Monkey Song

Thanksgiving was a jolly time, it was it was. The family congregated at my parents’ house, we ate too much, dealt with the crippling after-effects of tryptophan poisoning, watched a series of losses by football teams I was cheering for, and watched my parents’ cat Steve try to figure out how to catch a bird-shaped Christmas ornament Mom had hung from a ceiling fan.

We also, as my family is wont to do, spent some time sitting around, instruments in hand, singing songs together. The Von Trapps we ain’t, but we enjoy a little family jam session. Thanksgiving being sort of the starting gun for Christmas (except in the retail world, where September 1st (or, sometimes, St. Patrick’s Day) seems to be) we sang quite a few Christmas tunes, and thence came the first of two Thanksgiving Mysteries.

“Mysteries” is probably too dramatic a word, really, but I’ll push forward undaunted. We were singing the classic tune “The Friendly Beasts” and found ourselves wondering if we were remembering all the verses. We covered these four (Note – the page will immediately start playing a MIDI file of the song’s tune. It’s not objectionable (except for sounding like a $30 Casio keyboard), but if you’re not in a place where music suddenly springing from your computer would be appropriate then be ye warned (if you listen to the song all the way to the end there’s sort of a cool Easter Egg)) and sat around looking at each other for a bit, trying to remember if there was a fifth. It seemed like we’d usually only sung about those animals, but the song seemed too short. Finally we moved on and left the mystery unresolved. Until today. Today I have hied me to Google and solved the mystery. There is indeed a fifth verse:

“I,” said the camel, yellow and black,
“Over the desert, upon my back,
I brought Him a gift in the Wise Men’s pack.”
“I,” said the camel, yellow and black.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard it before, though, so I maintain that we weren’t forgetting the verse, we just weren’t aware of it. It doesn’t seem to measure up to the lyric standard of the other four – the “ack” sound just isn’t Christmassy, to my ears. Still, there it apparently is.

We also discussed what the proper word for a group of pigs was. This summer EWALU will have horses for the first time ever and I wanted to have some other group-of-animal names at my disposal so I could misuse them in place of “herd” and annoy people (only the loftiest goals for me). My aunt knew a startling number of them (I knew crash of rhinos and murder of crows and that was about it – she knew at least a dozen), but no one in the room was quite sure what a group of pigs was called. Mystery #2, and all in the same afternoon – exciting Saturday! So once again I consulted the good folks at Google (one of whom I actually know now; I greatly enjoy imagining that every time I do a search off goes my brother’s friend Nick to check the Google library so he can run back to his computer and type in the answer) and found this delightful website (which plays nary a MIDI tune when opened). Apparently, pigs come in droves or herds, which is sort of boring but unsurprising (animals that people often work with groups of don’t seem to get the cool names). But hogs come in drifts, parcels, or passels, and swine occasionally form sounders. Also, I note that a group of bears is a sleuth and a group of ponies a string, both of which will likely come up at our family Christmas.

Elementary, my dear Watson and whatnot.

The real world has caught up with Caspian, bringing his excellent run at NaBloPoMo to a halt. I’m not half the blogger he is, but in hopes that I can pull off being 13.3% the blogger he is, I shall post on each of these last four days of November and allow Caspian to claim my posts as part of his NaBloPoMo run. The technical term for this is “DuoNaBloPoMo,” I believe (if one of the participants is a female deer it’s “DuoNaBloPoMoDoe,” and if one participant is a female deer and the other a devotee of solfege it’s “DuoNaBloPoMoDoReMiFaSoLaTiDoe”).

Last night I was driving from Iowa City to Decorah, and for the last hour of the drive – the bit with winding two-lane roads through hilly Northeast Iowa – I was driving in rain and fog, with visibility often not much past the end of my hood. And for most of that last hour I also had at least one car driving right up on my back bumper. I don’t consider myself a tentative driver, but given the conditions I didn’t think 60 miles per hour was called for; apparently that made me a jerk. Apparently the courteous thing for me to do, as a fellow resident of Highway 150, would have been to hurtle blindly through the fog, knowing that I’d be able to see turns in the road in time but trusting to the good folks at Nissan (div. of Engineering, Deer-and-Random-Detritus Proofing) for anything else that the highway might hold.

