Pageant Question 12: If you could go back in time and meet one person, who would it be, and why?

I was very good at going to school.  I had been doing it since I was three, so by the time I got to college, I knew how to sit and listen for hours, how to take pages and pages of notes from lectures, how to read dozens of books in a matter of months, and how to write so my professors were happy campers.  I was a vessel.  I was a programmable robot.  I was an excellent student.

What I wasn't good at was socializing (no surprise there) or noticing what was right in front of my face.  I had a real hard time with change.  I had gotten extremely comfortable in my uncomfortable life, and I didn't like to look ahead to the time when I would graduate, so I began actively researching graduate programs even back in my junior year.  It was the first semester of my senior year, however, that I looked up.  Literally.  I looked up during APY 377 (the awesomely titled "Magic, Witchcraft and Sorcery"), and actually saw.

I mean, I would glance up during class to look at pictures on the overhead or what the professor might write on the whiteboard, sometimes another student would make a noise and I'd glance, or sometimes I would stare into space and think, but this time, I looked up, and I felt like I became disconnected from my body.  I observed the classroom: a lecture hall class with plastic bucket seats and swing-arm desks in funky 1960s colors.  I observed the cement floor covered with industrial carpeting in a neutral brown.  I observed the three giant whiteboards at the front of the room, the ghosts of notes past lingering in blues and blacks.  I observed the other students, not nearly as many today as would be during an exam, mostly surreptitiously on their phones and a few taking notes and a few more than that staring blindly into space.  I observed the professor, looming over the podium, gripping the sides and reading from his notes.  Probably the same notes he had used for decades.  I observed with a detachment that let me finally see the professor as a human being, and he looked like hell.  My sudden observation allowed me to dig back into my less-observant memory for images of the professor earlier in the semester, and I noted that he looked markedly worse today.  His clothes were dirty and wrinkled, and he looked like he hadn't showered or slept in at least a few days.  But his eyes--his eyes were bright sparks in the recesses of their darkened sockets.  He looked alive.

At the end of class, I noted that the professor was packing up in a hurry, stuffing papers into folders and jamming it all into his bag.  Rarely did anyone ever stop to speak to the professor in a lecture hall class, so I knew I'd have but a moment to stop him.

"Professor Stevens," I began, and he started as if I had caught him stealing.