memories?
How reliable, do you suppose, are these thirty-nine memories?
http://www.robbyprenkert.blogspot.com/
How reliable, do you suppose, are these thirty-nine memories?
http://www.robbyprenkert.blogspot.com/
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.
Memory #8: Grace Incarnate: A Dissertation Excerpt
Memory #7: Memorial service
My best friend Dave was short and round. He had dark hair that got thinner and grayer by the year, perhaps because he attended more Bethel College sporting events since 1980 than any other person.[1] He laughed hard and sang loud; his gusto for life was contagious; he made you feel important.
He was also about the funniest person I have ever known. An e-mail from Dave could leave you in stitches. His voice-mail greetings, which were only occasionally in English, made you want to call him back when you knew he wasn’t home. Meanwhile, Dave claimed that 19 years of Bethel undergraduate education had taught him that he was clearly illiterate in at least four languages.
Dave loved books, but wasn’t afraid to poke fun at popular titles. He read, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and suggested that it should have been called Dating Kissed ME Goodbye.[2] Dave considered writing his autobiography. It would be fashioned loosely after Jim Cymbala’s book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire. Dave’s version would be called Break Wind, Light Fire.[3]
Dave was refreshingly honest; he knew well his shortcomings, and yet he wasn’t forever rehearsing them. If he needed to confess, he confessed. He longed for deeper intimacy with God and saw self-examination and candid confession as the place to begin.
Dave sharpened me—sharpened my mind, my spirit, my imagination. We had long conversations in my living room, in his car on trips, at our campsite at Cornerstone music festival.[4]
One long conversation concerned our childhood fantasies—pretend baseball and basketball games that we each had played alone as kids. Dave wondered about the meaning of such imaginings; I mentioned that C.S. Lewis seemed to think these imaginings might be a subtle indication of a person’s deep, almost hidden, longing for a world beyond this land of shadows.
I had just finished reading Lewis’s The Silver Chair.[5] In it, King Caspian dies at a very old age. Eustace and Jill are taken by Aslan from Caspian’s funeral up to a “mountain” stream. In that crystal stream they see Caspian’s dead body, water flowing over his wrinkled skin, long white hair, and beard. When the children see him, they cry. When Aslan sees him, he cries giant Lion tears that drop into the river.
Then the lion tells Eustace to pluck a thorn from a nearby bush. “Drive it into my paw,” he says.
Eustace obeys.
“A great drop of blood. . . . splashed into the stream over the dead body of the King. . . . And the dead King began to be changed. His white beard turned to gray, and from gray to yellow, and got shorter and vanished altogether; and his sunken cheeks grew round and fresh, and the wrinkles smoothed, and his eyes opened, and his eyes and lips both laughed, and suddenly he leapt up
and stood before them. . . . He rushed to Aslan and flung his arms round the lion’s huge neck; and he gave Aslan the strong kisses of a King, and Aslan gave him the wild kisses of a lion."[6]
When I told Dave this story, though it was after 3 a.m., his eyes sparkled. Sometimes more is communicated in a short silence in the pit of the night than a million words could ever express.
Life is full of mingled contrarieties. I oscillate now between heartbreak over my loss and immense joy over Dave’s gain. I miss those conversations with Dave—conversations that fluctuated from riotous laughter, to righteous indignation, to hushed awe. Dave could appreciate the resurrection of Caspian by the Lion’s blood because he had a healthy sense of wonder and a respect for metaphor and mystery. He could appreciate it because it was a picture of his Christian hope. At the same time, Dave could respect the simple, straightforward message of a Christian pop song.
When we were frustrated by life and had used each other to “dump on,” Dave would put things into perspective, recalling the lines of a Keith Green song. He told me if he ever got to preach a sermon his message would be a simple rhymed triplet. “Just keep doing your best / and pray that it’s blessed / Jesus takes care of the rest.”[7]
Frank Laubach, a different kind of best friend of mine and perhaps the greatest missionary of the twentieth century, whose books Dave read shortly before he died, said this. “God, what is man’s best gift to mankind?”
“To be beautiful of soul and then let people see into your soul.”[8]
My friend Dave spent much of his life giving this very gift to those he knew. I will treasure the beauty I saw in Dave’s soul all the days of my life.
