Summer Camp

Inside the journal that I kept during my stay at Pekin Federal Prison I found a picture that my friend Becky had sent me in a letter. It was a picture of us at summer camp. We must have been about 10 years old. Becky Sumpter, Sheryl Martz, Debbie Pippenger, and I went to Camp Tannadoona together. The three of them are on their knees in the picture holding the sign, I am standing behind Becky on the right. We are posing at the top of the stairs. At Camp Tannadoona you have to take 99 stairs to get down to the lake, the hard part is climbing back up those stairs after your done swimming.

Becky wrote letters to me while I was imprisoned, I am sure she sent this picture just to make me smile. It did then and it did again the other day when I rediscovered my journal.

Perfect timing really because Tilly just got home from Quaker Haven church camp today. She had a blast. She enthusiastically has been telling me about all the fun things they did...capture the flag, a talent show, silly cabin capers, boating with her counselor (who told Tilly's grandma when she picked her up today that Tilly was her all time favorite camper), KP duty and scavenger hunts. She also told me about "cry night" - she said that cry night was the night that the pastor preached about all that Jesus had done for them and they all prayed. And that "everyone cried"..."even the boys" she said.

I think Tilly got a kick out of seeing my picture from summer camp. I am so glad that she and Cooper both had the opportunity to go to camp again this summer. They both say they can't wait until next year.

New Year 2005

Copied from my journal while I was at Pekin Federal Prison, this would have been my 2nd holiday season that I spent in prison.

"Dec 31 New Years Eve

We had a nice get together in the alley - Champagne glasses made out of cut and filled clear plastic water bottles.

We picked resolutions out of a bucket...mine said "You will start to believe in people, otherwise tomorrow it could be God himself you won't believe in."

We had a quintet sing a harmonious Auld Ang Singe with altered lyrics ... "Oh Free Us All" - La La La.

It never ceases to surprise me - the human capacity to make the best in any circumstances."

• An "Alley" is what we called the hall that our assigned room was in. There were 4 alleys per housing unit. On each alley there were about fifteen 2 man rooms and two 3 man rooms sectioned by cinder block half walls on both sides of the alley. The party we had was mostly ladies from our alley gathered at the end of the walkway.


• I can't remember if we toasted with soda or possibly contraband grape juice from the kitchen, I do remember the champagne glasses that one of the ladies made by cutting the tops of water bottles off, filing the edge and gluing it to the cut off bottle bottom -(I drew a simple illustration in my journal) Who needs Martha when you have creativity like this...even though Martha Stewart was serving time in a federal prison at this time I bet she never made champagne glasses out of water bottles!
• The ladies who sang the Auld Ang Singe had beautiful voices and harmonies. The extra verse of original lyrics was beautiful, although I do not get that across in the journal. I wish I would have wrote it down.


• Stuck in pages of the journal is the little piece of paper that I drew out of the bucket with my fortune cookie style resolution.


• We tried hard, especially during the holidays, to take our minds off the fact that we were all away from the ones we loved and longed to be celebrating with. Although I attended this party in my grey sweatpants and white t-shirt, it was one of the classiest New Years Parties I have been to.

Prison Journal

As you may remember the entire contents of my house was packed into boxes and taken away to be cleaned after we had a small but smokey furnace fire in January. Well it is July and I hate to admit it but I am still unpacking boxes.

Last night, as I was trying to sort the contents of one of the unpacked boxes, I discovered the journal I kept while I was in prison. I had not seen it since 2005, I almost forgot that it existed. I am sorry to say I was not very diligent about keeping a journal, sometimes there are weeks between entries. I wrote so many letters to family and friends that I did not feel the need to write to myself. Yet still there are many entries that take me back to the very day they were scribed. My mom sent the journal book to me for Christmas while I was in Pekin Federal Prison.

There are a few little notes and pictures stuck in the pages of the thin hard back fabric covered book. These little scrapes and clippings bring back a flood of memories - some foggy and some crystal clear.

One of the notes tucked in my journal is the complete lyrics to the Beatles song, Rocky Raccoon. Another inmate, Lucy, wrote them down and gave it to me. I cannot remember why exactly. Just a piece of notebook paper with her bubbly college girl hand writing. At the end she fills up 7 lines with Do, Do Do Do Do Do, Do, Do Do Do - etc.

She was a funny girl. She was probably just bored and had that song in her head, you try writing the lyrics to a song you love without hearing the song. It is harder than you think...I am sure that we talked about it as I am a big Beatles fan too. The lyric sheet was probably a gift to me to make me smile.

Her "room" was just across the "alley" from mine. We called the walkway between the half walls that made up "rooms" the alley. Each housing unit had four alleys. So the ladies who lived on your alley were the ones you saw the most.

Lucy is epileptic. I saw her have several seizures while I was there. Waiting for a nurse to come from the FCI next door was intense during a seizure. She is a dynamite softball player. She comes from a good family, her dad was the fire chief in Bloomington, Il (or somewhere like that). Lucy is a super bright girl, a total math whiz. She had gotten through a couple years of college before she acquired a horrible heroin addiction. She ended up robbing a bank to support her habit which landed her in federal prison.

(Little bit of useless info...all bank robberies are Federal crimes because they are FDIC ...let me tell you that there were more than a few bank tellers in that prison, guess it's too tempting for some)

Lucy could tell some crazy stories about her life as a heroin addict. She robbed her own money bag when she was manager of a sub shop and said she got mugged...she made the report in the police station while holding onto a bag with a sandwich and the missing money.

I hope she is doing ok. I occasionally look for her on Face Book, but so far I have not found her. I pray that she got to go back to college and that her parents gave her another chance.

