I once had a professor, Peter Kirwan, who utterly and completely changed my life. He probably never knew that. It wasn’t like he became my mentor or pulled me out of the gutter when I was destitute. Rather, the course of his life took him across my path and my whole path shifted.

He was one of two professors who took a very motley crew of Hunter College students to London, for a course called London in Literature. We would read various things and then go explore the places they described or where the writer had lived. Thus we went to Sissinghurst after reading Virginia Woolf (Orlando, still my favorite of hers). We all piled down the East End after reading Dickens (Oliver Twist, I think). I forget where we ended up after reading The Rape of the Lock and I don’t know why we spent the day in Cambridge, but we did read piles of Andrew Marvell.

Peter had a limp (from the war) but would lead us through stately homes and formal gardens at tremendous speeds, his finger in the air, caroling: Onwards! Ever onwards and sideways! I heard in those words that sometimes the way forward is to slip down a side alley, maybe one you could only see out the corner of your eye.

Peter had gone to Cambridge after World War II, to Pembroke College. He took the whole rag-taggle of us through the grounds, pointing out where he had lived and what he loved about the place. It was small, one of the oldest colleges and so beautiful. More beautiful than anywhere I had ever been.

Pembroke

I was 18 years old that summer and for a native New Yorker, pretty damn innocent. I had had a strange and not particularly happy first year in college and was simply putting one foot in front of the other, doing what I was supposed to do — go to college, get good grades, graduate.

But then I went to England and, for the first time in my entire life, felt at home and felt as if there might be a road I hadn’t seen before, but a road I wanted to take. I fell madly in love, not with a person, but a place and wandered around for almost two months in a gloriously happy daze. After the course was over, I traveled all over the country using a BritRail pass (wonderful thing, like a EuroRail pass only for the UK and it only worked before they broke British Rail up into tiny pieces again). I accidentally ended up in a tiny Cotswold village that would turn out to be where my husband grew up. I staggered through cathedrals, watched Morris dancers, drank beer. And started to grow up.

I came back. I spent a year at Cambridge, at Pembroke, and while there were normal adolescent ups and downs, I remember it as an almost unbearably happy year. I met Ed on the third day I was there and twenty years on, here we are. The friends I made that year are still among the closest I have. I never really made it back to the US, not for long anyway. Not until my English husband took us here to do a PhD.

Because of Peter, I found a place I loved, friends I love, a husband I love truly madly and deeply — and a life I love.

Sometimes the points our lives pivot on aren’t the obvious ones. Sometimes they aren’t clear until later. Sometimes they are never clear. But I do know that Peter Kirwan changed my life, simply by living his. It’s a wonderful and yet somewhat intimidating thought. If I were to be that person in someone else’s life, would I know it? And would I change that life for the better, simply by living mine?

Maybe.

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