The proof copy of my book arrived today. There are a few quirks to be worked out, but it was pretty surreal to see my creation--from cover to title page to endnotes--fleshed out. Final print date is getting closer and closer...
(P.S. Scroll down to my last blog and see a video of Micah pulling Asher in a basket. Poor quality but hey, it's video and it's longer than that thrilling 1 second video of Heather! More to come.)
Once the boy has reserved a girl (with the 6 a.m. call), then he can go through with his plan to her ask to banquet. Roses simply aren’t enough. Perhaps the most elaborate “asking” of late was a AIM Air pilot who dropped a package out of the sky onto the school’s field during an event. The boy took the girl out to retrieve it, and inside the box was a letter with the question, “Will you go to banquet with me?” Another extremely creative “asking” was a boy who gave a girl a box of cereal, printed in color with her picture and name on it. Inside the box was not only a delectable and rare American sugar cereal(Lucky Charms, I believe) but a note popping the big question to his date. She said yes.
Girls usually don’t say no, so as not to offend the boy asking (who is always at the very least a friend and usually is a close friend). This is why the 6 a.m. calls to “reserve the right” happen. And of course, there are the occasional hard feelings when a guy has talked about and planned and prepared to ask a certain girl, and another beau swoops in minutes before to steal the damsel. But all is fair in love and war, right? (Perhaps the women’s lib movement is finally coming to RVA though, as this year there were a rash of girls who actually said no to the first asker.)
RVA has a myriad of other traditions that don’t deal with girl and guys and dating though. Like Titchie Weekend (elementary school festivities where parents frequently visit) and Senior Store (yummy food prepared as a fund raiser for seniors) and Interim (juniors’ and seniors’ week-long off-campus excursions). But the worst tradition of all, and I’ll probably take some flack for writing this, is a song that is sung every year at graduation—Toto’s “Africa.” Presumably, this song snuck into a graduation ceremony in the early eighties (with its lyrics modified to make it more spiritual and coherent), and it hasn’t gone away. Who knows what this song is actually about? Yet parents and students get teary-eyed every year while this pop relic is sung by our choir. Is it catchy? Yes. Is it the grand finale I’d want to cap off my high school career? Hold on a second, while I control my laughter.
Traditions. Sometime silly, sometimes touching. Always rooted in an RVA student’s heart.
Ironically, in the middle of my blogging about traditions, I've found myself in a unfortunate tradition of my own. I'm hoping it's more of a coincidence than a tradition actually. It's not a habit I hope to maintain.
For the second straight August, I have malaria. Before you fire up your chopper and try to med-evac me outta here, you should know it's not that bad. Having it once before helped me to recognize the symptoms earlier and start treatment even earlier than I did last time. The treatment costs about 6 bucks, and I started noticing improvement, no joke, two hours after the meds were in my system. Two days later, I'm still feeling sluggish and queasy, but I'm up and about.
I can't help but think of the first missionaries to Africa, the ones who would've been down and out, not up and about, for days, months, years with malaria. Those who died because there was no treatment, and their bodies just couldn't handle it. I'm pretty sure if I lived during those times, I'd be dead by now. Call it sweet blood. Call it easy mosquito-prey. Call it bad luck.
I'm glad that show Quantum Leap got canceled. I'd be dead if I were Scott Bakula.
On another completely different note, our friends Todd and Allyson put extremely informative and well-thought out video clips on their web site. So, I thought I'd try to emulate them. This was the best I could do.
A 17 year old boy breaks through a crowded hallway, screaming and flailing. He knows the rules of school, and normally he’s a good kid, but he’s being pursued, hunted, tracked. He knocks over a girl half his size, and she falls to the ground, stunned. She seems to be all right. The other students look on with smiles once he’s gotten past them, unconcerned by his behavior, although an outsider might think this was a traumatic matter of life and death. The predator that he’s running from wields no weapon, only a scarf, a scarf that is intended to go around his neck.
The tradition I just described is called “scarfing.” It happens before the junior class’s last party of the school year every year. The week before the party, each girl wears a scarf to school, and her goal is to wrap a guy around the neck with her scarf who will be her “date” to the party. One might think it was rude for boys to be running from girls or overly aggressive for girls to be chasing down their men, but it’s simply a game. The guys want to be the last one to be unscarfed, and the girls want to be without their scarves as early in the week as possible.
I don’t know how far back this ritual goes, but it’s a big enough deal that there are rules posted for all contestants. Here are a few of the most interesting of the “Ten Commandments of Scarfing”:
3. Thou shall not scarf above or below the neck, only scarves residing between the chin and shoulders are valid. 5. Thou shall use violence as a last resort ONLY 6. Thou shall not use mobs. Definition of mob:20+ people. 9. If thou art scarfed, thou shall wear the scarf until class party.
