"Think of the small [moments] as large"

It was unseasonably warm the day I made a surprise visit to my former college advisor at Smith. I hadn't seen him in many years, although I'd taped two notes -- written on completely professional, cartoon-laden Japanese notepaper the size of Monopoly money -- to his door in the past six months. (Not weird and creepy at all.) By the time I got to his office on this warm winter day, I'd walked up four flights of stairs in a wool sweater and winter coat and was sort of sweating under my clothes. Not a good look when seeing someone for the first time in six or seven years.

His door was slightly open, and I could see him in his chair, talking to a student. I paced around the hallway in front of his office for a few minutes, waiting for the student to leave. For some reason, I forgot to take my coat off and continued to drink the hot coffee in my hand, so I was getting increasingly warmer as I paced. I could see Dave through the open door; many Smith girls who took a class with Dave were smitten for life, (again, not weird and creepy at all), so I was actually getting slightly nervous about going in and saying hi. Eventually I interrupted with a knock and stepped into his office.

It took him a moment and a couple of hellos before he realized who I was. My notes left a few months ago were actually on his messy desk, as if a reminder that I still existed and would one day do as promised in the last note – stop by to see him again. After talking with him for a few minutes, he mentioned my blog, and I stopped breathing for a few seconds.

He’d read my blog? I mentally scanned through what I’d written, but my memory sucks, and I couldn’t remember if there was anything I should be embarrassed about. I determined, solely based on the past experiences of me being me, that there had indubitably been something at least slightly embarrassing that he had read. But instead of fumbling with this realization, something else happened.

You know those moments when you feel a sudden alteration take place inside you, and emotionally you are back at a different age of your life? For a few seconds, I was 20 again, and I was internally jumping up and down, shouting, “Dave read my blog! Dave read my blog!” He was that kind of professor, where his interest in your work or his tacit acknowledgement of your intelligence was enough to make you think you could become the person you’d dreamed about being. So his acknowledgement of my writing on this unseasonably warm February day as I stood in his office slightly sweaty and mostly overjoyed, was reason enough to start writing regularly again.