Bikini Bandit

SOUTHAVEN, Miss. – Police in Mississippi say a woman was carjacked by a bikini-clad suspect, who they say later tried to rob an RV dealership. Southaven Police Chief Tom Long said the suspect, a 24-year-old woman wearing a bikini, approached another woman in her driveway and demanded the car on Thursday. The woman gave up the car without a fight, asking only for time to remove her young children from inside.
Long said the suspect then drove the car to the RV business, where she told employees she had a gun and demanded money. The employees did not believe the claim and restrained her until officers arrived.
Police said the suspect appeared to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol. She was charged with carjacking and assault.
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Information from: DeSoto Times Today

I get a kick out of stupid news stories...and this one had me laughing today.
Two things...
1. It is sort of hard conceal a gun in your bikini, no wonder they did not believe she had a gun.
2. An RV Dealership doesn't seem like the best place to hit up for cash now a days.

People like this make me feel really smart. Maybe that is why I got a laugh out of this story.

I Blog Do You?

In the beginning of 2008 my cousin and friend, Steve, started writing a blog. He called it and addressed it, I Blog Do You? "Good question", I thought. I enjoy reading blogs from local folks, especially Steve, as well as blogging pros now and then. In January '08 my kids, Cooper and Tilly, jumped on the blogging bandwagon and began reporting their lives on their own blogs.

In April 2008 during Spring Break I took the opportunity of a quiet house (my kids were staying with grandma) to answer Steve's question..."Yes, I blog too." I said as I set out to carve out my own corner of cyber space to publish my thoughts.

Blogging was great fun to me. I love to talk and tell stories, blogging seemed a natural fit. I am an ok writer, as far as getting my thoughts across. But I struggle with punctuation and grammar. I write like I speak...long run on sentences, reiterating myself several times.

I began filling my blog with things I thought people might be interested to read...my experience in prison, my ministry born out of that experience and my life as God was restoring me. (click the links for an older post in that category). I write alot about my kids, because I know everyone is waiting with baited breath to hear the true and amazing stories of Tilly and Cooper. Well, my mom who lives 2000 miles away is probably the most appreciative of this. (oh and maybe Grandpa JB, who lives close by but who cannot get enough of those kids). But I have always wanted my blog to be something more than just a family memoir. I wanted to use this media as a way to share my testimony, a written tale of God's Grace.

I watched my stats for the first year or so, seeing how many people visit my blog. Some days dozens and sometimes barely any. I was always surprised to hear from people when they told me they had they been reading my blog. Old friends, and friends of a friend of an acquaintance, others I have never met other than in the blogasphere.

I have not looked at my stats for months...I am afraid I would confirm what I suspect, no one is reading my blog. As it turns out if you want people to visit your blog you have to actually keep writing posts! And I have been hit and miss, at best, in 2009.

So now I answer Steve's question again, "I blog do you?"

"uhh, sometimes..?"

I am not sure why I can't seem to get back in the blogging habit. I think of ideas that I would like to post all the time, but I do not take the time to focus my thoughts into comprehendable paragraphs.

I am going to keep blogging, at a much less prolific rate than my buddy Steve or some of the other bloggers I enjoy.

Oh Well, I have a feeling that Steve might be the only one reading this.

And he withdrew his question this week...he moved his blog from www.iblogdoyou.com To just www.stevegall.com - I guess I don't have to worry about changing my answer.

Summer Camp

Last Sunday we dropped Cooper off for camp at Camp Mollenhour DNR Conservation Camp in Silver Lake, IN. We had been talking about it for months, he had been so excited.

Normally the kids both go to church camp at Quaker Haven, which is where their Grandparents go to church and is on the same lake where they live. The kids know that camp like the back of their hand. It is very familar, they can even canoe across the lake to say hi to grandma in the middle of camp.

But this year Cooper heard about Conservation Camp and it really seemed like a camp for him. At Camp Mollenhour boys ages 9-15 can go for a week to learn about boating, hunting, fishing, wildlife and other cool stuff that Cooper loves.

On Sunday right before we left Cooper got cold feet. He had been super excited but when it was time to load up and head for camp, he did not want to go. He was nervous. He did not know a single person at this camp, had never been there before and all of the sudden Sunday through Friday seemed like a really long time to my 9 year old guy.

We told him he had to at least try it. That if he got too homesick he could come home. When we dropped him off, I was the one who got nervous. It seemed that Cooper was one of only a few 9 year olds at camp. Most of the boys were 12 and up it seemed. In fact when I made his bunk up and got him settled in the cabin I looked around and all the boys in his cabin were 13 and 14 year olds, maybe a couple 11 and 12 year olds. Alot of the kids seemed to know each other and had been to camp before.

I was not preparred for being so sad to leave him! I was worried about him all week. I could not stop thinkng of him. Did I packed the right things? Is he meeting friends? Every morning I would wake up and think, "Cooper is in the water." At Camp Mollenhour the director turns on a siren of a sheriffs car at 6am every morning and the boys have to hustle out to the lake to jump in and wake themselves up! It was in the fifty's every morning this week and I wondered if he was freezing. I even put Cooper on the prayer chain at church.

We picked Cooper up from camp yesterday at 6:00pm. He had a great time. He shot clay pigeons with riffles, identified fish, he scored 92 % on his Hunting Saftey DNR test, he earned DNR patches in both hunting and boating saftey, he fished with bass pros, rode in fan boats, swam and scuba-ed, shot a bow and caught a baby milk snake named Spot. And he learned this pledge... I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from waste the natural resources of my country - it's soil and minerals, forests, waters and wild life.
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