The Bluestone Review Spring 2022

from giving every student who sneezed a classic Catholic blessing. And that’s the day everything changed for me. That’s the day that my final years of college (I suppose it would now be University, GO RAMS!), would be riddled by constant battles that were seemingly never-ending. One thing would get fixed, and I could breathe for a mo ment…but only for a moment before there was some new fire to be put out. And good ol’ Rob Merritt was there every step of the way, keeping me going because he knew—we both knew, even if I contemplated giv ing up a time or two—that this was where I was meant to be. Sure, he was pretty sarcastic and somewhat argumentative, but I always knew it was to get me to think deeper and challenge me. Yeah, he would get annoyed when I would correct him, the professor, in Advanced Grammar, but I knew he was impressed by how passionate I was for words and commas. Of course, he wasn’t the biggest fan of reading dark and ominous thriller stories, but I knew he always enjoyed when I finally broke down and wrote some sort of poetry or something a bit more personal. Regardless, that Shakespeare-loving, poetry-writing, nature-ad miring Dr. Rob Merritt made enough of an impact on me that I got one of his catchphrases tattooed on my arm as a constant reminder of every thing he’d done to fight for me, with me. “Write about it…” right next to a dragon, since fantasy is just his favorite genre to read. “I don’t know how I’m going to make it through without you three here with me,” he’d said to me and two of my colleagues at the end of our senior year Zoom rendition of a Bluestone Review reception. Well, Rob, I know I can only speak for myself, but I know I can’t make it through without you, either. Whenever I need that little push to get through the rough stuff, I do exactly as you always preached to me…I write about it. Then, the sun gets a little brighter, the birds sing a little sweeter, and I push through it, just as you always pushed me through it. In the end, all I can really say is that, in my eyes, just being you is Merritt’s greatest merit.

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