Prof

They always say the first impression is the only impression. Or in some extremely unbearable cases, the last. You may size a person up, chew him/her up and spit him/her out rightaway when that happens. But not always,hopefully, keeping one's ridiculously high hangout company standards a little secondary-ward as compared to his mortal social needs. So what makes one compromise? Dunno about that, but something sure tells me it's a word rhyming with desperation. Desperation.

Anyhow, the first impression I had of someone I'm now a fan of has nothing to do with the paragraph above you've  spent a good minute on. This man, I'd like to call 'Prof' henceforth is a professor of pediatrics at my college and even though I had been present in Prof's classes at least three times including today, I'd never payed attention the first two times, so this was, for all intents and purposes, the first impression. All I did the first two times is what I'm doing right now in an opthal class on IOLs. 

But I listened and listened and when I realized I was listening I screamed a bit at myself in my head. But Prof was magnetic with a totally profound point of view on bacterial meningitis. I've come across a LOT of professors in the past, MANY of whom I never paid attention to because they looked like they just wanted to get a bunch of medical facts over to the other side. Not Prof though. He seemed genuinely interested, his rasp of a voice oozing enthusiasm, not undeterred by the lack of amplification and acoustic clarity which he could have availed using the lecture hall microphone. What made Prof so unique was that I've never seen someone so animated in his talk, hands waving around, eager to teach, to extend knowledge which for all practical purposes was, in fact, in its true essence, medical WISDOM. 

Prof asked very few questions because he knew the 90 odd people were actually listening, if even with one ear, to his lecture. And that's a real accomplishment for a teacher teaching our class, believe you me. I myself, in the last bench was asked a question, the answer to which didn't seem difficult at all. You see what Prof was doing here? He wasn't just maliciously picking up students and testing whether they knew stuff he knew they didn't, he was merely allowing himself intravenous shots of pride with satisfaction in his work, which I felt he totally deserved.

Prof wound up 10 minutes well before time, and told the junta half smiling that it was his last class at AFMC. Hoots of "treat sir" were greeted sportingly and he graciously agreed for an All Present. And all the while Prof took to walk out of the lecture hall, for what might just be his last time, and out of sight, I was sitting right back there in the last bench thinking "Wow! Now that's how you make a first impression!"