An Uncomfortable Friendship

By Dennis Nutter

An Uncomfortable Friendship is the story of a man who encounters one of his high school teachers thirty years after their first encounter as teacher-student. After the chance meeting at a local breakfast restaurant, they begin a series of weekly breakfasts at that same restaurant to discuss the events of their lives, their perception of social issues, and their views on various aspects of Christian doctrine.

Hopefully, the book will provide the reader with interesting dialogue and food for thought on a variety of issues and topics. Other individuals joins the conversation from time to time and provide for greater diversity of thought and create some challenging and tense situations. The story is set in fall and early winter of 2001 and runs a little over three hundred pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796042115

Dennis Nutter

Dennis Nutter has been a born-again (John 3:3) Christian and a Sunday School teacher since 1983. He has no formal training in religious studies, in terms of studying at a Bible school, attending seminary, or even participating in on-line education programs on the points of "orthodox" Christian doctrine. He has, in times of personal study, reflection and prayer, sought the truth of the holy scriptures, apart from the preconceived notions and interpretations that have come to be nearly universally taught in seminaries and bible schools of all faiths and denominations. He welcomes your comments about the content of the book, with your corrective or supportive information that he may have missed - either by letter or e-mail. Dennis can be reached at [e-mail].

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Copyright © 2019 by Dennis Nutter.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019908284

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-7960-4203-0

                            Softcover                          978-1-7960-4204-7

                            eBook                               978-1-7960-4211-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/20/2019

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CONTENTS

Prologue

One:              A Welcome Routine

Two:              A Chance Encounter

Three:           A Planned Encounter

Four:             Some Perceptive Questions

Five:              A Struggle With Truth

Six:                Another Enlightenment

Seven:           A Little Clarity On Group-Think And The Abortion Mob

Eight:            An Uncomfortable Confrontation

Nine:             Walker Vs. Walker

Ten:               A Lesson On The Holy Spirit

Eleven:         An Unexpected Visitor

Twelve:         God’s View Of Divorce

Thirteen:      A Question Of God-Haters

Fourteen:     A Sad Encounter

Fifteen:         A Long Friendship Tested

Sixteen:        Another Sad Encounter

Seventeen:   A Final Lesson For 2001

Epilogue

PROLOGUE

Can you answer that for us….Tigger?

I looked up to see my history teacher, looking so proud, smiling impishly straight at me and waiting for me to answer – or, more likely, hoping that I would just draw a blank and turn red. I knew he was so incredibly proud of himself because he had seen an opportunity to poke fun at one of his students and made such great use of it. His timing - in asking me the question, his pause for just the right amount of time, before dropping what he certainly thought to be the funny part, Tigger, and also catching me at a time when I was obviously in my own little never-never land of deep thought - had been perfect.

It was the first time he had addressed me with that cartoon name, but he would, from now on, take great joy in using it as often as he could, during the final few weeks of the spring semester of my junior year of high school. He had obviously been planning to use this new term of endearment when the timing was right – not at his first opportunity, but when it was really right. I had to give him his due credit, he had delivered and timed it incredibly well. The entire class laughed hysterically, and he stood there, looking smug and so proud of himself for his brilliant gotcha.

Mr. Walker was man in his late fifties or early sixties, I had guessed, but he was always good-humored and eager to crack a joke – or laugh at someone else’s, as long as it didn’t disrupt his class too much. He had always been a lot of fun as a teacher, but that day, he took to a new level and it seemed to please him that he was having so much fun at my expense.

The week before, my best friend did me the incredible favor of walking down the hall outside my fifth period history class, sticking his head inside the door of the classroom and saying, right at me, Hey, Tigger – T-I-Double-G Grrr!! Nothing else to say – not, let’s play some hoops tonight, or lets go score some cigars and drive around after school – just his big smile and bright blue eyes, and shouting that name that would make my last few class periods in U.S. History an incredible annoyance, to say the least. After I thought he was done, he took a few steps from the door and then, suddenly, reappeared, just to say, Grrrrrrr. Then, he was gone.

I wasn’t really thinking about any of that when Mr. Walker so rudely interrupted my deep study of the sole of my tennis shoe, the following week. Learning all the deep secrets of the patterns of the tread and picking at the little pebbles that had become imbedded in the cracks and crevices of the bottom of the coolest pair of adidas on the market seemed to occupy much of my time - during school hours, at least. Other guys wore Pumas or low-top adidas, but mine were the first of the adidas high-tops to come out. The smart-alec friend of mine still wore low-top Converse, but they were gold suede, which made his shoes pretty groovy, too. I still preferred my adidas and the adidas T-shirt I wore most days, to go with them…

I had now been snapped out of my daydreaming by whatever question Mr. Walker had asked and by the clever cracking-wise of my now-grinning teacher. I had no clue what the question was that he was asking me, but still wanted to focus on that, rather than his intended jab at me – and by the knowledge that I was now to be teasingly known as Tigger.

What was the question again? I asked, smiling at him and nodding my acceptance of the fact that he had really gotten me.

Now, he was smiling as big as Texas - beaming, actually - and he looked all around the classroom to make sure that everyone else was enjoying this little bit of humor in an otherwise fairly dull discussion of the world as it was in the early 20th Century. He repeated it as though it was obvious what the question was, What was the document called that spelled out the terms between Western nations following the defeat of Germany in World War I?

What I wanted to say, of course, was the easy answer of getting him back – You were there, you tell us. Thankfully, I didn’t say that. I wanted to let him know that he hadn’t completely gotten me, so I said, with the best combination of defiance and disinterest that I could muster, The Treaty of Versailles.

So began a brief period of time, within my nearly-as-brief high school experience, that would sear this particular teacher into my memory to a greater extent than was true of most of my other teachers. While the tet-a-tet that would dominate my relationship with Mr. Walker for the next month or two was both fun and an annoyance that flooded outside of that classroom, my very good friend had started something that would have a small impact on my life in the coming weeks, but a very great impact on it decades into the future.

My friend had started this incredibly amusing little scene after he had overheard my girlfriend refer to me as Tiger a few days before. She said it of course, for good reason, and she called me Tiger, not Tigger. But my good friend, Doug, knew that, Tigger – T-I-Double-G Grrr would surely be a lot more fun. And he was right.

The Tigger label would be used relentlessly for the next few weeks (good morning, Tigger Can you answer that for us, Tigger, etc.), but thankfully, died at the end of my junior year. It did not appear again during my senior year, which was great, although I probably didn’t give it any more thought than did anybody else. I would occasionally bump into Mr. Walker during my senior year. When I did, he always called me Mr. Nutter, and I, of course, called him Mr. Walker.

After that senior year, as was true of most of my 454 classmates and the dozens of teachers at my high school, I would not see Mr. Walker again for nearly 30 years.

CHAPTER ONE: A WELCOME ROUTINE

After high school, I went to college, got married at the end of the first semester of my freshman year (to the girl who had called me Tiger), had three children and, eventually, two grandchildren, and after nearly thirty years of marriage, a divorce. I worked as a salesman/consultant/executive/division manager at a firm that started out small in the 60’s and 70’s, but that became large and well-known in the late 80’s and 90’s, and continues to thrive to this day – but without me.

It was a great opportunity and a rewarding experience to have worked there in the company’s formative years, but after nearly 25 years at the company, it grew to be big-time, and I remained enamored of my small-time ways. In short, it was no longer a marriage made in heaven, although I still held the company and most of my colleagues, in high esteem. The CEO and I had many discussions about my future at the firm and agreed that something had to change – in me – not in the company, as it was changing in ways I did not completely want to keep up with. We worked out a severance package and I was on my way to one of the greatest, though also brief, periods of my life.

For the first time in my adult life, my life was filled with the routine of doing the same thing every day, at the same places, seeing largely the same people, even though I didn’t know most of them. For over twenty years, I had lived mostly on the road, in a different city every day, sometimes three or four cities in the same day. I might wake up in Toledo and have a morning meeting, then drive to Detroit for a late lunch meeting, and then fly to Milwaukee for a late-afternoon meeting, and then, after a Big Mac at one of the finest establishments in Milwaukee, catch a plane to Atlanta, via O’Hare, for meetings there the next day. Many nights, I would have done nearly anything to have been able to catch a plane for home instead of to the next day of meetings.

Now, I had that chance. I would see passenger jets flying over the lake where I would take my kids skiing and tubing during that glorious summer that I was off work and I would ask myself, Do I miss getting on planes and going all over the country, to the places I used to go? I would always answer and say to myself, Not a bit…I don’t think so…Not much. Even if I did miss the fast lane of flights, hotels, and meetings with executives and having what I was certain was a significant impact on the strategic, operational, and relational directions of many large and significant organizations, I now was fully committed to embracing my life of the routine and the laid-back.

As the summer started, I would get up at 5:00 am, brew a pot of coffee and begin working on a book I had been thinking of writing for several years. I now had time to do the necessary research and then thoughtfully make my all-important statements about several things that I knew were wrong, in certain schools of Christian thought, and which I knew the entire world was waiting for me to weigh in on. (Specifically what that aspect of Christian doctrine was is not really relevant at this point, so I will spare you the details of what that was about until later.)

