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| See that handsome fellow on the left? So full of promise yet so naive. |
This post gets really long...
That summer I was working at Preferred Popcorn as a bagger. For the first time in my life, I was working 40 hours a week at a solid job with solid pay. I was living at home, so all the money I made was pretty much mine to spend as I saw fit. Unfortunately, my money management skills at that time were pretty pathetic, but I did manage to save enough that summer to pay for my first semester of college.
One of the highlights of my summer at this time came almost right away during Memorial Day weekend. I always went with Lindsay's family to Halsey for a weekend of camping. In previous years I had mostly went because I was friends with her brother and he invited me. That summer Halsey was different because I went as Lindsay's boyfriend. Here's a picture from just after we got back that year.
I also went on a trip to Valentine, Nebraska with some guys from my class early in the summer. Another guy in my class lived up there and he had always invited us up but we had never been able to go until then. We floated down the Niabrera River for a day and it would have been a lot of fun, except I remember it being exceptionally cold for the month of June. Floating down a river on a cold day is not the ideal situation.
After Halsey and the Valentine trip, I got back and it was already June. Lindsay was working at Covenant Cedars Bible Camp that summer, and even though it was only about 8 miles from where I lived, I really never got to see her. I started writing her letters a few times a week, and we talked on the phone when we could.
Then, after we had been dating for a little over a month...I got a bad surprise. When I thought we were just going on a walk to have a normal date, we were actually going on a walk where I would be dumped. At the time, I did not like it one bit. I really liked this girl, and I felt like she might be the right one for me. However, in retrospect, I was 18 years old and I had a lot of growing up to do. I wasn't ready to be a godly leader in a relationship. Lindsay had gotten into the relationship for the wrong reasons. For the rest of the summer and into the fall, I would hold onto hope that maybe she still liked me a little bit and that we could maybe date again. It wasn't until a second "break-up" kind of talk that I really started to come to grips with the idea that I needed to move on. So I did move on, and even though I always kind of liked her and got nervous/excited/happy whenever we talked, eventually I realized that we were just friends. But something in me always knew that I'd hate it if she married someone else, and there was something in me that wanted to say that she was the one for me. Despite my immaturity and the fact that Lindsay wasn't in the relationship for the right reasons, I still felt that when we dated in the summer of 06'. And as the story goes, nearly two years later, I was a lot more mature, and God brought her back into my life and we started dating for all the right reasons. Just 9 months after that, she became my wife. She was the right one for me, but just not at that time. And God didn't bring her back into my life until sometime after I had trusted him enough to truly be okay with the idea that God might have a different plan for me.
Anyways, that went far beyond the summer of 2006, but that's because it was a big thing in my life that started in the summer of 2006. It was a huge learning and growing experience. But to be honest, after she dumped me, I was a pretty sad puppy for a while.
Luckily, Rusty was coming. That was my modo for a week or so after the break-up. Rusty and I had become good friends during my Junior year of high school when he was a sophomore. In fact, Rusty had become good friends with my entire friends group. But then he moved back to Washington during my senior year. However, he wanted to come back to Nebraska...for some reason. I guess we are just pretty cool around here, haha. He told me he wanted to come back for the entire summer, but he didn't know where he could stay. I immediately suggested he could live at my house with me! I don't know if I ever official asked my parents about it, but either way...Rusty was coming. Right at the beginning of July, he came. The rest of the summer I had a friend with me pretty much at all times, and I got to know Rusty even better than before. We had some fun adventures, like mattress surfing. One of the first days he was there we took an old mattress and tied it to the back of my 1986 Mercury Sable and went out into the country and one of us drove as the other mattress surfed. We also broke Rusty's video camera that day, which in retrospect was a sad deal because it ruined the chances of us documenting that summer on video.
In early July I traded my 1985 Ford Mustang in, spent an extra $1000 and got a 1997 Nissan Maxima with 126,000 miles. Even though that car wasn't in perfect condition, it was definitely in decent condition. The only issue I had with that car was when the clutch burned out. It was probably about two weeks after I had bought it, and I knew the clutch was going bad. Me and some friends had went to Kenesaw to visit Drew and Reed Hanke, and I let Truman drive the car to the gas station which was a few blocks away. I went outside 5 minutes later and heard a horrible noise and smelt a horrible smell. That was my clutch going to crap. Overall though, getting a new (used) car was another highlight of that summer. I loved that car when I first bought it.
