It is amazing how this one single photograph could bring alive a host of memories that I thought had completely slipped from my grasp.  This picture was taken back in January of 1980 – thirty years ago – during the winter tour of Luther’s world famous Nordic Choir.  I was a scrawny little sophomore who was thrilled beyond belief to be part of such an incredible choir  and  traveling on  such an exciting tour, which took us to Washington D.C., Santo Domingo,  Florida,  Mexico,  and California.

In an odd coincidence, I laid eyes on this photo for the very first time this past Tuesday,  just a couple of hours after mentioning the 1980 choir tour on my radio show.   My guest that morning was Pastor Kathy Brown and the topic was Haiti – and at some point I said something about how the closest I’d ever come to seeing the nation of Haiti was during my sophomore year of college when the Nordic Choir sang in Santo Domingo (which shares an island with Haiti.)   When I got home later that morning,  I found this photo on my facebook wall – sent to me by classmate Brian Leeper, who had received it from another fellow Nordic member,  Kelsey Bruso. (who I believe took the photo.)

I took one look at this photo (which I had never ever seen before) and it was as though someone had hooked up my brain to a laptop and downloaded a plethora of potent memories that I had completely forgotten.   I saw the smiling face of Paul Bryan Zenke, one of my choir tour roommates,  and suddenly remembered how he got me to do isometric muscle workouts with him almost every day of the tour.  (talk about an unbelievable miracle!)  I saw the face of Rollie Mains and instantly remembered a moment while we toured a huge pyramid in rural Mexico when Rollie sternly took me to task for paying too much money for a sweater sold by one of the locals.   I saw the face of Jim Quandt and recalled how that gifted bass (and really nice guy) was the first singer I ever knew with perfect pitch.  On and on. . .

And suddenly the memories were washing over me almost faster than I could process them. . . my first visit to Disney World . . . my first time eating grits (they weren’t too bad if you put a lot of salt on them) . . . the scare  as we flew to California when our plane was forced to land in Houston and we had to transfer to another plane for the rest of our trip (arriving in the middle of the night in L.A.)  . . . another scary experience as I accidentally left my plane ticket and boarding pass on the plane we had just vacated, and I had to frantically run back to retrieve them . . .  A performance on television in Mexico City in which one of my classmates,  an alto named Kathy Hoadley,  fainted- and the two guys on either side of her,  Dave Ritland and Mike Matson,  had to somehow get her off the stage . . .  during that same performance,  Mr. Noble called on a member of the choir, Sue Scherer, to translate his song introductions into Spanish, and she would give him these little looks of bewilderment when he would say something especially complicated or difficult to translate, and there she was, translating live on Mexican television . . .  I can even picture my hotel room in Mexico City and its two narrow little single beds . . .  and can almost taste the thick, spicy chili that my host family cooked for me in Santo Domingo, serving it over rice . . .  or how lucky I felt when that same host family packed me a marvelous sack lunch for our trip to the beach, complete with beverage . . .  or how miffed we all were when the choir posed for a photograph on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building and spontaneously began singing our concert opener, “Cantate Domino,”  only to be brusquely told by a security guard that no singing was permitted on the steps of the Capitol Building. . .

The vast majority of these memories have been completely forgotten by me for decades. . . but just seeing that sea of young faces in this photograph was all it took to reignite those long dormant memories.   And it made me very sad that some years ago I discarded all of the photographs that I took on that tour. . . mostly because there was a big smudge on my lens which left all of my pictures with a big splotch of something right in the middle of them –  but also because I had done something that had long been an unfortunate tendency of mine:  to take pictures almost entirely of things, buildings, signs, etc.  and taking almost none of people.  This strange practice of mine dates back to when I got my first camera back in first grade and used up rolls of film photographing our car sitting in the driveway- or our neighbor’s car sitting in their driveway.  But a picture of my parents?  Or my siblings?  Or our dog?  Or my young friend Marshall?  Nope.  And on my first choir tour,  I scarcely took a single picture of any of my fellow choir members.  How foolish is that?!   And it meant that this pile of photos had almost no personal meaning for me at all. . . because judging  from my photos,  I’d apparently traveled to Santo Domingo and Mexico City all by myself.    But in fact what made that trip so special and memorable was not what we saw – or what we did –  but that we were there together… a long long way from home,  but we had each other.  And I realize only now that I should have been pointing my camera at my fellow choir members, but failed to do so.

I’m just lucky that Kelsey Bruso was a lot smarter than I was !

pictured above:  You see a small rickety bus on which the nordic choir traveled in Santo Domingo.  It was set up with these little extra seats that would fold down into the middle aisle.   I’m sitting on one of those middle aisle seats almost exactly in the center of the photograph.