About two months ago, we lost a great man. His name was Jay Criche, and he was a teacher.

He taught English for 30 years, 23 of them at Lake Forest High School. For most of that time, he was the head of the department, and he looked the part. He wore tweed sport coats most of the year, in weather cold or warm, and if I remember correctly, there were suede elbow patches on these sport coats. He wore small wire-framed glasses, a thick mustache, and his hair was dark, dusted with gray. He had a scholarly air because that's what he was, a scholar. His lessons, delivered from a seemingly ancient wooden podium, were Socratic in nature, the students peppered with questions, his expectations high, his mind open and wanting to be surprised.

I took his course when I was a junior, and the first book we read was "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." In those first few weeks, he showed us a caricature of James Joyce from the New York Review of Books. In it, Joyce's hands were rendered large, cupped and moving, as if paddling through water. Mr. Criche asked if anyone knew why the artist had depicted Joyce that way, and I raised my hand. "Is he swimming through a stream of consciousness?"

Mr. Criche cocked his head a bit, confirmed the answer, and a wave of validation swept over me. I hadn't known, until that moment, how badly I'd wanted his approval. I was going through some rough times at school and at home my face and back were covered in acne, my chest was concave, my last name sounded like food but in that class, I felt I had worth. After that, I took it upon myself to impress him. Though William Faulkner wasn't assigned reading, for weeks I brought "As I Lay Dying" to class, stacked neatly upon my other books, hoping he'd notice. (He didn't.)

He was kind to me, but I had no sense that he took particular notice of me. There were other, smarter kids in the class, and soon I fell back into my usual position of thinking I was just a little over average in most t...