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In April 1989, when I was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Minnesota, I took a telephone call from a Carleton College political science professor who said he wanted to run for the U.S. Senate.

His name was Paul Wellstone, he said, and he wanted to challenge Republican incumbent Rudy Boschwitz, a self-made plywood millionaire who sold root beer-flavored milk at the State Fair. The professor, who had a loud and exceedingly buoyant voice, said he wanted to meet at the state Capitol in St. Paul and talk while walking the grounds there, because he had a really hard time sitting still. He sounded nice enough, so I told my editor I wanted to do a story for the college newspaper.

My editor, a permanently worried-looking junior named John, agreed, but only after he gave me some background. This professor, said Worried John, was not exactly a threat to the flavored milk guy. He was known in political circles only half-jokingly as a socialist. He had no money, no relationships with local Democratic power brokers, no willingness to play the comfortable world of the political center. And he was, God help him, an indefatigable optimist.

“The guy doesn’t have a chance,” muttered Worried John.

The next day, I met the professor in the parking lot of the Capitol. He was a tiny, wiry man with curly-crazy brown hair that was clearly thinning, eyes that glinted, and a goofy smile.

“The Greek girl from North Dakota,” he said. That’s what I had told him about myself over the phone.

And so for the next two hours, I interviewed him as we power-walked around the pretty lawns. He told me he was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, a hopeless talkaholic and a proud liberal who got his degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He talked about his issues — improving public education, strengthening family farmers, helping the poor — while he waved at employees leaving the Capitol, calling many of them by name. He spoke in rhyme and in allegories, quickly and forcefully, nearly frenetic with energy. And at the end of the interview, he hugged me.

“I know I’m not supposed to hug reporters, but I can’t help it,” he said, and I remember him giggling. “I hug everyone.” Then he disappeared into the parking lot, the happiest man in St. Paul.

A few months later, he became the Democrats’ nominee, blazing through the state in a green bus. He went on to become the only challenger to unseat a U.S. Senate incumbent in 1990.

My father, who passed away a month before I met Paul Wellstone, once told me that idealists usually die young, at least metaphorically. They face social ridicule, political confines and personal sacrifices, and often they wear out, tired of isolation, disappointments and the glacial pace of change. Changing society’s calibration becomes as hopeless as trying to smash through the metal bars of a prison cell with your own head, as the novelist Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote.

People said Paul Wellstone had already started wearing out as an idealist before his death last month in a plane crash in rural Minnesota, an accident that also took the lives of his wife, daughter, three aides and two pilots. It’s true that the professor, who was 58, had become somewhat of a pragmatist, compromising and forging alliances with ideological opposites to pass legislation he believed was meaningful. Some say he realized he had to work in the system to get things done. Others argued that his softening was proof that he had become just another career politician.

Wellstone voted against using force against Saddam Hussein in Iraq under both Bush presidencies. But he also worked closely with Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Pete Domenici of New Mexico, two deeply conservative Republicans, to pass legislation.

So who was he? And whom did he become? And now that he is gone, whom will he remain?

In the days after his death, I scanned the online message board memorials to Wellstone, reading the impromptu stories. And in nearly every anecdote, I noticed that people who knew or just knew of Wellstone defined him by his idealism and sweet, infectious energy.

One woman revealed that her mother voted for the guy because she liked the way he jumped up and down to get his point across — like a real person. A waitress in a St. Paul restaurant frequented by politicians told a friend that Wellstone was the only one who ever remembered her name. And a Minneapolis woman who attended the Minnesota Democratic Convention in 1984 recalled how Wellstone woke up delegates at 2 a.m. after late-night balloting had lulled them to sleep: He took out a microphone, placed it in a metal garbage can and poured in a can of BB gun pellets to illustrate with aural fury the sound of a nuclear war. After the delegates woke up, he gave “one of those great Wellstone speeches“ about his opposition to the arms race.

“The beauty of Paul was that when he was done, you didn’t feel depressed, you felt like fighting, and that all the battles were worth fighting no matter how overwhelming the odds,” she wrote.

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I didn’t see Professor Wellstone much after he became Sen. Wellstone. During the campaign, he had written me a few short letters, scribbled on yellow legal pad paper and mailed to me at the Minnesota Daily. After he got to Washington, he dived into his new job. He made what the politicians call a few rookie mistakes — angering President Bush (the elder) with his antiwar fervor or declaring an ideological duel with Helms (whom he later befriended). Meanwhile, I finished college, moved to Greece, then returned to the United States to resume my career as an American journalist.

In 1995, I took an internship at the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Washington bureau, where I covered the state’s congressional delegation with three of the newspaper’s senior reporters. By then, Wellstone was five years into his first six-year term and thinking about his re-election bid, which would apparently be a rematch with the flavored milk guy.

I saw Wellstone after a committee meeting in one of the Senate hearing rooms and set out to interview him. It had been a long time, but he remembered me.

“The Greek girl from North Dakota?” he asked. He had the same glinty eyes and crazy hair, the same buoyant voice.

He hugged me. This time, I hugged him back.

At the end of my internship, my mother visited me in Washington. She spent much of the trip in the Senate chambers, marveling over Bob Dole’s majestic posture (“The TV does nothing for him,̶q; she noted) and fretting over Ted Kennedy’s too-small suit (“I need to fix that,̶q; she said, because she is a tailor). One day, she came with me when I had to cover an education rally on Capitol Hill, organized by Wellstone, Kennedy and Claiborne Pell. Wellstone was the keynote speaker.

My mother, a public television junkie, loved the rally, seeing it as a piece of news unwinding in mercurial, dynamic real time. After Wellstone finished his speech, he spotted me and walked over to talk. When my mother saw him approaching, she quietly backed away. I tried to get her to stay, so she could meet him.

“He’s an important person,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “I don’t know what to say!”

He noticed her hesitation and faced her.

“This is my mother, Georgia,” I said.

She nervously held out her hand. “It’s an honor to meet you, Senator Wellstone,̶q; she said. Her accented voice cracked. Her eyes started to water.

I looked at the senator and noticed his eyes were watering, too. Something about my mother’s shyness, her insistence that he should eclipse her because he was a politician, clearly bothered him.

“No, Mrs. Kakissis,̶q; he said, as he shook my mother’s hand furiously. “It’s an honor to meet you.̶q;

And, of course, he hugged her. As they embraced, I watched silently — slightly embarrassed and utterly, deeply moved.

My mother never forgot this meeting with the senator. She told her friends at work. She told our relatives in Greece.

He didn’t forget her either. Before I left Washington for graduate school, he and I power-walked around Capitol Hill for a last interview.

“Don’t forget to say hello to Georgia,̶q; he said, just before saying goodbye. “Don’t forget, OK?̶q;

And then he sped away into the chilly December wind, the last time I saw him, smiling like he was still the happiest man in the city.