Stuck in traffic on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, heading to a college friends’ reunion and a god-daughter’s wedding last weekend, I was trying to find something listenable on the radio. NPR crackled into earshot, and I was soon honed in and listening to an interview on Fresh Air whose topic-of-the-moment was OCD behavior in cats. The voice of the woman being interviewed registered as slightly familiar, and just as my travel-fatigued brain was sifting through the Rolodex for possibilities, the host broke to say that he was speaking with Dr. Laurel Braitman, science historian and author of the recent big-hit book Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, Gorillas on Drugs, and Elephants in Recovery Show Us the Wildness of Our Own Minds.

Wait! This was our Laurel–Thacher grad of 1996. I knew she’d published recently and was on the requisite book tour; I’d gotten an invitation to her local book-signings and receptions but had missed them because I’d already headed north for vacation. But how excellent that I could listen to her in a totally serendipitous moment like this! An hour later, finally at my  friend’s home, I’d barely hugged everyone before blurting out, “Were you listening to NPR just now? That author’s a Thacher girl!” It was an unearned pride of connection, I realized–but it made me inordinately happy to crow. (On a more personal note, Laurel’s class was the last group for whom I officially signed “YES!” letters as Director of Admission.)

When you’re an educator in a place like Thacher, a school community that transforms 13- and 14-year-olds into young adults ready to go out into the broader world as life-long learners, movers, and shakers, this sort of moment happens with some amazing frequency. It’s what Cam Schryver once called “the disproportionate influence of the few.”

Earned or not, I am always so proud to say, “I knew her/him when.”