Musings

Random memory just came back from my time at Liberty University.

As students, we were required to be in Class Dress and attend Convocation— basically a church service— every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10am.

RAs were required to take attendance for their halls, but as long as you weren't too late you wouldn't get written up and fined.

I typically took advantage of this and showed up barely late.

Convo, as we called it, always started with some music played by the campus band in the genre of rock.

It was much easier to kinda sneak in while music was still playing, so my tardiness ranged from about 5 to 15 minutes.

Convo took place in the basketball stadium and sat basically the entire on-campus student body, I believe around 10,000 or so in 2012.

Considering our seats were closer to our dorm, I didn't typically walk around the entire thing. Instead, I'd walk up to a side door, bang on it, and some random student that happened to be nearby would pop it open for me, no big deal. It was a relatively silent transaction masked by the sound of rock music.

It never really crossed my mind that you couldn't hear anything from the outside when the music was playing.

So one day when I banged on the door, as per usual, but I got the dirtiest look from the person that opened the door.

They stared me down as I entered confused, “like wah?”. And then I realized everyone nearby was also staring me down. And then I noticed how uncomfortably silent the entire stadium was. And then I realized everyone in the stadium was staring in my direction.

Turns out it was Veteran's Day and everyone was having moment of silence during the Posting of the Colors.

And I blew it.