It frightened me how tempting it was to give in to that pressure, too. To make an unsafe choice (indeed, a life-threateningly unsafe choice) because someone I didn’t know obviously wanted me to and was angry at me for not. Someone who wasn’t even a someone – just one in a series of angry headlights off my back bumper. It made me wonder where I draw the line – apparently I’m not willing to risk my life because someone I don’t know wants to get back to college a little faster after Thanksgiving break. But I know that I’m often willing to bow to group opinion when activities are being planned and I’m a limp noodle in the face of someone I know who’s actively angry with me – I’ll make almost any concession to end the confrontation. Where’s the line? When do my decisions become my own? How different would I be if I’d grown up in a different environment? If my family had never left Texas, or I’d never worked at summer camp, or gone to a state school instead of Wartburg, or even if Matt hadn’t decided to study camping ministry or Jason’s girlfriend hadn’t needed a ride to her scholarship application?

It’s scary stuff to first think about and it’s mentally exhausting even once you realize that growing up with opinions and values affected by those around you isn’t something that can be avoided even if it were something that should be. Not the sort of thing one wants filling their head while descending into a valley that looks like it might well harbor King Kong as idiots blind you from behind. I usually quite enjoy the drive to Decorah; last night I was thrilled to finally get there so I could drive south instead and let the back-to-school traffic have its own lane.

Apparently I’m going back on Friday, but by Friday we’re supposed to have single-digit temperatures so fog shouldn’t be a problem. Good thing; I can only handle so many automotive existential crises in a week.

I can’t remember what the Wartburg library used to be called.

These last couple of months I’ve gotten to go back to college, in a sense. I have several friends from EWALU who are students at Wartburg or Luther and I’ve spent some time on both campuses (campi?), hanging out with college students in college dorms and going to student activities events and even sitting in on a class. Talk about opening up the memory floodgates; I’ve been in school quite a bit since Wartburg but never in college (if I can presume to refer to them as different things – if you’re just at an institution for the academics, that’s school. College is the rest of the experience). During September and October I’ve played Frisbee in the U, sat down in Whitehouse Business Center to check my e-mail, watched TV in a Grossmann dorm room. I’ve listened to students wail and gnash their teeth over a professor who assigns too much reading, watched the casual dating patterns that can only survive in an environment where thousands of demographically and age-ologically similar people live within a block of each other, and been invited to participate in the college nightlife (talk about making one feel old). It triggers powerful memory after powerful memory; I maintain that my time at EWALU was the most shaping influence of my late teens/early twenties, but 62 weeks at camp can’t compete with 12 semesters at Wartburg for sheer volume of memories. Mostly, I find, it’s the little things that I remember and smile about. I walk through Grossmann Hall and remember the Nerf Gun wars that were so very focusing and helpful to our studies during finals week 1997, or I look at the new Student Union and think of the Frisbee Golf holes that used to be where the new construction now is. Even being at Luther triggers floods of memories – last weekend I was in Decorah to celebrate a camp friend’s birthday and one of his friends proudly showed me the quote board hanging on his dorm room wall. Barely even a page long. Amateurs.

It’s been a fantastic outlet for memories of a very happy time, but there has been a glitch, if you will. An annoyance. Three weeks ago I was in Waverly with a camp friend who goes to Luther. We were waiting for some Wartburg EWALU-ians to finish classes so I took him for a tour of the campus. We walked past the Bob & Sally Vogel Library and I said, “It wasn’t called that when I was in school here – Bob Vogel was still the president. It was… uh…”

Complete blank. I’ve been trying since then to remember with no luck (I sort of expected it to come to me as I was writing this post, but alas. I think it started with an M. Mc…something?). It’s driving me nuts, probably more so than is strictly warranted. I want to continue enjoying this flow of college memories and continue being thankful for what a great experience it was without having those memories marred by not being able to remember something as basic as the name of the stupid library. Any of you out there whose memories are better than mine, please chime in.

In completely unrelated news, I learned today that 2006 will be the last year that October gets to be the longest month. I think that’s a shame; I always thought it was cool that my birthday month was the longest month of the year. Apparently that doesn’t factor into the decision-making process of the Powers That Be, though – the Daylight Saving Time shift will be moving to November next fall so October will lose its one-hour edge and settle back into a 7-way tie for longest.

Boo.

