my dinner with dane

excluding my very first semester at byu, i was like a very high percentage of byu guys, rooming with a mission buddy. dane and i decorated our room with Christmas lights, went to a fireside where elder uchtdorf of the second quorum of the seventy told us that he was a harry potterfan, and we bore our testimonies to each other at a lamp post on 9th east coming home from school one night. dane was a computer science major who later switched to modern dance, attempted to live the life of a homeless person in salt lake during the olympics, and moved out of our apartment to hike across russia and asia, stopping in mongolia to spend some time with the nomadic yak herders.

since his eastern hemisphere trek, i haven't seen dane much. the last i saw him was in the ice cream aisle at macey's, where he and his new wife were soon moving to oregon, where he was going to open a dance studio. occasionally i've gotten e-mails from him, like the trivia contest asking which u.s. state has declared war on a foreign nation (it was maine).

last week he e-mailed me, saying he was in town to present a paper at a dance symposium at byu, in defense of how the dance department justifies the mission goals of the university, i believe.

we met up at the creamery on ninth. it was the most convenient place at the moment, but it was also where we would often go as exuberant freshmen. just walking back in there amidst long lines of parents and swarms of children in the ice cream line made it seem as if our past was only last year.

we laughed as we happily discovered were we still both dabbling with m:tg (if you don't know, i'm not telling), and briefly summed each other up on our hopes and dreams.

"do you still have anyone to have philosophical discussions with?" he asked.

i thought about it, and realized that i don't. from jon in high school, through dane, the chris, and even the dingus, i would have long discussions into the night, letting our minds sprawl as we talked. i remembered how, with dane and chris, my room-roommates, we would lie awake in our bunk beds, talking until one of us would fall asleep. i miss that dearly.

while i wasn't too concerned about it, i conscious of my car being in the creamery's "30 minute parking" and suggested we go to my place. he was very impressed, declaring it to have "good mojo", and we sat down with glasses of wheat tea (it's a japan-thing).

we talked of how we've changed since we knew each other, learning to apply gospel principles and understanding in a gray scale world. how we've tightened in some ways, relaxed in other matters of understanding. and he shared a thought-provoking story about learning what the prompting of the Spirit isn't.

the time came, and i dropped him off at campus. our visit was barely two hours, but as i drove home, i looked at the ever-changing byu campus (surrounded by cumbersome construction projects our freshman year, he noted that he was glad to be a school that could continually update itself). it was strange to remember so much that i had forgotten; some things were casual memories. others i wanted to hold onto, to see what i could do with them again.