Back to my routine. I would make some breakfast at about 7:00 or so, being as quiet as I could, since my wife and two youngest kids weren’t up, quite yet. After breakfast I would usually take a cup of coffee and walk around the acreage we lived on just to get some fresh air and look at the horses as they were getting up to face another of their routine days, as well. We had six beautiful horses, including a brood mare with a foal on the way, and an appaloosa POA (Ponies of America) that was one of the smartest animals I ever knew. The horses were beautiful and an absolute blast to watch as they would run around the pasture, but I had little to do with them. They were there for the pleasure of my wife, as what turned out to be my last-ditch effort to make up for my twenty-plus years of negligence as I was catching all of those planes and living in hotels.

By well before 8:00, I would be back in the study, reading, looking up quotes and references and writing the book that I was certain would be the most persuasive case ever made on the subjects – whatever they were.

At 10:00, the highlight of my morning would come. A local UHF TV station played old reruns of Gunsmoke, and I never missed an episode during that summer of enjoying the routine of life, for the first time since I couldn’t remember when. Now, as everyone knows, Gunsmoke was the greatest television show ever broadcast, and Festus Hagin was the greatest character ever created, in the history of all TV shows. Hands down.

At 11:00, my kids would finally be out of bed. (How teenagers can sleep away half of a day, I’ll never understand. But they did. I suppose they stayed up late, but I don’t know. I was in bed, asleep by 9 or 10 – every night. Life was great!) We might go out and play a little basketball on the driveway, or play some catch with a baseball. If my daughter didn’t want to come out with us, my son and I might take a .22 rifle and my 9MM handgun to a grove of trees nearby and do a little target shooting. We had a German Shepherd that loved to make this trip with us and also loved to go explore whatever we were shooting at. Even at the age of ten or eleven, my son could always outshoot me with whatever we were shooting (except a compound bow). It was frustrating and made me wish I could just go back in and watch more of Gunsmoke.

By noon, it was time for lunch. This was not routine. Some days we would just have a bologna sandwich and some canned soup. Some days we would grill burgers (huge thick juicy burgers that were almost purple for me, red for my son, and pink for my daughter. If my wife was around for lunch and wanted to have a burger with us, hers would be cooked to a grayish brown in the middle – almost to the point of being dust.) We might also just have a grilled cheese or mac and cheese – whatever we felt like having, but never anything fancy. We may also drive to any one of about five nearby towns to have lunch at a local drive-in or bar. Our favorite was in Weeping Water, a local drive-in we just called Kevin’s, after the man who delivered the food and soft drinks, rang up people’s orders, and collected the money. His mother did all the cooking. I never could tell who washed the dishes.

Wherever we ate, it was usually determined by whether we were going to go swimming at a local pool. Just like the restaurants, there were three or four nearby communities we could choose from, in terms of which pool we wanted to go to. Usually, we preferred the pool in Weeping Water, where my kids knew more people, and of course, we ate at Kevin’s.

About once a week, we would load up our boat and go to Lincoln, eat lunch or buy some fast food to take to the lake with us and then head to the lake. We would meet my oldest daughter and her boyfriend at the lake for an afternoon of skiing and tubing. It was all great fun, and that was about as much variety as my routine ever had to endure in those days.

When summer was over and my two youngest children started back to school, my son stayed home and was home-schooled, while my daughter went to a parochial school in Lincoln. Every morning, she had volleyball practice at 6:30, to allow for all the girls and boys teams that needed to use the school gym to be able to all have a turn throughout the day. One at the unbelievably early time of 6:30, one at 7:30, one at 3:30, one at 4:30, and one at 5:30, after school was out. I would drive her to volleyball practice and then began my day-long routine, which went about like this, almost every weekday, from mid-August through December of that year:

Such was my daily routine, day in and day out, for sixteen weeks from late August to mid-December, in late 2001.

CHAPTER TWO: A CHANCE ENCOUNTER

A month or so into this routine, I looked up from my books and papers one morning, to think about finally ordering some breakfast. I noticed a large table of people nearby, of about a dozen or so men and women in their sixties and seventies - and one who looked to be even a little older. Something about that oldest man looked familiar to me.

As I watched the man, and the rest of the group sitting with him, I realized that several of the other faces were also familiar to me, though most were not. The faces that were familiar to me had one thing in common – they had all been teachers at my high school – obviously, long-since retired. I kept watching them for about 15 or 20 minutes, although it almost immediately came to me who the oldest man in the group was. It was Mr. Walker, all these years later.