Update 11/2 – Engelbrecht (scroll down to the “1970s”)!!! Engelbrecht Library, it was it was! Man, that’s a relief.

There’s a fire burning in our fireplace. I haven’t lived in a house with a fireplace since 1987; I’d forgotten how it transforms a room. Fires give off a different sort of heat from a heat register – it’s alive, pulsating, and it comes with neat crackly noises and a distinctive smell. Most of us, I think, have some sort of positive memory connected to firelight – candlelit dinners, campfires in the Strawberry Point area woods, Christmas singalongs around a fireplace much like ours. And maybe there’s something else, too – something deeper than memory, some part of us that remembers when a fire was all that stood between us and the scary unknown. Whatever the reason, I’m certainly not fighting the appeal. It’s inefficient compared to a gas furnace, I’m sure, but who expects magic to come cheap?

And on top of that, there’s snow falling outside for the first time this fall – golly, but I do love this time of year.

Because we here in the Creative Ideas & Editorial Revision Department at Meaningless Musings believe in continuing with a successful idea until it’s completely run its course (and even quite a bit beyond), we once again proudly present the Name That Quote game!

Standard rules apply – try to name the source and the speaker, no looking up answers. This time the quotes aren’t limited to any particular genre. Some are from TV, some from movies, some from various print media, some are song lyrics. Post your answers in the comments and I’ll update the post with answers as people guess ‘em.

1. “Something snapped inside of him – he was a raging lion” – Correctly identified as being from “Lambert, the Sheepish Lion,” one of Disney’s finest contributions to culture as we know it. It’s a cartoon short that’s (I learned tonight) available in its entirety on YouTube! If you’ve never seen it, I strongly encourage you to click that link.

2. “[name omitted because it would immediately give the source away], there’s a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases.” “Awww – five days? But I’m mad now!” – Correctly, if tentatively, identified as being from “The Simpsons,” and more specifically Homer himself.

3. “Listen – I am your superior officer and when I tell you to maintain radio silence that means you hush!” – Correctly identified as being from “The Dukes of Hazzard,” and therefore obviously (at least I assume obviously) said by Rosco, who for my money combined with Boss Hogg for one of the finest comedy duos in TV history.

4. “Her mother wasn’t nearly so picky.” – Correctly identified as being from “Aladdin,” as the Sultan bemoans Jasmine’s high standards.

5. “Ever since we’ve decided to adopt leaves as standard currency, we are of course all extremely rich.” – Correctly identified as being from Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, in a particularly entertaining scene where the Golgafrinchams (sp?) are trying to work out economic theory on the newly-settled Earth.

6. “You will have eyes to see and for that night you’ll be a bright lamp burning in the darkness.” – Correctly identified as being from Peter Mayer’s Jack-O-Lantern song, John’s Garden.

7. “Kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty!” – Correctly identified as being said by none other than than paragon of virtue and erudism himself, Jay as he bangs on the glass of a pet shop near the beginning of “Mall Rats.”

8. “Bye, trumpet player I don’t know. Now I understand why your music is so sad.” – Correctly identified as being from “Scrubs,” as J.D. sadly moves out of the house he and Turk have shared for almost four seasons and says his goodbyes to a picture of Dizzy Gillespie.

9. “President Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of his White House, had a big block of cheese.” – Correctly identified as being part of Leo McGarry’s “Big Block of Cheese Day” speech on “The West Wing”

10. “We bears all have one common dream.” – Apparently recognized, but so far not identified.

11. “Superior, it’s said, never gives up her dead.” – Correctly identified as being from Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

12. “I’m so smart it’s almost scary. I guess I’m a child progeny.” – Believe in yourself, Joel. Correctly identified as being from “Calvin and Hobbes” – click here and search for “progeny” to see the source strip.

And that wraps up the game, kids! Seems like these used to take longer… I must be picking easy quotes. Thanks for playing, happy Wednesday, etc., etc.

I first worked at EWALU back in the summer of 1993, motivated as much by the fact that I needed a summer job as by any deep commitment to the place. I’d been a camper for four summers and had some fine times (including, but certainly not limited to, an opportunity to co-referee the 1990 Grand International Trans-Global Canoe Race Extravaganza), but never seriously envisioned myself as a future counselor. I assumed my college summers would be much like my high school ones; late nights at the park across the street, the occasional evening of role-playing games in Kyle’s basement, wistfully remembering the days when Silkworm could still be found in arcades. Immensely nerd-ish stuff, I’ll concede, but I had the sort of group of friends that made it entirely worth missing at college. And miss it I did; my freshman year at Wartburg was at best worth a “meh.”

