Oh no.

I was reading helloyvetty and she had filled out a little meme quiz. I must confess, I really like reading those and filling them out. I don’t know why, I also like taking the quizzes in magazines too. Yeah, I’m a little strange. Anyway, one of the questions was, “What would God say when you reach the pearly gates?” and for some reason it made me pause. Not so much because I have an answer or don’t have an answer (I can only imagine the response to be “Who?”) but because it actually reminded me of one of my college professors.

We called him Dr. Steve but pretty much only to annoy him. He was a biology professor but the first class I took with him was an honors seminar (oooh, don’t I sound smart?) on creation and evolution. It was interesting because my college had some religious ties but was very much about science at the same time. I actually found the class fascinating and entertaining. We read the Origin of Species, which I really need to read again, and a bunch of creationist stories. But somehow along the way, I found a way to really…well, I guess I irritated Dr. Steve. I strongly suspect that it had something to do with the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but I don’t quite remember. At the end of the semester, I left the class, with high marks, I might add, and didn’t really think about it again.

The next semester I was required to take a biology class and since my college was quite small Dr. Steve was my biology professor. That was fine. I had enjoyed my previous class with him and I thought he was an interesting guy. Much to my surprise, while he was taking roll on the first day he said the name of the person before me on the alphabetical list and then he just said…“Oh no” and looked up at me.

“Oh no.”

He never actually called my name once the whole semester. Even when he called on me in class he pretty just pointed to me and said “You.” I did fine. I think I may have even earned an A. And when I went from his lecture class to the practical lab he would come by and check on my work and tell the lab professor, “Watch that one.”

But I still don’t know what I ever did to provoke an “Oh no.”

My senior year I took a bird watching class with him. Yeah, yeah, I hear you mocking me but it was a tough class. I had to identify birds by both sight and sound, log twenty sightings a week and wake up early to go hiking in the college swamp. Oh yes, my college had it’s own swamp. This was in the slightly earlier days of computing so the college had a very limited number of terminals available to students. Dr. Steve had us all come to his office at scheduled hours to log in our bird books. I would wear my headphones and listen to James Brown while I typed. He would roll his eyes and yell at me when I sang along.

But when I read that question “What would God say when you reach the pearly gates?”, all I could think of was Dr. Steve’s voice saying…“Oh no.”