In the first few weeks of July I started roguing and after roguing is detasseling. That meant that I had to wake up at 5:30 AM every day and go to work. I hooked Rusty up with the same job, so we got to work together. I was also still working at the popcorn plant that summer during evening shift. When detasseling was at its height, the workday ended around 2:30 PM, and then I'd get home at 3:00 and have to be at the popcorn plant at 4:00 until 11:00 PM. I made crazy money over those few weeks, but I was crazy tired all the time and basically had no life. One fond memory that comes from detasseling was listening to the new Dashboard Confessional CD every morning on the way to work. At the end of the summer, I found out that Rusty HATED Dashboard Confessional, especially the first song on their new CD, but he had just suffered in silence all those days we listened to it at 5:30 in the morning on the way to work. The bus stop for detasseling was only about a mile from my house, so we never really got through that first song...
After detasseling was over, I went back to working one job again, and that felt like quite a relief. At the end of the summer, my plan was to move to Lincoln and get an apartment with my friends Ben and Phil. It sounded like a great idea, and I was really excited. During one of the last weeks in July, my parents went on a vacation to celebrate their 20th anniversary. This meant that I was in charge of my parents house for an entire week...if you're 18 years old and have friends, that means one thing- PARTY!!! If you're a Christian kid, it means PARTY WITH NO BOOZE! So that's what we did. We did however smoke a ton of cigars that week. Hey, we were 18, we had the right to destroy our lungs! I had friends over almost non-stop that week. It was one of the funnest weeks of my life. I put a sign on my door that read "Treat this house like you'd treat your mother." My friends gave me a bad time about that sign because logically speaking it made no sense, but the concept was simply that they would treat the house with respect so that when my parents got back they wouldn't be upset with the fact that I had people over all the time. There was one point that week where I got very upset with Rusty because he decided to light fireworks off IN THE FREAKING HOUSE...and some of my friends were trying to defend him. I felt like I was taking crazy pills that day.
We survived that week and my house didn't get burnt down. That was good. One of my last memories that summer was randomly going to a Blue October/Yellow Card concert in Council Bluffs Iowa. I'm not a big concert guy, but I went. Dashboard Confessional was also supposed to play that day, but they never showed up. Then I hung out with my friend Ali and went with her to her house in Omaha, and Micah and Rusty got lost trying to find her house and all their phones died. It was starting to look like I was going to be stuck at Ali's house for a few days, but then we got one last desperate phone call from a payphone from Micah. He told us exactly where he was and said that we had to find him because they were done trying to find me. Luckily, Ali was an Omaha native so she knew exactly how to get where they were. I was just glad my friends didn't ditch me.
I'm so glad Rusty came that summer. The excitement level of the summer of 2006 went up immeasurably because of Rusty. He had some really bad luck though. At one point he had staff infection, a spider bite on his hand, corn rash, and a head injury from an epic wakeboarding crash. My mom said to his mom on the phone, "IF THIS WERE MY SON, HE WOULD BE IN THE HOSPITAL RIGHT NOW!" I don't remember if he went to the hospital...but I do think he finally got some medical care right before he left.
Early in August, we went back to Omaha to drop Rusty off at the airport so he could back to Washington. That was pretty much the end of the summer. In just a few weeks I was going to be moving to Lincoln, finding a job, and starting college.
But then, at the last minute...there was a twist. We were supposed to move on Saturday, and it was probably on Thursday that me and Phil found out that Ben was bailing out. Then I had a few days of scrambling around and praying because I had to make a very important life decision. I could move to Lincoln with just Phil and pay more for rent and possibly end up with a lot of debt, or I could stay home, keep my job at the popcorn plant and go to community college in Grand Island and afford it. I ended up choosing the latter, and I'm glad I did because going to Lincoln would have been a very bad decision in retrospect.
The next Monday I enrolled at Central Community College in Grand Island and I stayed home for the next school year. That concluded the summer of 2006. Next up: Summer of 2007. The last summer I spent single, my start on youtube, and probably the best "bro" summer ever.
-Bill
PS. If this ridiculously long post wasn't long enough for you, you can check out the archives of my xanga blog. I kept it pretty updated from 2006-2008. http://billgrip.xanga.com/?nextdate=6%2f12%2f2006+1%3a56%3a32.607&direction=n
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