During the spring of the aforementioned freshman year I started thinking about summer job options. Hy-Vee seemed like the most logical course – most of my friends worked there and didn’t seem to fiercely hate it – but I found it impossible to get excited about that prospect. So I found myself stopping by the EWALU booth on Work At Camp Day in Buhr Lounge one February afternoon and filling out an application. And coming back later to interview (which I apparently did a horrific job of – I was very much a “We need more male counselors” hire that first year) and signing a contract when they sent me one. I still wasn’t sure about the idea of being a counselor, but I never got around to pursuing any other options, so Memorial Day weekend found my dad and I on the way to Strawberry Point, he excited about his boy following in his footsteps as EWALU staff and me terrified and wondering what I’d gotten myself into. I clearly recall telling him I’d changed my mind as he slowed to turn off of Highway 3. No thanks, I’ll work at Hy-Vee after all, this was a mistake, Dad. Thankfully, he was wiser than I and ignored me entirely.

I’m aware it’s sort of melodramatic to say that summer was life-changing, but I stand by it nonetheless. EWALU was the first place I felt like I fit in, like I was contributing and doing the things I was supposed to do well. And those things were vastly important – I was ministering to kids, helping create a safe, fun environment, contributing to a team and being part of a community. I’d be surprised if I was actually all that good at the job that first summer (certainly I didn’t fit all that well into the staff, socially) – I still needed to absorb much of what I was learning – but a tremendous amount of who I am today is built on a foundation laid that summer.

I spent six summers at camp and while they were never again nearly that life-changing (thankfully; that would have gotten exhausting) they comprised 63 of the best weeks of my life. In 1999 not being there felt like walking around sans an arm. Except that I could still clap. Over the years it got less jarring to spend summers not at camp, but I’d always get a bit wistful around Memorial Day weekend. Still, I’d had six summers – more than most people get – and I wasn’t in college anymore. I didn’t think about it much. Until two springs ago, when my friend Adrian decided I should come back for one more summer. He needed a health officer and was convinced I was the man for the job. It was flattering, and I was vastly tempted, but I decided to do the responsible thing and pass. I spent a week at camp as a volunteer (”camp grandpa”) instead, and drove up for several other random weeknights to spend time with the staff. And I found myself getting hooked again.

I found myself back in the midst of a group of friendly, excited, Christian people who were eager to include me in their community and willing to let me be part of their experience. I got to play campfire guitar again, got to hike around woody trails again, got to be part of some of the inside jokes and watch some of the triumphs again. It was fantastic; more recharging than I could have imagined. And I was fairly burned out at both of my real-world jobs – the recharging was entirely welcome.

That fall my friend Jesse was hired as the Program Director and he immediately started petitioning me to come back for another summer. And, fresh on the heels of a summer of being sort of on staff I was much more receptive to the idea than I had been the year before. So I started making sure my finances were in order enough to make it feasible and signed a contract for summer number seven. And, of course, immediately started worrying. Would it be weird to be the old guy? Was I looking at my old summers through rose-colored glasses and creating a standard that couldn’t possibly be met? Could I really afford it?

All of which fears were, of course, groundless. Camp, I’m pleased to report, is every bit as fantastic as camp ever was. More so, even, now that I’m older and more aware of my weaknesses and strengths and especially more so now that I’m comparing it with the real world instead of with Wartburg. It was recharging and empowering and exhilarating and every bit as downright dandy as it had ever been. I wish I was still there. I hope I have another summer in me somewhere down the road. If not, I’ll settle for the occasional retreat (two coming up in October!) or work day (one coming up tomorrow! First time back at camp since the summer ended! Yay!); one takes what one can get, I guess.

It did pretty much kill off blogging, didn’t it? Sorry about that, any of you who might have noticed. I continue to stand by my 12 posts for 2006 goal; we’ll see what happens.

This is the place where I am most wanted,
Where everything I am comes from
–”Boulder River,” Chris Cunningham/John Hermanson