The lawn in front of the old Administration building at Walla Walla College was immaculate that Thursday morning in late May. I was walking down the sidewalk away from a final test I’d just completed in the classic old building and toward the Havstad Alumni Center. A stairwell outside the Center would lead me to the basement and into an office space where a desk with my name on it had resided for the past two years. I was also arriving at my “finals” there, so to speak, as this was my last week as a member of the Public Information Office team. While the offer had been there to stay on, I would matriculate from the college that Sunday and felt it was time to venture on to a new, next chapter as I had two other offers to consider. Also on the desk was my “Senior of the Year” award from the School of Communication and Language Arts.
I glanced up to see the matriarch of my Adventist Academy coming up the walk toward me. “This should be interesting,” I thought, and I was not to be disappointed.
For those with creative and/or writing aspirations, there was a caste system in place at my academy. They would have the “privilege” … perhaps even the responsibility … to be educated by this esteemed lady. She was tough, thorough, exacting and quite proud of the products that she produced. As a result, there were those within her caste, and the rest of us.
The operative word there, of course, was “us.” I was a high school student with creative and writing aspirations. I was the first Junior level student to serve as the school’s paper editor. If there was a writing, graphic, or creative class that had been offered, I had taken it – unless, that is, it had been taught by her. There was a very non-personal reason to that fact. From my eighth grade year on, I wanted to be a journalist and composition writing with which she was obsessed and the inverted pyramid style of journalistic writing where the who, what, when, where, why, and how must be conveyed in three to four sentences had little in common. Her value proposition didn’t match what I sought to learn so I opted to stay a part of the other caste.
As we neared one another on the sidewalk, I greeted her politely and warmly. “It's good to see you. You’re here for Tracy’s graduation, I presume?” She was and a surprisingly pleasant conversation followed including the fact that I too would be graduating that weekend. And then she asked the question, “What is your degree?” When I replied Communication Media with an emphasis in Journalism, her jaw didn’t just drop, it plummeted downward. In fact one could have driven a semi truck through her perplexed, stunned, gaping mouth. She seemed simply incapable of processing that outcome.
Oddly, her reaction delighted me more than surprised me. It was a remarkable moment in how it so dramatically contrasted from others, those caste members who to this day at alumni meetings share of her motivating and embracing their success. And, yet, looking back on my career I wonder if she didn’t actually inspire me more than them. What her gaping mouth taught me was that how someone else perceives you has nothing to do with who you are or who you can become. And, more importantly, how important it is for anyone whose sidewalks in life you share – particularly those who report to you – to fully understand that too.