Nestled on a spacious piece of land several minutes west of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Haverford College is one of the most beautiful campuses known to mankind. It is located on “The Main Line,” a string of wealthy suburbs of one of America’s larger cities.

At the time of my attendance there in the 1980’s, there were approximately 1,200 students enrolled, making it a cozy and small liberal arts college. It was precisely because of its intimacy, flowing out of its smallness, that I chose to go there. Haverford has an excellent academic reputation, a kind of Ivy-league type feel to its History, and that is another reason I made Haverford my choice.

Much of college life requires efficient and admirable writing skills, and Haverford’s size played into one of its strengths for incoming Freshman. For, you see, in addition to the oft-required Freshman English class for students, we were required to attend a weekly discussion group with our Professor. Fate shined on me that Fall, in granting me the blessing of Professor Paul Devine, a man who demonstrated to me throughout the year his broad-based knowledge of English, with a talent for getting across a comprehensive seriousness to the craft of writing, while helping to hone one’s skill. There were times I chafed under certain criticisms, but, in looking back, I can say without a doubt that I am in partial debt to Professor Devine for the skills that are currently mine.

Professor Devine was not the only person to provide constructive criticism during our discussion groups, since the other 2 male students in my group, along with a woman classmate, chimed in. We would often go around the table, gathering the thoughts from each other as we focused on the paper of our attention, the essay being written by one of the four of us. Usually, the paper under our scrutiny was based upon our classroom reading. I don’t remember any specific act of judgmental cruelty from my classmates, but I do know that I was unstable in my writing confidence those initial weeks of school. My instability resulted, in part, from having returned to school after a 4-year stint in the Army, while my classmates were making a seamless transition straight from high school. They were 18 year olds, and, at 22 years of age, I was “the old guy.”

Despite her youth, I remember clearly, the female member of our group. As a person who has a long-held preternatural fascination with the English language, I stood in awe of her writing gifts. There was an augustness to her writing, an excellence that made her stand out like a palm tree in mid-winter Chicago. Her writing bag of tricks made her creative and experimental in ways far and beyond her 18 years. I have often asked myself if my perception was colored by my academic immaturity, combined with the insecurity of my own writing skills at the time, and the answer that has always come back to me over the long 33 year since the Fall of 1984 is, “No. Ms. Lisa Paget was a splendidly talented writer, and as with Professor Devine, I cannot point to any specific way that she enhanced my writing, though I am certain that she did.” I am sure that I never conveyed any of this to Lisa at the time, but it was just as clear in my thoughts in 1984, as it is now.

I did not know Lisa outside of class and our discussion group, and I am not sure what she may have majored in, though I do think I vaguely remember seeing her at one of a number of gatherings for my fellow History majors. I can not say for sure. However, if I took what I do know about Lisa, and someone was to ask me where I thought she would wind up beyond our college graduation in the Spring of 1988, I would emphatically say that she’d be doing whatever her heart desired. Lisa’s writing reflected the fact to me that she could accomplish whatever she put her mind to. If a person said she had completed her PHD in Engineering at MIT, I’d believe them. If it was said that she was a Rocket Scientist with NASA, there would be no argument, nor disbelief, from me. Personally, I have always believed that Lisa would become some famous novelist, or would have gone on to get her PHD in English, while becoming an English Professor at some elite, Ivy-league type school. My point is that I have nary a doubt about what Lisa could achieve. I felt the sky was the limit for her, that the World was her oyster.

So, as a person who has my own, intimate and powerful 1989 interactions with President Barack Obama, and who sees those interactions documented in David J. Garrow’s new book Rising Star:The Making Of Barack Obama, imagine the shock I felt as I read penetrating, direct quotations of Lisa’s in Garrow’s book, from her experience as a fellow Fall 1988 Harvard first-year law school student with President Obama? Am I shocked that Lisa had the academic goods to enter Harvard Law? Absolutely not. Knowing that that is where she wound up, I can say that she was right where she should have been.

But, there is a larger, yet more fundamental, point to me casting a spotlight on this fact. My point is that this story once again indicates the extreme smallness to our World. There is no way that neither Lisa nor I could have had the foresight to know as we sat in our 5 person Freshman English discussion group in 1984 at Haverford, that we would both have personal interactions just a few years later with the first African-American President in History. Perhaps, this fact is not remarkable to you. But, I felt that this story is remarkable enough to me that I needed to write about it. I’ll let it lay right here. It’s awesomeness, on so many levels, speaks for itself.