While RVA is notorious for its many rules (to keep 500 kids in line without their parents around surely needs a strong system of order), these are the fun kind of rules. But playing this game by the rules means sometimes that other rules (real rules) are broken. Like the kid mentioned above who ran through the hall and bowled over a small girl, or the kid who didn’t go to class because a mob minus one was waiting for him by the door. Yeah, he got a D-Hall (detention) for the infraction, but it was worth it to him to get one day further in the game.
Another tradition around here is “banquet asking.” Banquet is essentially prom without the dancing and after-parties. Juniors and their parents plan and prepare for the event, and it truly is a once-in-a-lifetime event for our students. Seniors have no responsibilities for the event except to dress up and have a good time, relishing the fact that their junior year and all of the preparation that went into banquet is over.
Because of the excitement and hype around this event, guys are not allowed to ask girls until six weeks before the event. That way if anyone breaks up with someone or changes their mind or any other dramatic turn of events, the trauma only lasts a short while. But on that morning when banquet asking begins…look out. Boys call dorms at 6:00 a.m. to “reserve” the right to ask a girl, and boys that call at 6:01 are left out in the cold. And why would they simply want to reserve the right? Why wouldn’t they ask right then and there? Well, banquet asking has become an event to rival marriage proposals. More on this later…
This past week was a milestone for me. My youth ended.
I now can be considered nothing other than an adult. No longer a young adult or a young man or a youth. Adulthood is undeniably here. Hopefully with my age will come more than just gray hairs. Hopefully some wisdom will eventually get into me.
One of the wisest things I read from my younger days was written by C.S. Lewis. I had written this out by hand and had it on my bulletin board for many years, only to lose it recently. Then I was reading Breathing Grace by Dr. Harry Kraus (a fellow missionary here in Kenya http://www.cuttingedgefiction.com/) and found a portion of it there. After I googled some of the words and read the whole thing, I remembered hard days of learning to love wholeheartedly and to forgive unreservedly. This quote helped me to dare when I wanted to hide, and I hope it's a piece of wisdom I'll never lose...even in the absent-minded senility of my old age. 30. Wow.
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable…The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
C.S. Lewis The Four Loves
(I've included a picture of the current state of my chin. The resolution is painfully good enough to reveal some grave patches of gray. And I assume they'll only spread from there, forever cloaking my boyish face with a cover of adulthood.)
A few months ago I wrote about the cultural frustrations I’d been having. Three different situations, all of extreme importance in my opinion, all out of my control and in the hands of a Kenyan. My crashed hard drive, extra seats for our car, and my son’s birth certificate—I thought I’d better let you know how they resolved themselves lest you think I were frozen in my former blood-vessel-throbbing, primal-scream-nearing, Adam-Sandler-with-a-golf-club state.
We got our birth certificate in early June…just a day or two shy of four months of waiting for that one document. A few days later I talked with another new father who was taking time off work with their new little girl and who had the time to get the birth certificate himself. He filled out the paperwork on a Tuesday and picked it up on Wednesday. Why it took our Kenyan gopher 12,000 times longer than it took our friend, we’ll never know. Once we got the Kenyan birth certificate, we applied for a passport and a Report of Birth Abroad certificate from the US government. Those came two weeks later (to the day!), and Asher is now free to travel as he chooses (with parental approval of course) to and from the United States at will.
Our second ARGHH!!! was the crashed hard drive. This story didn’t have such a storybook ending. Our computer is up and running in the technical sense of the word, but whatever he did to it made it run twice as slow, erased one hard drive (the one with ALL of our pictures, videos, and documents), and caused our music to sound like Keith Richards fell asleep with his elbow on the record player. The silver lining is that an old colleague from Grossmont High in San Diego let me send the “empty” hard drive his way to see if anything could be retrieved. It’s in the mail as I type, and my fingers are crossed (which is making it very hard to type).
The last frustration was the seats. I found someone to make extra seats for the back of our SUV (and thus increase it’s functionality). When I showed up to have them installed, it turned out that they were an old brown pair (our interior is grey). After searching for over six months, I didn’t care. They could’ve told me that they planned on amputating my arm and turning it into the seat cushion, and I likely would’ve agreed. Despite the poor quality of the seats and the installation, they proceeded to charge me more than the original quote. I politely asked the “service manager” (both words are oxymorons at this place of business) to at least give me the quoted price and showed her the proposed bill that I’d been given. She admitted that something needed to be done, went to talk it over with her employer, and came back with a new receipt. The new price? Eight dollars MORE than the previous price. She said she found a mistake in his original billing and actually COULDN’T reduce the price but had to add MORE on to the bill.
As I left that afternoon, she smiled and said, “You’re not happy,” not understanding why poor service, poor workmanship, poor communication, poor business, and poor value would make someone upset.
I wanted to say, “Arghh!” but I didn’t.
I simply smiled, got into my vehicle, and said, “No, I’m not happy.”
Through personal stories, cultural insights, and perspectives on the mission movement in Africa, Ryan Murphy shares what the missionary life looks like in the 21st century. The author's first book--All That You Can't Leave Behind--offers an entertaining bridge into the unknown lands of missions work and challenges you to make a difference in your world for God's glory.
