Norm Fintel considered himself lucky on the day that he died. He told his nurse, “I think I’m one of the only people that can say if I could go back, I wouldn’t change a single thing. How lucky am I.” This was after a lifetime of spreading that luck in the form of wisdom and compassion. He wove a large, adoring family and a profound legacy from the fibers of faith, vision, and work. He was Robby’s grandfather, and I wanted to write down everything he ever told me.

“He won an airplane in a raffle,” Robby’s mother once said. She was cooking at her lake house in Draper, Virginia, tossing breadcrumbs in a bowl with her hands. Norm was crouched in the garden outside. The family always fretted about how much yardwork the then-ninety-year-old insisted on completing. Peggy explained how he turned the airplane into a shiny convertible and drove around the Midwest, urging fellow farmers to pursue a higher education. The airplane became a symbol of the shimmery, extraordinary quality Norm’s life took on. It figuratively flew him to Roanoke College.

The name “Fintel” is inscribed in two-foot-tall letters across the top of Roanoke College’s library. Norm was the President of the college from 1975-1989, and he sparked the upward trajectory that the institution still enjoys. His celebration of life was held in the campus chapel where his daughters were married. Reverend Paul Hendrickson stood and announced, “Vision comes from Nebraska.” Nebraska farmers like Norm have the ability to look at a field of red dirt and imagine lush miles of corn. They look at a dry blue sky and believe that plump rainclouds are just a few days over. Norm looked at a struggling college and envisioned a thriving liberal arts institution. He looked at a woman at a bridge game who regarded him as an intellectual snob and saw a lifelong partner.

Last night, Robby and I strolled down the street to a lively patio and had a beer. I thought about Norm and his profound spirit, his sharp luck, his love that was both humble and regal. On the walk back, I said, “Think about all  of the tiny little choices and factors that led to us meeting.” Ever the mathematician, Robby curtly replied that there were an astronomical amount, but he humored me and thought about it. “I needed to not work as hard as I should have at baseball,” he said. “I would have gone to an easier and more athletically-driven school, where I probably would have graduated.” He thought some more. “I needed to have had no idea what I wanted to do. I started at Brown as an engineering major, and by the time I got to Roanoke, I had almost enough credits to graduate—they were just all in different fields. That’s why I went to summer school, which put us in the same friend group. And I needed to have had family ties to Roanoke. That’s what brought me there.”

I thought further back. The life I love—my partner and puppy and apartment and degree and various cities I call home—hinged on my dad driving from Nebraska to Wake Forest and meeting my mother in 1984. It also hinged on Robby’s father moving to Roanoke College from Long Island, and his mother transferring from a small school in the Midwest. It hinged on Norm Fintel having the vision and temperament to be tapped for the position of College President, and on Jo Fintel giving the snob a chance. I am gob smacked at the thought of how an alternate choice made by one person would have blown my unborn destiny to the ground.

And it would have been fine. Another person would have been born in my place, or Robby and I would have met different, wonderful people. We all would go on loving and making popcorn and doodling on the backs of envelopes. Maybe one of us would save a life someday, or decide that they were going to finally create the thing that had been clutched in their throat for years. Norm Fintel is proof that an existence is what you nourish it to be.

Norm and I sat on the deck in Draper, Virginia last summer. We drank tea and he told me about the buzzards that scrawled lazy circles through the violet-blue sky. He said something that I promised myself I would write down, but didn’t. I’ve been thinking for three days about what it could have been. I remember inhaling sharply when I heard the words, then holding the air in my chest, still and stiff as buzzard wings. It had to do with life. Something about the importance of it all. I think I’ll uncover the words someday, or maybe the act of pursuing them is all I need to discover. Either way, Norm sparked tiny shifts in how I view the importance of each person and the love they’re capable of creating. He taught me that a relationship with the earth is a vital part of being human. I learned that there is, perhaps, something divine about the impossibly delicate way things come to be. The Spirit moves through tiny choices that we might not have made, and the love we give is what makes each choice grow. We must treat our gifts with the grateful bafflement they deserve. I was impossibly given three years in which to learn from a man whose faith surpasses profound, and will continue to build a life with his grandson I impossibly met. My current existence hinges on the number scrawled across a raffle ticket in the palm of a young, dust-covered man in Nebraska. How lucky am I.