It was my junior year in high school when my mother told me that I would not be going to school the next day.

At the time, she was a programmer at U.C.S.D. Extension, the university’s community education department. She needed me to drive her and a visiting lecturer to Tijuana for lunch.

By the time I was 17, I spoke Spanish fluently because I had fallen in with a clique of Mexican schoolmates. I had also traveled with them in Mexico and spent my 16th summer at one of their homes in Mexico City. I knew Tijuana well, including some of the best spots to eat where my friends had taken me.

The visiting lecturer was none other than the then recently knighted Sir Roy Strong, art historian and then director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He had come to San Diego to give a talk on campus organized by my mother. When she asked him what he’d like to do after his lecture, he said that he’d like to have lunch and go shopping in Tijuana.

I was the kid for the job.

After we had eaten lobster at a seaside restaurant in Rosarito in Baja California, my mother and her friend who had joined us excused themselves to use the restroom.

Alone at the table he told me that he was impressed with my language skills and my hungry quest to learn more about another culture.

“You should go to Italy and study Italian,” he declared before my mother and her friend returned to the table.

I had never met anyone like Sir Roy. And the meeting had a profound effect on me.

Four years later, I was on my junior year abroad in Padua and I never looked back.

Looking back on it now, it was as if Sir Roy was an image, an apparition sent to show me my path. It was one of the defining moments of my life and man, am I glad I listened to him.

Image via Sir Roy’s short-lived and long-abandoned Instagram.