Homecoming at LeTourneau

So I went back to LeTourneau for homecoming, and despite getting food poisoning, it was great!

This was my first road-trip in my Hyundai.  I was very impressed with it.  In speeds from stop-and-go traffic in Dallas to upward of 85 m.p.h., it averaged me 37.5 mpg.  I also learned how to float shift – without the clutch, although I try to avoid it because of the risk of damage.

When I got there, I first went to the new student center.  It was lovely!  They should have built this before the auditorium.  But oh well.  I briefly wished I was 18 again.

There were many organized activities, like the catamellon and the boat race.  T3 brought the Black Pearl, 100% cardboard.

 

 

I stayed with old church friends.  It was a lot of fun going back!  I really wouldn’t want to do it all over, but it brings back nice memories.

End of an era with the Chrysler LHS

The date was July 24th, 1999.  Windows 98 was the dominant operating system.  Cell phones were still a thing of the future for all but the most exclusive few.  There was a small family from that era who had just moved into Chicago from Texas.

An eleven-year-old boy sat bored at a car dealership.  His dad was negotiating for a new Chrysler LHS – the flagship luxury car of the brand at the time.  The little kid was restless, and his mother and a salesman suggested he go sit in a minivan sitting in the big glass showroom and pretend to drive it.

“But what if I start it up and crash?” He asked.

“Oh, I’m sure they disabled it,” his mother said absentmindedly.

So the little boy played in the minivan.  First, he made “vroom, vroom,” sounds.  Then, he adjusted the seats.  He decided that he wanted to feel really grown up and turn on the radio.  The keys were in the ignition – should he turn them?  After all, his mother said that the car couldn’t really move.

Well, the dealership was not destroyed, but it came rather close to it.  Instead, a salesperson ran over and shut off the minivan right before the little kid shifted it out of park as he leaned over to turn on the radio.

Ever since then, the car became part of the family, first at a regular fixture of suburbia house and then at a more rural location.  It didn’t always get in the garage when it rained, as a bunch of children’s toys usually ended up there, but at least it got the carport.

The car was around for a lot of things.  The eleven-year-old boy passed his driver’s test on it.  The boy’s dad threw a Frisbee at it which left a mark that he could never get off.  When he was seventeen, the boy and his dad went to a mission trip in Oklahoma in the car, where it was featured prominently in the parking lot and was permanently dyed by splatters from girls painting a picnic table.

When he turned eighteen, the boy spun it out and missed the SAT.  At twenty, he drove across the country in it with his grandmother in pursuit of history and trains.  For his last eight weeks in college at LeTourneau, he brought it down to pack his stuff in and to (unsuccessfully) cruise chicks with.  He drove it back north when he graduated, and then south again for graduate school.  His last major journey with it was heading south, where he saw relatives, those who would not be relatives, museums, historical sights, and places of railroad significance.

Still, it had never been a very reliable car.  The air conditioner broke just a few short years into the car’s existence and was never able to be permanently fixed.  The electronics system, the tires (the boy was driving it once at 70 mph when one tire blew off the rim), and many of the other components failed sooner than they should have.  After a strut broke as the culmination of several repairs, the man realized it was time to move on.  After all, his dad’s first car had to be towed, and since his car was low mileage, the boy hoped to recover some value from it.

He listed it on Craigslist and was honest about the good and bad of the car.  A neighbor picked it up with the intent to fix it up for his daughter.  Since he is a mechanical fellow and has all the tools, he will be able to maintain it much cheaper.  And the boy is happy knowing that the car is still around.  But never again will he drive it to school, and that little kid riding in the back seat on the way back from church is forever just a memory.

Coming soon: the car that replaced it.

A visit to LeTourneau

The day my old Xanga shut down, I was in Longview, basking in the memories of my youth at LeTourneau University.  Everything had changed yet remained the same!  First off, the new dorm was open and students were living in it:

LeTourneau also knocked down the old cafeteria, where some of my absolute best and worst memories of my late teens and early twenties are from.  In its place is a new, huge monstrosity that will be the student center next year:

It is interesting to see how I age, not in leaps and bounds, but in small, undetectable increments.  Even when I joined NIU, I still looked for the most part like a college student.  Now that I’m at UNT, I can’t help thinking that they all look so young!  Like overblown highschoolers!  I guess that really is kind of what they are.

There were a few people who still remembered me.  Since I graduated two and a half years ago, many people who had been freshmen during my senior year were still there, as seniors.  I said hi to a guy who had lived in my old dorm, and marveled at how much older he looked.  A girl remembered me from when I tutored her in calculus so many years ago.  And the girl who had been my assistant editor to the newspaper was now student body president.

As a whole though, I kept looking for familiar faces but coming up empty.  If I had visited a year before, I probably would have been a lot more remembered.  But as it was, there was a great feeling of both sadness and happiness that came over me as memories were stirred up, some of which had remained dormant for half a decade.  And everything went on without me.  I suppose that when I am dead, if I was given the opportunity to visit the earth again for one day after twenty years have past, I would probably feel about the same way.

But the faculty had much greater recognition of me than the students did.  All the chemistry department remembered me, as well as the Bible department, art department (the one professor in it), math department, and tutoring department, and Lawrence, the greatest cafeteria worker of all time, came to greet me.  I even got invited by the student body president to sit in on the administration meeting and offer input!  It was very enjoyable.

I stayed with my pastor during my visit.  My car air conditioner permanently broke and I won’t be paying a grand to fix it.  Instead, I drove two and a half hours back in 105 degree weather.  But I got over 30 mpg, despite going over 80 m.p.h. in a 4500 pound V6 Detroit car!

Last Sunday, I was at Denton Bible church looking for parking.  I accidentally backed in a little too far and nudged a car, but fortunately there was no damage.  If I hadn’t backed into it, though, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the “LETU Parent” bumper sticker on the minivan next to them!  For a college of only 1300, the school certainly has had a large impact.  I was 150 miles from the university in a metropolis of several million people when I saw the bumper sticker.  I left them a note.