tennis matches were played on Tuesdays and Thursdays–block days. So he was absent a fair amount during my first month or two of teaching at Bethel.

I have learned a lot from John over the years. I learned to laugh, to lighten up, to care for students as persons rather than as my mere pet projects that I would transform into brilliant writers. Watching him teach, I learned just how powerful a personal story as part of a lesson (on anything) could be. I was never as good at planning the whole semester out day by day the way John could, but he never expressed any frustration with my last second ideas. Together we learned the importance of the “daily ritual” of reading and discussing classic devotional literature with our students.

Today in block class–and I write of this because I will not soon forget it–John played the piano for our students and for the students in the block across the hall. We sang Christmas carols. Then he briefly played a little Chopin followed by some jazz.

And the students thundered their approval.

Maybe they were just clapping for the guy who can make something beautiful come out of the piano, but I heard something more. It was an ovation for ten years of service in mentoring freshmen through that often painful, often transformative first semester of college. I was clapping, too.

Memory #10: Bus Race

I do not think she liked me; in fact, she did not even stop at our driveway to pick me up each morning. Instead, she stopped directly in front of the neighbor’s drive across the street—still in front of our property, yes. But it meant in winter or in wet that I had a longer, snowier or muddier, walk to the school bus.

And she did not like to have to honk the horn if I was not out waiting for the bus. Truth be told, she did have to honk the horn on many occasions because I was not out waiting in the dark or the rain or the snow or the whatever. I could tell by her look and often by her snide comments—“running late today, eh”—that I was not her most beloved passenger.

I remember feeling shamed by her more than once for making her wait and making our bus a little later than our usual fifteen minutes early arrival.

The bus drivers would talk to one another on CB radio on the way into Wakarusa Elementary and Middle School, and I knew of what they spoke. They were racing. Who would be the first to arrive at the school, and then to wait triumphantly as the other buses slowly pulled in ingloriously behind. We weren’t allowed off the bus until the school doors were opened at 7:50 a.m. I do not know why—perhaps in those days it was thought better to inhale diesel fumes than fresh air. So there we sat.

I remember my bus driver. I remember that what she seemed to care about most was beating her husband, another bus driver, to the finish line at the school. And I remember that once we got there, we were made to sit in the bus and wait for the doors to open. I remember thinking the whole thing absurd. I remember feeling that I was simply an obstacle—a barrier, an annoying burden—to her on her daily quest to get to school before all the other buses arrived. I remember.

Every trip is a quest, and the real purpose of a quest is always the acquisition of self-knowledge. Nothing in my experience of being an obstacle on my bus driver’s quest would lead me to believe that she ever had any sort of epiphany about the way she treated the cargo she delivered each morn. And yet, in my more compassionate moments, many years later, I trust that at some point before she retired and then “retired” that her eyes were opened and that she did see the light.

When it some day comes to send my Sydney on a school bus in the cold dark Baugo township morning, rest assured that her bus driver will know that my Sydney is not an obstacle—is most certainly not a mere barrier or annoying burden—to him or her winning a bus race to the doors of the elementary school. Her cargo is my treasure.

Bless you, Lorna, my bus driver, wherever you may be.

Memory #9: Personal Best

During the two summers I worked the most intensely on writing my dissertation, I would often take breaks from the pain and strain of composition–writing a coherent sentence is always a pain for me–to go out to my driveway and shoot free throws. I shot a lot of free throws those two summers.

I like to keep track, but percentages don’t excite me. Strings do.

On June 25, 2006, I got hot and made 125 free throws in a row. The most I had ever made in a row at any point in my life prior to this was 66. I thought 125 was pretty good. I knew it was nothing like a world record or anything, because of course someone would have made three or four or even five hundred at some point.

So I looked it up.

On April 26, 1996, dairy farmer Ted St. Martin made 5,221 free throws in a row, breaking his own world record, something he had repeatedly done (that is, break his own world records) since 1972.

I find some consolation in the knowledge that the world record in 1971 was 499 free throws in a row, a record held by Harold “Bunny” Levitt, who won a YMCA free throw shooting contest shooting underhanded in April of 1935. 499 is at least in the neighborhood of 125, and I had to go chase the ball myself after each shot.

But it’s not even in the same galaxy as 5,221.

Back to the line, I guess.