No one chooses to be in our profession: strategic communications, for some organization.

We wanted to be - what?: a novelist, priest, playwright, scholar, teacher, doctor, a journalist?

We backed into it, our job; we discovered it, created it. By necessity – or chance.

What did you want to be? How did you choose this profession – where you’ll spend most of your time (other than sleep) between graduation and retirement?

Here’s how I did.

During my last semester as a professor of the Humanities at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1979, a first-year student gave me her ticket to the Michigan/Ohio State game in response to my admiration of her hair, blacker than the raven's wing.

But – it was a Freshman's ticket, in the low corner of the visitors end-zone. Because I was leaving the academy for a career in business in Chicago (Ragan Communications with 8 employees around 1981), I thought: "What would it be like to see one game from the perspective of the coach, the storied Bo Schembechler - opposing his own mentor: Woody Hayes?”

I envisioned Michigan’s cheerleaders and marching band at my command. (“If you want to lead the band,” I recalled, from an undergraduate aphorism, “you have to face the music.”)

So I worked my way up through the Sophomores and across the Juniors, down through the Seniors and Alums, until I found myself standing in the aisle on the 50-yard line, tenth row, next to the best seat in the biggest stadium, with its six-figure+ seating capacity, the year’s best game.

It was unoccupied.

A lovely octogenarian next to the open aisle seat, her silver and gold hair still radiant in the late-autumn mid-afternoon Saturday Michigan sun, with classic chiseled features, draped in blankets and shawls and a tam of maize and blue, said: "Would you like to sit? Watch the game with me?"

I said: "Would I? Yes. I would.” After an awkward introduction and silence, I said: “But this is the best seat in the biggest stadium for the most important game of the year. Why is it vacant?"

She said: "That was my husband's seat. We met here in our '20s - and during the nation's '20s. The Roaring '20s. We were students. It was grand, that first night, in the arboretum. We lost our virginity together. We fell in love and got married. He went into college administration. I became a professor - Biology. Our children were born here; all of our friends and colleagues live here.

"Over the years, we never missed a home game and we’ve built up our seniority, so that now we have the best seats in the best stadium, for the best games - in the country."

"That was my husband’s seat. But he died.”

I said: "I'm sorry. But can't the people you mentioned - your family, colleagues, friends, and so forth, come to these games with you?"

And she said: "Well, sure. But they're all at the funeral."

I knew then, that it was time to leave. Maybe try something new. Move to Chicago. Meet some girls. Answer an ad in the Trib. Edit the Ragan Report.