Things I Should Write About

For some reason, I can't remember why, I once made a list of unbelievable things that have happened to me over the years. It's a long list, but I don't think I got them all.
Some of them don't require an explanation. Like when a total stranger left her six month old baby at my doorstep in the middle of the night or when I got an A on a college class that I only attended one time. Those happened exactly the way it sounds like they happened.
Other things require a little explanation which I wouldn't try to go into in a brief blog format, but when I wrote the list I probably intended to fill in the circumstances.
Sometimes bizarre things happen around me that leave me slacked jawed in amazement. Like the English professor who showed up twenty minutes late to every class (if he showed up at all) so drunk that students could smell his breath four rows back. Then he would ramble on for ten or fifteen minutes about how easy we had it, then he would leave fifteen minutes early saying that was all we were capable of handling in a day. Someday I'll write about it in greater detail, but for now let me just tell you I would sit stone-still staring at him in disbelief, wondering how anyone could end up so utterly broken and nasty. Sometimes I would look around the classroom wondering if anyone else was as flabbergasted as I was. About three weeks into the term, he was gone. According to legend, he just piled all the books from his office outside the door one day and left.
But here's the funny part. I was trying to learn details about his disappearance from another student when she said she thought I admired him because I “always hung on his every word.”
She was right. I did. Because from the very first day in his class, I knew that some experiences are just too strange to forget.

Nancy Sherer