I can't even say I knew him. We met via e-mails when I wanted into his class because he was a forerunner in his field and I wanted to work it into my major. He let me into the lecture even though I didn't have the prereqs and I felt so special, like I somehow swayed his opinion. Two weeks later a mass e-mail went out saying the prerequisites had been dismissed and the class was open to the general student body.
We had a grand total of one face-to-face conversation. It was in a Kroger when I only needed to grab cat food but was with friends, so I had the forty-pound bag propped like some over sized toddler on my hip while I'm walking around looking at the discounted cheese.
It was one of those moments where you stare at someone for too long trying to decide if you really know them so then you're obligated to speak to them after you make eye contact. Only it wasn't anything like that at all.
I thought it might be him so I stared until he looked at me because I wanted to talk to him in person. He was dressed down. T-shirts, jeans, just some white tennis shoes. Did you ever have that moment in grade school when you see your teacher outside of class and you can't believe that they are allowed to exist outside of school? It's the opposite of that in college when your professor is world renowned. You start looking around hoping to make an impression, get them to remember you for a recommendation, for a faculty advisor, for graduate school. He looked up from the deli ham for a second, probably realizing I was staring pretty intently at the back of his head.
I did some damage control for the creepiness by saying his name as a question, as if I was trying to decide if that was really him or not. "Dr. Peterson?" As if that worked.
In summation, he essentially looked me up and down, cat food and all, and then looked to his basket. Then back at my cat food baby and back into his basket of paper towel and apples and said, "I can see you have a cat. Well at least there's nothing in here," as he jostled his basket, "that is too incriminating." We parted ways and that was that. He was a good guy that treated his star-crossed fans well.
I had his lecture from 4pm-6pm on Tuesdays. We got the e-mail Wednesday afternoon and suddenly he was gone. You want to know what my first thought was? What my first horrid little thought was? This insipid gnat of a wisp was, "There goes a grad school opportunity." Because I am a terrible person. A selfish horrid human. But human none-the-less. I cried that night for reasons I can't fully explain but I know it wasn't because of graduate school.
The next day we got an e-mail with the subject line "Take a break" from a Mrs. Colleen. She informed the students that everything would continue on schedule and not to worry because she would take the course over starting next week. The next day. It was as if this man had planned this all along and it was no problem. No inconvenience at all. Just take a little break, that's all. Except there would be no break. Things would run seemlessly.
How does that work? How does the world just keep going? When I do something small like just moving my couch for the next couple days I need time to adjust to the changes. I bump my leg on the chair that wasn't there before, I have to double take when putting papers away because the shelf used to be over there...
Chris Peterson wasn't just a couch.
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