Drops in the River.

My friend Taylor is a good man.

I met him at a park on a mild August evening. He was grilling hamburgers, helping out at an event put on by the young adult ministry from my church. We were introduced to one another and made a few minutes of small talk. He knew what he was doing on the grill. In that situation it's just knowing when to flip and remove pre-formed burger patties, but you can tell a guy who knows what he's doing even from easy stuff like that if you're paying attention.

Some time later, we eventually got to talking about making ginger ale. I have no idea how this happened, but I thank the good lord above that it did. Taylor and I not knowing one another very well at all and Taylor wanting to learn how to make ginger ale led to my coming over to his place on New Year's Eve of 2007. His wife Ann, who is wonderful, had to go to bed early to wake up early for work and Taylor didn't have any plans. I considered going to a party to which I was invited by a friend, where my main objective would have been to get to know a girl for whom a couple friends thought I'd be a good match. Spending some time to get to know Taylor instead of chasing a girl is one of the better decisions I've ever made. I showed up around nine with a bunch of ginger root, some sugar, club soda and cranberry juice - Taylor had told me that Ann loves a little cranberry juice with her ginger ale.





Making ginger ale is extremely easy and extremely delicious. All you need is ginger, sugar, water, and club soda. Saying that it's "making ginger ale" isn't entirely accurate; it's actually making a ginger syrup which is then added to club soda to make the equivalent of ginger ale. Heat equal amounts of sugar and water in a pot. While the sugar and water are heating, peel the ginger. This is done quite easily by scraping it with a spoon. Chop the ginger up and add it to the sugar and water mixture. Let it boil in there for about 15-20 minutes. Remove it from the heat and strain the ginger out. Now you've got a nice concentrated ginger syrup. Add it to club soda to taste. Good with a little lime as well.


We started talking while we were preparing the ginger syrup. At the time, I didn't know how easily the ginger could be peeled with a spoon, so we used paring knives. I also didn't know that removing the ginger's skin isn't very necessary at all. It was tedious, but both of us are the type who enjoy the process of food preparation too much to be annoyed by it. As we leaned against counters and talked a bit, the boiling ginger syrup filled the house with the smell of fresh ginger. There aren't a lot of things that smell better than fresh ginger. After the syrup had reduced enough, we strained it, made a couple of drinks and sat down.

We talked about a lot of things, among the first of which was how stupid it was that I was going to go chase some girl I didn't know at a New Year's Eve party. In disbelief at how stupid it was, I was telling Taylor about how dumb I felt about it. Rather than trying to convince me to think otherwise, he talked about how it was stupid and about how coming to his house was way the hell better. I liked that about him.

Taylor cut right to it, and it was easy to do so with him, even that early in our friendship. That same night, we talked at length about a difficult decision I was in the process of making. I was about to stop attending college for a number of reasons. He listened, weighed what I had told him, and gave me his honest opinion on it. I quickly learned that as good as Taylor was at messing around and having a good time, his ability to connect with people and to get to the heart of a matter was far more impressive. We sat down together and talked about the deeper and more important things in our lives - an activity we would share countless times in the months after that.

Taylor and Ann are moving to India for the next two years to do missionary work (they have a blog set up on which they will chronicle important events). They leave this Thursday. A few nights ago, I stopped by their house to sit and talk with them, to get to the heart of matters one more time before they leave. Just me and a couple of very, very good friends talking about life and God and all the things that make us happy to be alive and to know one another.

Though I couldn't be happier that they're doing what they're doing, I'm met with a deep sadness at the thought of not seeing them for so long. They are the truest sort of friends.

The knowledge that I'll go so long without seeing them has made me think about all of our times together and has brought me to this realization:

There are few things that feel better or more right to me than to sit and connect with people, getting to the heart of matters. That process of drawing people together through the relation of thoughts and hopes and sorrows and experiences might be the most gratifying thing I get to do in my life. Being involved in youth and young adult ministry, I get to do it a little more than some people - but I don't get to do it nearly enough.

My favorite Fleet Foxes song suggests that days are just drops in the river to be lost always. I feel like the days when I get to do this are the part of the river where the current is most swift, where the river is most forceful and has the most potential to change the landscape ahead of it. They seem to me the most significant and noteworthy - but I don't get to do it nearly enough.

Kindergarten: Five Things. One lie.

In my previous post, I alluded to something I remember about kindergarten, noting that I don't remember much about the time I spent there.

Now that I think about it, I remember more than I originally estimated, but as far as actual events are concerned (and not general things like classmates' names or physical details of the rooms, etc.), I remember five of them, considering only one of them to be truly important.

One. We ate paste. When I was in kindergarten, in addition to having glue, we had adhesive paste. I never used it after kindergarten, and I don't recall either of my younger sisters using it when they were in elementary school, so ever since a few years after kindergarten I always thought that I was one of the very last people ever to use it. There's no way that's true, but I thought it for a long time.

Anyway, I remember the day we ate the paste. It was a group of four or five of us. It was regrettable and, in a surprising turn of events, minty.

Two. We ate crackers with butter on them. The crackers themselves were buttery, too; they weren't saltines. I have no idea why we did this. Now that I think about it, it's possible that someone my teacher knew made the butter. I think we may have been talking about making butter. Really, I think the whole thing was just a way for my teacher to have what was likely one of her favorite snacks. Why else would you talk about making butter with your kindergarten class?

Three. A girl named Katie threatened boys on the bus with a belt. She was the only Katie I went to elementary school with; there were Katherines and Kates, but no Katies - and she went to another school after kindergarten. She was wearing a dress, not any sort of garment that would require the wearing of a belt. Threatening boys on the bus by snapping a belt was such a good idea that she went out of her way to bring one to school - this couldn't wait until a day on which she might wear a belt anyway. That's almost as dumb as writing about this event in such a way that suggests that kindergarteners might voluntarily wear belts at some point.

Four. Stop, drop and roll. One day in kindergarten, we talked about fire safety. As one might expect, this eventually involved discussion of stopping, of dropping and of rolling. When I was in kindergarten, I was pretty happy to be at school. All the way through elementary, really. I liked it and I got a lot of satisfaction out of it. I was more than a little bit of a goodie-goodie. Almost as much of a goodie-goodie as my classmate who composed and sang a song in front of class at music time, the lyrics to which go like this:

I like school and school likes me,
I'm as happy as can be,
I like school and school likes me.

I still remember the melody.

The first (only?) time this got me in trouble came on the day we talked about stopping, dropping and rolling. On the bus home, I sat next to David Barker, who was blonde and tiny. We got to talking (and to getting excited) about stop, drop and roll.

At this point, I began to physically demonstrate in the bus seat. David Barker got a bloody nose. I don't need to tell you how funny it was.

Five. My teacher lied to me. My teacher lied to me and I will never, ever forget it.

We were using a particular type of plastic blocks. They were sort of Lego-ish in that they locked together, but were a softer plastic and only had one shape and size. You could stack them in a line and that was about it. The teacher was having us use them in order to teach us about patterns.

We were instructed to use different colors of blocks to create a pattern. I was doing this next to a girl named Megan Sutherland. I remember that it was her because, had my teacher not told me a terrible, terrible lie, Megan would have been the focus of my anger, not Miss Petersen.

I was sitting on the floor, taking the plastic blocks out of a bin and constructing my pattern. The pattern went like this:

Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Red. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Red. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green...and so on.

My pattern took considerably longer to develop than all the other ones in the classroom. It also took many, many more yellow blocks than the others. That's the part that was disagreeable to Megan Sutherland. As Miss Petersen walked by, Megan told her, "Miss Petersen, Jon's hoggin' all the yellows."

Miss Petersen, in what (in my experience) was the only wrong thing she ever did to anyone, turned to me and lied:

"Jon, that's not a pattern."

It was a damn pattern. I fought, trying to explain to my teacher how it was a pattern. It didn't really matter; she understood that it was. But she told me it wasn't.

My pattern took more brains (...and more blocks) than those of the other students. It shouldn't have been taken away from me because it was inconvenient. Or even if I had to give up the yellow blocks, I certainly didn't deserve to be lied to.

What if I hadn't fought it? What if I didn't hold on to what I knew to be true? In my mind, that was a truly dangerous moment. It could have been the first step toward developing a very different mind than I have today. For convenience. To avoid ruffling any feathers.

I don't know for sure whether that moment actually triggered anything that ended up affecting my mind long-term for the better. But I have to think that the fact that I so vividly remember it suggests that it was very important.

I very genuinely thank God that I resisted in that moment. The consequences could have been staggering. It was a pattern.