On Saturday morning I had breakfast with a retired English professor who, back in the fall of 1980, taught me freshman composition and served as my academic advisor. On learning that I hadn't selected a major yet, he wrote on my final project the following prophetic words: "If you don't go into English, I shall go into mourning."
He's retired now but still interested actively encouraging his former students, some of whom were in attendance at my 40-year college reunion over the weekend. At a party celebrating the 100th birthday of the women's dorm where I'd lived, I ran into a classmate who had been in that same freshman comp class. We remembered carrying our electric typewriters out to the lobby after lights-out to type up our English papers and then staying up all night typing other students' papers so we could earn enough money to pay our way home for the holidays.
She recalled how our composition professor would sometimes carry his guitar into the classroom on Fridays and lead us in singing at the beginning of class, usually concluding with "Lord of the Dance." My classmate suggested that we go and find our former prof and sing him "Lord of the Dance," but I suggested that she make it a solo. She's always had a gorgeous voice, and I still can't carry a tune in a bucket. Some things never change.
The dorm room I stayed in wasn't much different from the one where I'd lived all those years ago except for the blessed addition of air conditioning, a godsend given the oppressive heat in central Kentucky this weekend. Every student who lived in the dorm back in my day had a box fan in the window for those sweltering September days. The place has been spiffed up significantly over the years but somehow the dorm bed I slept this weekend in was much smaller than I'd remembered.
I stayed in a room right above the old college newspaper office where I'd spent so many hours writing articles and doing paste-up, but the newspaper offices are now located in the state-of-the-art mass media building on the other side of campus. The old paste-up table and wax machine are probably rusting in a landfill somewhere.
The first person I encountered when I got out of my car was the former youth director from my home church in Florida, and the first event I attended on Friday afternoon was a talk where a woman I mentored when she was around 12 years old read from her recently published book. The minute I walked in the door, she pulled me into a big hug and started gleefully recalling all the fun we'd had back when I was a college student and she was a preteen who loved to read and write and tell stories. Once I took her and two other girls to the National Storytelling Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, where we listened to master storytellers all day and then, after dark, sat on a blanket in a cemetery listening to ghost stories as fireflies lit up the night. After an exhausting day, the girls took turns telling their own stories as I drove them home in the dark.
Now one of those girls whose creativity I'd encouraged is the Vice President for Student Life at my alma mater, and there she was on Friday masterfully telling stories she'd gathered into a book, and there she was yesterday giving the keynote address in front of a thousand people in Hughes Auditorium. Not so long ago it would have been considered sacrilegious for a woman to preach in those hallowed halls, but there she was preaching one of the most inspiring sermons I've ever heard--and I've heard a lot. She's come a long way from that little girl telling spooky stories in a dark car.
And I guess a lot of us have come a long way. One of my classmates served as a pastor in China for 35 years until Covid sent him home, and now he preaches in Mandarin every Sunday at a Chinese church in South Carolina. Culture shock, anyone? I had dinner with classmates who served as missionaries in Ecuador for many years and lunch with friends who'd served in Spain, and I felt a little bit provincial for being a mere English professor in rural Ohio.
This morning I ran into an old friend who was on the newspaper staff when I was editor, a guy I recall as a fidgety firebrand and iconoclast who was always asking the kinds of questions that can get college students into trouble. Forty years ago I wouldn't have pegged him as a future college professor but he finally finished his PhD and he's still fighting the good fight, trying to instill journalistic ethics and writing skills in college students who wouldn't know what to do with a paste-up table or wax machine. He thanked me for putting up with his foibles all those years ago and helping him harness his energy into a long career as a seeker of truth.
I didn't see any online influencers at my reunion but I felt myself enmeshed in a vast network of positive influence: the youth pastor who helped me navigate the rough waters of adolescence, the English professor who helped me find my calling, the newspaper staffers whose gifts I helped shape, the little girl whose creativity I encouraged and who is now going on to inspire thousands of people all over the world. I may be just one small link in this vast network of influence, but the energy that flows through that network reaches beyond the limits of time and space and feels like it could change the world.
My old newspaper buddy, still fighting the good fight.
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