Now I had thought about him on occasion, and of the events of that spring, so long ago. I watched him talk with the other members of the group, not really dominating the conversation, or withdrawing, as a few others in the group seemed to do, but speaking briefly, listening, laughing with the group, then smiling glowingly – even knowingly – at one or more members of the group. Even at 80-plus years old, he obviously was completely at ease in the group, completely engaged in the conversation, and obviously enjoying the company of the others in the septuagenarian breakfast club.

I wondered if he would remember me all these years later, after probably teaching 15,000 or 20,000 high school punks over the years. I settled in my mind that he would not recall the unrelenting teasing he had given me all those years ago and decided not to go over and say anything to him. Of the others in the group, only one had been my teacher and that was for just a few weeks. I was moved into an advanced math class in the first semester of my junior year and the man at the middle of the far side of the table had been the teacher for that prestigious group. I hung in there for about a month and was enjoying being in an advanced class. Then, when they started introducing computers and computer programming of math problems and formulas, I asked my guidance counselor to drop me out of that class. I hated computers, in 1971, and my distaste for the tediousness of using computers intensified during my college years, and still keeps me from using and understanding the full greatness of the power of technology, even to this day. I probably still didn’t care much for that teacher because I always equated him, in my mind, with the dreaded monster known as a computer.

I resolved that I wouldn’t go over and introduce myself to this group and tell them how much I appreciated their hard work with mostly disinterested and unappreciative kids, over their decades of service to the local schools. I went back to my reading and studying – something I never would have done 30 years earlier, back at good old Lincoln Southeast High School.

After about another fifteen minutes, something strange and fateful happened. It seemed almost like a divine appointment, as it played out, if one believes in that sort of thing.

As I read from an old 17th-century philosopher-theologian, I could sense a presence beside me, standing at the end of my table. My waitress rarely ever checked on me, as she knew that I had the same routine every day and that I would not need a refill on the coffee pot that she had placed on the table when I came in, now over three hours ago. At first, she would always offer to get me some fresh or warmer coffee, but soon learned that I was content to drink the pot in front of me, at whatever temperature it was. If I finished that pot, which I rarely did, I was done. I had eaten my breakfast and had my plate taken away long ago, so who could this be, at the end of the table? Of course, all these thoughts happened simultaneously, taking only the split second that had elapsed from the instant I sensed someone standing near me, to the act of looking up to see who it was.

When I did look up, I saw the smiling face of my former teacher, Mr. Walker, just as he said, It looks like you’re studying hard. That’s good to see.

I was surprised that he had come to my table, though I shouldn’t have been, I suppose. The man had been a teacher for 40 or 50 years, of course he would be interested in someone who had a half-dozen books spread out on the table in front of him and who had probably not even looked up for ten or fifteen minutes.

Yeah, just a little light reading. Somehow, I sounded almost like a high school kid when I answered him.

He spoke energetically, Well, it’s good to see a man that’s still interested in learning. Most people I see that are about your age, sitting alone in a restaurant, are playing solitaire or video golf, unless they are working on something for their job. It’s good to see a man reading and obviously dedicated to understanding something. It’s refreshing, I guess you could say.

It amazed me that he spoke without much of the frailness or breathlessness that you so often hear when older people speak. He looked all of 85 or 90, but sounded like a man at least 15 or 20 years younger. I was trying to carry on the conversation, so I didn’t engage my brain in the task of trying to figure how old he might be – especially since I didn’t even know if he was in his fifties or sixties, when he taught me and my class of ‘73 mates.

Well, thanks. I have a few weeks off of work after spending 25 years with a company, and I have some things I’ve wanted to learn more about for some years. Now, I have the time to do it. I didn’t go into all the detail of where I worked or any of that, because the place I had worked was a major employer in Lincoln and mentioning the name always seemed to lead to people saying, Oh, you must know… More often than not, I had at least heard the name, but probably didn’t know them, if they had joined the firm in the past ten years. I caught planes and stayed in hotels, and on the one day I was in the office each week, I would see only the dozen or so people that I worked most directly with.

Well, anyway, it warms my heart to see it.

I could tell he was planning to leave, so I blurted out, Mr. Walker, you were my history teacher about a hundred years ago. Brilliant, I thought, just go ahead and tell the guy how old he looks by saying it was a hundred years ago.

He ignored the time reference and asked, Really? I’m glad you told me. I was wondering if you were a former student of mine. He nodded toward the books on the table, Obviously, I single-handedly created in you an insatiable desire for life-long learning. There was that impish grin that I could still recall from that day that I had to come up with the Treaty of Versailles, to maintain any degree of respect in my young world. Tell me your name.

Dennis Nutter. I paused for a few seconds. But it’s been a lot of years.

And a lot of students. It’s always hard for me to remember specific students and their names after so many years. Were you a good history student. He really stressed that word, gooood." And then smiled again,