Sweet Validation

Walking the pleasant one-mile slope to my apartment from campus, I'm sure observant passersby would have laughed to see my childlike grin, but I just couldn't help it! You may mock me when I tell you the cause, but I know you have probably felt a similar sense of exhilaration at some point. My creative writing professor returned our graded collections of poetry today. He started out by giving the traditional introductory lecture in which he expressed his general satisfaction with our work and spoke of general strengths and weaknesses that he saw throughout the class's collections, and so forth. As he went on, the anxiety and excitement in the class rose. We knew what was coming. At last he brought out the giant stack of papers, some few bearing the badge of honor (an orange sticky note) that named them worthy to be read before the class. He began. Inside my head I had reverted to elementary school and I began to chant the mantra: "Please read mine, please!" I wanted so badly for the teacher to validate my hard work and to tell me that I had done a good job, that I wasn't a horrible poet like I had feared. Sounds wonderfully melodramatic, doesn't it? Well, he read a few poems from other collections and I calmed down, telling myself it didn't matter, that he wasn't going to read any of my poems and that it was okay that he wasn't going to because it didn't matter. As I was saying this to myself, what did I hear but the title of my elegy ("Grandpa Said"),and then the first line, and the second ... He was reading my poem! He liked it! And I could tell from the reactions of my classmates that they liked it, too! Call me crazy, but it made my day!