[1] Dave was at far more than men’s basketball games during his nineteen years around Bethel. But let me focus on just basketball for a moment. I played in 147 games during my four year basketball career at Bethel. Dave was there for all but three played during a Christmas Break Florida trip my freshman year. We won 113 of those games, five of them after trailing by more than 20 points in the second half—we had made a habit of impossible late game comebacks. Winning that way is enough to give people heart attacks, never mind gray hair. Dave was also present at the NAIA national championship victories in 1995, 1997, and 1998. Consider the heart stopping finishes in each of those three games. In 1995, Mark Galloway hit an impossible three-point shot at the buzzer of regulation to send the game into overtime and on toward victory. In 1997, Randy Romer’s running jump shot in the lane with just seconds left put the Pilots ahead, but the opposing team threw a length of the court pass to a wide open player streaking down the court for a lay-up. Romer, racing after him, may have bothered him just enough. He missed the easy shot and the Pilots had their second NAIA national championship in three years. The next year, Rico Swanson’s fall away jump shot from the right wing at the buzzer made the Pilots back-to-back national champions. And Dave was there keeping statistics for all of this in his official capacity as the college’s Sports Information Director. Mostly, though, he was there as Bethel’s biggest fan. It’s a wonder, considering all he witnessed watching Bethel basketball, that his heart didn’t stop much sooner than it did.
[2] Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1997). When this book was first published it hit the evangelical youth pastor crowd like a tsunami. I can envision these well-meaning men (and very occasionally women) of God taking their young flocks on retreat and preaching to them the dangers of the secular patterns set for dating. Nearly a million copies of the book have been sold in almost a decade. Dave, trying to keep current on the culture of his dormitory full of eighteen and nineteen year old college males, read the book to find out why so many of them were beyond frustration with the girls on campus who had suddenly decided that dating was evil.
[3] Jim Cymbala, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1997). Anyone who knew Dave soon found, always (of course) in the high and holy literary spirit of “The Miller’s Tale,” that Dave was prolifically flatulent. He was as sincere and God-loving a person as you could ever hope for, and he was as hilariously irreverent as they come. Cymbala’s book is about reinvigorating the church via the “prayer meeting.” Dave prayed. Dave also farted. Both well and often, and I’m betting he did them frequently at the same time. And God laughed.
[4] “Cornerstone Music Festival” is a huge “Woodstock” type event put on by Jesus People USA on the Cornerstone farm in Bushnell, IL. Dave and I went half a dozen times in the 1990s, camping, talking, laughing, mocking bad music, and enjoying the good stuff. Since Dave died, I’ve never been able to bring myself to go back. Maybe someday.
[5] C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Macmillan, 1953; reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 1994).
[6] Ibid., 252-53.
[7] Keith Green, “He’ll Take Care of the Rest,” Ultimate Collection, Chordant, 1977, CD.
[8] Frank Laubach, Letters By a Modern Mystic (New York: Student Volunteer Movement, 1937), 21.
Memory #6: “IMPORTANT”
About forty-five minutes before my seminar on C.S. Lewis (taught by Professor Pain—I kid you not) one Thursday the summer of 2001 at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, I walked into the library to check my e-mail. It had been several days, and there were about thirty or so mostly useless, mostly non-personal e-mails awaiting a courtesy open and delete. But I was hungry and in a hurry, so I deleted the majority without reading them, deducing from their subject headings that they didn’t apply to me. The last e-mail left to be deleted, the one at the top of the list, was entitled “IMPORTANT MESSAGE.” I was skeptical that it was, in fact, important, for I could tell it was a mass e-mailing to everyone on campus at Bethel from an address notorious for announcing trivial urgencies. But for some reason I decided to open this one before rushing off to get a sandwich before class.
The message, quoted in full, read as follows:
“Today at approximately 12:15 p.m., Oakwood Hall Resident Director Dave Slater was found dead in his apartment. A prayer meeting will be held in the Shiloh Prayer Chapel at 3:00 p.m. We will forward further details as we receive them.”
Dave was my best friend; in fact, probably my only really close friend. If he knew enough about computers and could pull it off, this was just the kind of practical joke he’d pull. He lived completely alone in a college dorm all summer. I remember him joking, “Man, if I died in my apartment when school’s out, it’d be a week before anybody found me.” It turned out, we think, to be about five days. It was no joke; there was a message on my cell phone to call home right away. My best friend was dead.
I went to C.S. Lewis class that night anyhow (I was 700 miles from home; I didn’t know what else to do!), and a man gave a presentation on Lewis’s A Grief Observed. It was the first time I’d ever been in a graduate seminar where the material of the presentation touched the presenter so deeply that he cried. The only more ironic possibility might have been if I’d been taking a course on the literature of grief—which was, believe it or not, an option that summer.[1] Nevertheless, no one should learn via e-mail in a university library that one’s best friend has been discovered dead in his apartment.
[1] Drew University, Summer 2001, “The Literature of Grief” taught by Dr. Laura Winters.
