A few of the teachers who saved my life

He was slim and handsome, with a pale angular face, his hair a little long and out of control so he was brushing it away from his forehead with his fingers a lot, and he'd pace back and forth in front of the class as he introduced us to the Romantic poets in my junior year of high school. He was intense but low-key, spontaneously saying I don't remember what, but it was captivating — the first male English teacher I ever had, certainly the most charismatic; though I was interested in girls, at some level it registered that he was sexy. I was smitten with him.

My family had season tickets to the Dodgers, and more than once I invited Mr. Quinlan, and maybe a couple of other friends, for a night at the ballpark. Would the authorities even let us do that now? Would the teachers Tom Quinlan and his friend Jesús Chavarría, who taught history, be accused of “grooming” us innocent teenagers? Ha! We were grooming them to share their coolness — young men in their 20s, unlike any other teachers we'd ever met.

Why am I telling you this? That was nearly 60 years ago. I saw Tom Quinlan one more time, about eight years later, when I was living in Malibu; he happened to be living nearby, and I paid him a visit, probably to brag that I'd published some poems in little magazines. And that was that.

Flash forward a half-century or so, to a few weeks ago when The New York Times published a letter of mine, about literary translation, and I received an email from a Thomas Quinlan asking me if I was the same person he knew when he was a high school teacher all those years ago in Beverly Hills. It was Mr. Quinlan! Tom to me now, but in some archetypal way he'll always be the 27-yearold cool Mr. Quinlan, even though he's 86 and living with his wife in northeast Florida after a widely traveled and diversely employed lifetime as an administrator at various educational institutions and director of nonprofits serving children and families.

It had been a while since I had thought of him and never expected to see or hear from him again, so to exchange messages as we have lately feels almost uncanny. As I write this I'm rediscovering our deep connection and am amazed —not least that he remembered me, who at 16 never thought I was or would ever be worth remembering.

And hearing from Tom Quinlan makes me think also of some of the other English teachers I had the good luck to be galvanized by: at UCLA the electrifying poet Jack Hirschman in his Introduction to Poetry; or back east at Bard the intellectually omnivorous novelist Robert Coover, who let me just hang out with him in his office; and in graduate school at UC Santa Cruz I had the extraordinary fortune of studying Ideas of the Nature of Poetry with the dazzlingly erudite poet Robert Duncan. Well, Coover was teaching “Don Quixote,” so not exactly English. And Duncan was brought to UCSC by Norman O. Brown to teach in the History of Consciousness program; he was way too wild-minded for the literature professors.

What I mean by English is the language. All these guys (yes, all guys, though Duncan was gay) were eloquent speakers of American English whose styles were all different but they all spoke precisely, spontaneously, associatively, brilliantly, thinking on the fly, and they must have been, without my knowing it, and without their knowing it, “mentors” of mine, which to me means someone from whom I learned by the power of their example.

The late reappearance in my world of Tom Quinlan is, to me, astonishing, as if destiny has delivered a rare gift. It makes me wish that Juan Padilla, my great Spanish teacher, were still alive.

... they must have been, without my knowing it, and without their knowing it, “mentors” of mine ...