Beneath the bones of my skull, imbedded forever, lie all the fingerprints of those who shaped me. But the deepest impressions of all were made by J. Michael Thompson.

I was three years old when my father taught me James Weldon Johnson’s greatest poem, The Creation. We memorized it together. But one line was my favorite above all others: “He hurled the world!” And I would yell it out whenever we recited it.

My father taught high school English in my early years. Above the chalkboard in his classroom was a strip of cork, two feet high. Across the length of it he tacked black-and-white pictures, artists’ rendering of the faces of the greatest English writers of all time. Dead center, precisely between Shakespeare with his mustache and Milton in his blindness, he affixed one last image: a matching-size, full-color photograph, of me.

Every year, “Mister T” took his high school seniors on a five-hour bus ride into Stratford, Canada, for the annual Shakespearean Festival, where magnificent actors performed on the finest of stages. Bouncing along in the bus, right beside all those soon-to-be high school graduates, was one five-year-old boy: the image from the photograph come to life.

My father assigned to me the best soliloquys of Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, King Lear. So I memorized them. He had scores of his favorite quotations; if he started any one of them, I was expected to finish it. “Always read,” he said. “Never leave home without a book.” And I never did. 

In the afternoons, after teaching school, my father would recover from his labors with a nap. He’d call me into his bedroom for my one job: to read aloud to him from the newspaper, with perfect inflection, until he was fast asleep. “Unh-unh,” he would say, if ever I mistakenly tried to escape before he had fully drifted off. Then I would read some more.

Now his final sleep has come, and I’m still reading. He talked about writing his books, but then left the task to me. Perhaps he liked people too much; he could not bury himself in the writer’s solitude. But I enjoy the stillness. I can finish the work for both of us. 

At his rolltop desk he penned thousands of missives by hand with a teacher’s pen and ink, sharp scrawl on a blue paper. He liked to be different. That desk is now mine.

He’s close by when I write. Whenever my sentences bead with sweat and stumble in exhaustion, I hear him from beneath the covers. “Unh-unh,” he says. “Try it again. You can do better than that.”

He was a true teacher.  He could be severe, impossible to fully satisfy. His eye was heavy upon me, often more than I could bear. But at the end of all our reading and writing exercises he would give curt praise if improvement could be found. “Better,” he would say. “Much better.”