Memory #3: Imaginary Friend
When I was very young I had an imaginary friend who played with me. What we mostly played, though not exclusively, were sports. Football, mainly. Baseball and basketball to. There is a photo of me, in some dusty album somewhere, wearing one of my father’s tattered church basketball jerseys. I hold a red, white, and blue basketball, in the stone cold, unfinished basement of our rural Wakarusa home. Behind me, a wooden backboard and a full-sized basketball rim and net hang on the wall, five feet or so from the concrete floor. I suspect my friend and I had just finished a wild game, defeating some imagined team, for my cheeks look flushed and rosy. My father’s jersey hangs to my ankles.
I think my friend—Rebound, he was called—had made the winning shot that day.
Memory #2: The greatest Pony League baseball team in the history of Wakarusa
Virgil Weldy, Jr. Insurance. This was the name of my pony league (12-15 years old) baseball team in the Wakarusa Little League. When I was twelve, we were an expansion team. All the other teams in the league had existed the previous season(s), and thus, had returning (and older) players. To make up for the inequity, those who ran the league decided to give our coach a bunch of early picks in the draft of “little leaguers” who were coming into “pony league.”
I think we ended up something like 0-12 that summer. Our coach kept reminding us: “Just wait boys, we’re going to dominate this league in a year or two.”
He was right. The next year we won just over half of our games. The final two seasons we all played together, we never lost a single game, and our first five batters combined for a batting average of over .600. My memory fails me here, but I think at least six of us from that team (it may have been seven) went on to play varsity baseball at Northwood High School.
On January 5, 2009, I will celebrate my 39th birtday. I wish I’d thought to start this series a few days ago and then posted once a day until January 5. Anyhow, it’s a little less than 39 days until my birthday, so I’ll post one memory (in completely whimsical order) from my life in honor of each year of my life. No, the memories will not correspond to particular years. I have no memory of being 17 months old. If all goes well, I may even include a visual aid or two in some of the posts. But not this one.
Memory #1: “Hillside demolition derby”
My two younger brothers and I used to take the following items out to the hill in our backyard: a bigwheel tricycle (Derry), a little red wagon (Jamie); an old metal tricycle (me). Derry would ride his normal little kid style. I rode mine standing up, on the back axle. Jamie rode the wagon the way anybody would, sitting (sometimes kneeling) in the wagon, using the handle to steer. No big deal. Kids ride toys down the hill for fun.
I think it was my suggestion that led us to discover the mad hilarity of a game I would like to now dub “hillside demolition derby.” Perched at the top of the hill, each wearing a football helmet of some sort, we aimed our vehicles so as to collide about half way down. Derry (the youngest) gave the countdown. “3-2-1 go."
We met with horrible and hilarious violence somewhere half way to the bottom, bodies and body parts scattered randomly in the summer grass, three boys laughing riotiously at the double flip one of us had turned or at the way the wagon had run over our leg or neck. Only rarely did someone cry. Never for long.
Ten songs:
1. “Hey You” by Pink Floyd. “But it was only fanstasy / The Wall was too high, as you can see / No matter how he tried he could not break free / And the worms ate into his brain” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1yD9avOGgM
2. “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Don’t worry / About a thing / Cause every little thing / gonna be alright”
3. “I Fall to Pieces” by Patsy Cline. “And I’ve tried, and I’ve tried, but I haven’t yet.”
4. “Pressure Drop” by Toots and the Maytals. “I say when it drops, oh you gonna feel it /Know that you were doing wrong.”
5. “We’re All In This Thing Together” by Old Crow Medicine Show. “We’re all in this thing together / Walkin' the line between faith and fear / This life don’t last forever / When you cry I taste the salt in your tears.”
6. “Barney Theme Song” by Barney Kids. “Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination / and when he’s tall he’s what we call a dinosaur sensation”
7. “Come On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. click here “Come on Eileen, / I swear (well he means) At this moment you mean everything, / With you in that dress my thoughts I confess verge on dirty / Ah come on Eileen.”
8. “I Wonder if I’m Growing” by Raffi. “My mom says ‘eat your sandwich / It will make you grow up tall’ / But when I eat my sandwich / I’m hardly bigger at all”
9. “I Wanna Be Sedated” by Ramones. Oh for crying out loud, just click here and sing along.
10. “The Finish Line” by Steve Taylor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJhwc2d7y-E “And I gasped / When I saw you fall / In his arms At the finish line”
Dear Katylynn,
Someday, when you are an English major at Bethel College, and your professor says something goofy that embarrasses you in class, remember that he skipped his church league basketball game to attend your first birthday party, and cut him some slack.
Your most beloved Uncle
Sacraments are acts regarded as sacred, holy.
Confession is sacred, holy.
Blogging is confessional.
Keeping a blog is sacramental.
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