LaurenandLloyd.com

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high school

There and back again

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We had a whirl wind trip down to Concordia Missouri last weekend and Lauren only let me go if I promised to make a post about it.

My high school choir director is retiring at the end of the school year and the last home concert of the Singing Saints under the direction of Bill Gasau was on Sunday. I drove the Prius down along with Beth, Sam and Ben (who shall not be mentioned in the remainder of the post).  We left at 1:00pm drove down to Concordia and had dinner at the Smoke House Formerly Known As Biffle’s. We ran into a number of former classmates there, so dinner was interesting.

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Then we headed over to the church for the concert. There were a fair number of other former classmates at the church, so a good time was had by all before the concert as well. I would estimate that there were 600 people there. It’s a really big church.

Mr. Gasau had been directing the choir for 47 years, and they had people who sang in the choir stand up by decade. Lots of alumni. The oldest alumni would have been 65 years old. They also recognized former accompanists (always students), former choir presidents, bus drivers, people related to Mr. Gasau. It was swell.

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I’m not sure who that guy is.

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There are Muellers, Wisenborns and Mannings in that photo.

The choir sounded good, and all of the choir alumni went up to sing a couple of songs. I think it took longer for everyone to find a place than it did to sing the songs. I’m 95% sure that Mr. Gasau looked up during the first song, noticed me smiling at him and pointed to me and smiled. I knew I was his favorite.

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Here’s what the whole big group sounded like. Sorry about the sound quality. No, wait. I take that back. I think it sounds pretty good for just sitting my phone down on the pew and letting it record. click on the little play icon at the front of the link…

[wpaudio url=”http://laurenandlloyd.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/20150315-195951.mp4″]

Afterwards there was a nice reception where I saw even more people that I knew. Following that we went to Kent’s house and then spent the night in Biltz.

Bookstores (part 2)

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I (this is Lloyd) went to high school at Saint Paul’s College High in Concordia Missouri. One oddity of a boarding high school was that the school had a “bank”. Parents would deposit money into an account and specify how much money you could withdraw each week.

It would be hard to describe how inordinately proud 14 year old me was when my parents thought about it and decided not to put any limit on what I could take out. I knew that there was enough in there for me to get $5.00 a week for a semester. I don’t remember if that was money from my own bank account at the Farmers Bank of Lohman* or if it was my parent’s money. Money in our family was pretty fungible.

$5.00 happens to be enough money to walk to Casey’s every evening after Study Hours and buy an orange popsicle and still have enough money left over to walk downtown and buy a paperback book on Saturday.

Living at Concordia put me approximately 5,000 times closer to a bookstore than I had been at Honey Creek.  It didn’t really matter that they didn’t have a lot of books to choose from. We only ever looked at the science fiction / fantasy section. Really, section is probably too strong a word. It was maybe 4-5 shelves that were maybe 3 feet wide.

Looking back on it, I can’t imagine that we went there every Saturday, but it must have been close. Just looking at the number of books in my basement attests to that.

Since I found one, here’s what the inside of the Farmers Bank of Lohman looked like:

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*I once kissed the daughter of the bank president.