Books by Dale Harris

Books by Dale Harris
A Feast of Epiphanies

Though I Walk, A Novel

Daytime Moons and Other Celestial Anomalies, a book of poems

Second Wind

Second Wind
An album of songs both old and new. Recorded in 2021, a year of major transition for me, these songs explore the many vicissitudes of the spiritual life,. It's about the mountaintop moments and the Holy Saturday sunrises, the doors He opens that no one can close, and those doors He's closed that will never open again. You can click the image above to give it a listen.

The Song Became a Child

The Song Became a Child
A collection of Christmas songs I wrote and recorded during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. Click the image to listen.

There's a Trick of the Light I'm Learning to Do

This is a collection of songs I wrote and recorded in January - March, 2020 while on sabbatical from ministry. They each deal with a different aspect or expression of the Gospel. Click on the image above to listen.

Three Hands Clapping

This is my latest recording project (released May 27, 2019). It is a double album of 22 songs, which very roughly track the story of my life... a sort of musical autobiography, so to speak. Click the album image to listen.

Ghost Notes

Ghost Notes
A collections of original songs I wrote in 2015, and recorded with the FreeWay Musical Collective. Click the album image to listen.

inversions

Recorded in 2014, these songs are sort of a chronicle of my journey through a pastoral burn-out last winter. They deal with themes of mental-health, spiritual burn-out and depression, but also with the inexorable presence of God in the midst of darkness. Click the album art to download.

soundings

soundings
click image to download
"soundings" is a collection of songs I recorded in September/October of 2013. Dealing with themes of hope, ache, trust and spiritual loss, the songs on this album express various facets of my journey with God.

bridges

bridges
Click to download.
"Bridges" is a collection of original songs I wrote in the summer of 2011, during a soul-searching trip I took out to Alberta; a sort of long twilight in the dark night of the soul. I share it here in hopes these musical reflections on my own spiritual journey might be an encouragement to others: the sun does rise, blood-red but beautiful.

echoes

echoes
Prayers, poems and songs (2005-2009). Click to download
"echoes" is a collection of songs I wrote during my time studying at Briercrest Seminary (2004-2009). It's called "echoes" partly because these songs are "echoes" of times spent with God from my songwriting past, but also because there are musical "echoes" of hymns, songs or poems sprinkled throughout the album. Listen closely and you'll hear them.

Accidentals

This collection of mostly blues/rock/folk inspired songs was recorded in the spring and summer of 2015. I call it "accidentals" because all of the songs on this project were tunes I have had kicking around in my notebooks for many years but had never found a "home" for on previous albums. You can click the image to download the whole album.

random reads

Programming and Fatherhood

When I was a boy, the closest thing we had to the world wide inter-web was The Rainbow, a monthly computer magazine for our TRS-80 Color Computer 3 (a.k.a the Co Co 3). The Rainbow published the printed code for a variety programs and applications, which you "downloaded" into your machine by typing them out, line by painstaking line. Hours (sometimes days) later, you'd finally run the program, hoping beyond hope that you hadn't made an error in the transfer from print to screen...and inevitably you had, and inevitably you'd spend hours (sometimes days) going back through it again, line by painstaking line, looking for the proverbial "needle of error" in the proverbial "haystack of code."

But at 14, I loved my Co Co 3.

Pardon the maudlin moment of nostalgia here, but I logged untold hours on this little 128K wonder (yes, that's a "K," as in kilobyte. That was it: 128 of 'em. And you had to save your programs using cassette tape. Those were the days). Some of those untold hours were spent entering code from the pages of The Rainbow Magazine, but more of them were spent working on code of my own.

I programmed exclusively in the Co Co 3's Extended Basic language, and, though I did develop a clunky-but-working word processor that I used to type up homework assignments, my primary interests were in the far less practical field of Game Development. I tried my hand at writing just about anything playable I could think of: text-based adventure games, first-person maze exploration games, shoot-em-up arcade-style games, Tolkien-inspired role playing games, weird versions of chess, flight simulators and battleship-type strategy games. And I learned first-hand about things like algorithms and symbolic logic and applied algebra, and Cartesian geometry and matrices and multi-dimensional arrays and animation and visual story telling and literary narrative devices and graphic design and systematic problem solving and who knows what else as I did so.

I even submitted one of my programs to The Rainbow. It was a game called "Karate," where two stickmen squared off in a joy-stick-controlled melee to the bitter death. The game was actually accepted and printed (I think they paid me $25.00 for it), and almost a full year later I got a letter from some 14-year-old boy somewhere who had typed it in, line by painstaking line, and was now wondering if I could help him figure out where the needle of error was in his haystack of code...

I was reminiscing about my Co Co 3 the other day because my son's been working lately with some game development software called Game-Maker that he downloaded from the internet . As I've watched him become impressively proficient with Game Maker's drag-and-drop interface, programming his own versions of pong, and dodge ball and shoot 'em up arcade style platform games, I've been thinking a lot about apples falling close to trees and chips off old blocks and stuff like that.

After my son had taught me the basics, I thought for old time's sake I'd try my hand at programming a game, which brings me at last to the point of today's post. Because part way into the project, I hit this wall where I wanted the little man to follow a path and slash at the bad guy with a sword, but it just wouldn't do it. I tried everything I could think of, but the little man just wouldn't follow the path.

And in a moment of desperation I called out to my son, who was playing Wii in the basement: "Son! I need you."

"What is it Dad?"

"I can't make the little man follow the path..."

"Be right there." He thumped confidently up the stairs. Looked for about 30 seconds at my code. Found the needle. A few clicks as he explained in patient tones what I'd done wrong, and suddenly the man followed the path as faithfully as a prize winning terrier graduating from obedience school.

And as he went back to the basement and his Wii, having helped his Dad in his moment of need, I thought back to that day when the issue of The Rainbow hit the shelves with my karate game in it, and my Dad took me down to the local Radio Shack and bought every issue in the store. And I thought about how he told the clerk as he paid that his son had a program published in that issue. I'd looked away shyly, but deep down inside I stood up a bit taller, because here was this man that I most admired in the whole world telling a stranger: my son has what it takes.

I wonder if this isn't one of the richest gifts a father can give his son: to call on him in a moment of need, to turn to him for help, to buy out the local Radio Shack when his accomplishment is on display, boasting on him to the clerk as he does so. Because when we, as men most admired by these boys who look up to us, assure them that they really do have what it takes, in these modest but potent ways, we invite them, too, to become men.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

This evoked some memories of my own, Dale. I remember the CoCo computer, but I was a Commodore 64 man myself! My first word processor was one I typed in from the corresponding magazine for the C64 called "Compute!" (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMPUTE!) I used that word processor during my first 3 years of College to write all my papers!