The Professor

'The texts will be here when you get back. Love may not.'

Travel with me back in time a little bit… okay, more than a little bit.

We’re going back to the early nineteen-nineties, to the campus where one of my best friends and I went to college, nestled in the mountains of middle Tennessee.

It was early winter, a time of the year when the fog rolls in most every day, shrouding everything in their way in a cloudlike haze. Sometimes, you could barely see thirty or forty feet in front of you, as tree branches and shrub tops poke out from the mist as you walk around campus.

And my friend was having something of a crisis.

The year before, on a trip to the beach along the Gulf, he’d met the girl who’d become his girlfriend. They dated long-distance, as she didn’t attend our college; when they met, we were in our first year of college and she was about to graduate high school.

Things had gone so well, they’d stayed together even after went to college several states away. But, as you can probably imagine, distance sometimes doesn’t make the heart grow fonder.

Misunderstandings happened; the air between them grew tense. Remember, they were separated by nearly a thousand miles in a time without cell phones, when long-distance calls were still really expensive.

I noticed his mood dip, and then dip a little more. No matter how much I and our friends tried cheering him up, nothing worked.

One day, we were standing outside on the big lawn that spans our college’s quad when I asked him: “So what do you think you’re going to do?”

He shook his head, but a look crossed his face that told me he’d thought of something. We couldn’t linger anymore anyway, as we both had to get to class.

Later, he told me he’d gone to see his Spanish professor, who was teaching at our college for a year as a visiting faculty member. The professor was in his mid sixties then, with thinning gray hair and a love of perfectly tailored suits. He loved music, had traveled all over the world, and spoke several languages.

What he loved as much as teaching, though, was when students would stop by his office to talk. So my friend dropped by.

The professor invited him in, and offered him a seat. My friend had a lot on his mind, he said, but what he was worried most about was an exam coming up in the professor’s class. He hadn’t been able to keep his mind on his studies, and so was way behind on studying for it.

The professor asked why, but at first my friend didn’t say. He didn’t want to feel like he was making excuses.

“Is there anything outside class going on?”

The professor wasn’t the kind of person who was all-business, only about the lecture. In his classes, he blended in stories of his travels, the wine he loved, the art he adored, the scenery he loved to see. He loved life itself, and everything that came with it.

So my friend decided to tell him; how he and his girlfriend had hit a rough patch, how they weren’t speaking at the moment. That he wanted to put things back together with her, but didn’t know how.

“Then you must go to her,” the professor said.

My friend was a little surprised. Really, you think so?

“Yes,” the professor told him, adding that he didn’t need to worry about his test for now.

“The texts will be here when you get back,” he said. “Love may not. Go.”

So, my friend — who didn’t have a car of his own at the time — hitched a ride to see her that weekend with another friend of ours, who happened also to be dating someone at the same college.

When he got back, my friend didn’t share much about how the weekend went. And this is where my memory of that time starts to get hazy; so much has happened since. I’d love to tell you that moment saved everything and they lived happily ever after, but it would be incomplete. They did get back together — but later broke up again. (And then a couple years later, got back together again!)

There’s a scene in the middle of the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, when Burt Lancaster’s Archie “Moonlight” Graham recounts the story of when he was a young baseball player, trying to make it to the major leagues.

In the middle of the 1905 season, Graham gets called up from the minors to the big-league New York Giants. After playing a single inning in a single game as a right-fielder, the next day he gets sent back down to to the minors. Though he plays a few more years in the minors, hoping to get called back up, he never does.

I’ve never forgotten Lancaster’s line in the movie:

“We just don't recognize life's most significant moments while they're happening. Back then I thought, ‘Well, there'll be other days.’ I didn't realize that that was the only day.”

That’s what I think about these little moments. What if my friend had given in to his discouragement? What if the moment I just shared with you never happened at all?

Absent an alternate universe, of course, we’ll never know. Now, though, they have three children, and live not too far away from my family and me.

These little, tiny moments that seem like nothing when you’re in the middle of them, it’s true they might turn out to be completely inconsequential. But you just never know when the opposite might be true, you know?

I hope you’ve had a great few days of running — as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell