thirty-nine memories (35)

Memory #35: Yoga, etc.

Today I did an entire 90 minute yoga workout. Is it a workout or a routine? Anyhow, the whole time I was doing it, I was looking at the people in the video that I was trying to follow and thinking things like: "I have got to be doing this wrong"; "Wow, that's an uncomfortable position"; "Breathe? Are you serious?", and so on.

And then, incredibly enough, when I was done, I was stunned at just how good I felt. I felt strong. I felt limber. I felt amazingly relaxed.

That's not much of a memory. Here's a memory. I can remember a time when people I knew well and thought pretty highly of thought yoga was some sort of instrument of the devil to get us all to become wierded out new age hinduist hippies. I think they might have been some of the same people who encouraged my entire youth group to burn our satanic records in a giant pyre outside the church one Sunday night. When the wind whipped up and it started to storm, it was taken as a clear sign that the devil didn't want us to burn our records. But lots of people did anyhow.

I didn't have any records. But that presentation by some vagabond youth minister, with all those backward masked records and creepy album covers, sure got me curious. So curious that I went to the drugstore day after day and thumbed through albums, looking for devilish symbols hidden in the cover art.

I remember my best friend Dave telling me that one of the stupidest things he ever did was to burn all of his Doors albums in one of those cultic record burning/smashing youth group sessions so popular in the late seventies and early eighties.

I wonder if those records, given up in a moment of misguided zeal, have come back to him ten or a hundred fold where he resides now?

thirty-nine memories (34)

Memory #34: She Calls Me "Papa"

I remember the day she was born: 3:06 p.m. on May 18, 2006. I remember the day she came home from the hospital, tiny and helpless, and Morgan kissed her gently. I know her first word was "no," which doesn't really trouble me at all. I hope she remembers that word when the inevitible peer pressures come some day.

I do not remember the first time she called me "papa," but she still does, and I hope she always will.

She's playing "Hungry, Hungry Hippos" behind me as I write this, talking non-stop to no one in particular. I tell Jeanie regularly, with wonder, with affection, with pride, "That girl never shuts up."

I adore this little miracle child--so much so that I can scarcely recall what it was that, for all those years, terrified me about being a papa.

thirty-nine memories (33)

Memory #33: 33

Larry Walker wore #33 when he played for the Colorado Rockies.

One very cold April day in 1997, Dave, Chris, and I went to a Cubs game and sat in the rightfield bleachers. The Cubs lost their twelfth in a row. Larry Walker hit a homerun. It was 33 degrees at game time.

After 8 innings of being heckled by the bleacher bums in rightfield, Larry Walker, turned around a couple of times and started heckling back. He made an 0-12 sign with his fingers. He put his hat on sideways and staggered around like a drunk, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, mocking the way the Cubs had been playing.

I liked him all the more that day, even though I love the Cubs more. He won the MVP that year.

Later that same evening, Dave, Chris, and I bought third row tickets to the White Sox game for ten bucks a piece from some guy right outside the stadium. It was 33 degrees at game time. It snowed.

I love baseball. Now I wear #33 whenever I get a choice.

thirty-nine memories (32)

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.

thirty-nine memories (31)

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.

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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.

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Memory 29: October 10, 2001

I've said many times that the most powerful worship services I've ever been in have been U2 concerts. I was a security guard (can you imagine?) for this concert, the opening concert of the third leg of Elevation tour, and the first U2 concert in the aftermath of 9/11. I think they very intentionally chose Notre Dame--home of the "fighting irish."

Definitely worth putting up with the ignoramus who was the supervisor of we one-time security guards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TCP-mdpSFE

There were so many great moments in the concert, but I liked these two especially. What's foreshadowed in Bono's rambling preamble to "One" is realized in the closing hymn, "Walk On."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwd1xoYRfDw

Apparantly, those really are NYPD and NYFD members on the stage. Is this shameless pandering to the intense emotions of the time, or is it a sincere celebration of courage and our longing for "home"? I like to think it is the latter.

Either way, the place erupted.

Love the "Pied Piper" image of Bono leading them around the heart shaped stage.

Hallelujah, he sings. And I think he really means it. I know I did.

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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.

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Memory #26: Hair

I remember having this much hair. That was March 2007.