The Teacher Who Lit My Fire

A belated thank you to the man who inspired me to write

We all have a teacher who shaped our life. Mine was a Shakespearean scholar.

He was a tall, genial man with a wry, sheepish grin and rosy cheeks, neatly trimmed beard and a distinguished bearing and could have easily stepped onto the stage as King Lear in a Shakespearean production.

He favored wearing a gray suit jacket, slacks, a colored dress shirt, no tie, and his collar open a few buttons. His name was Dr. Robert Reid III, and at the time I was a student in his Introduction to Literature course. He was an English Professor at California State University, Northridge.

He brought a sense of liveliness to reading literature and made each character feel like they were a living, breathing human being going through the same struggles as people. The characters in poems and short stories were brothers, sisters, comrades in the human race.

Dr. Reid made me think about every poem or short story, and his comments caused me to think about my life while my high school English teachers simply assigned stories to read and questions to answer at the end of each story.

From the details of any poem, Dr. Reid could talk about sex, love, faith, happiness, death or the loneliness of a rich man who put a bullet in his head. He talked philosophically about grabbing whatever happiness comes your way, as if it was my responsibility to pursue my own happiness in my lifetime.

He read Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy on the betrayal of his uncle, who killed his father to become King of Denmark and married his mom. It felt as if Hamlet were in the room with a knife in hand, contemplating murder or suicide ( I can’t remember which one) and not a literary figure over five hundred years old from a William Shakespeare play.

His influence on me as a writer

I was a journalism major. I’d written for my high school newspaper and had been an intern for the Los Angeles Times Sports Department during my freshmen year of college. Journalism piqued my curiosity about people, and Dr. Reid’s course took my interest to a much deeper level.

In Dr. Reid’s class, we were required to write poems and a short story. I knew journalism, but I had no experience in creative writing, so I turned in a poem and short story written by a friend.

It wasn’t that I wanted to turn in work that wasn’t my own. I just wasn’t capable of writing creatively yet, though Dr. Reid was opening my eyes to the to the possibilities, and it wasn’t long before I began to write my own poetry.

Growing up, I’d been the kid who always did his homework and played sports with the changing of the seasons. Even when my routine was disrupted by often moving to a new city, my response was usually the same: Not much.

Emotionally I was like a piece of tilapia in the freezer. I needed to be thawed. I lived my life mostly disconnected from my emotions, and I needed to find a way to discover myself, and Dr. Reid showed me the way through literature.

Switched Majors

I switched my major to English after taking Dr. Reid’s class. I found myself looking at life differently. It wasn’t that I had found all of life’s answers in Dr. Reid’s class; no, it was the opposite. I was awakened to life’s questions, and my mind was opened to examining my life and the world around me.

I became a voracious reader and followed Dr. Reid’s example to think about the struggles of each character as if they were fellow human beings. In my senior year in college, I decided to become a taxi driver to meet and write a book about all the strange, weird people in Los Angeles. (That desire ended when I crashed the taxi. Thankfully, I was okay and had no passengers.)

What I gained the most from Dr. Reid’s class was learning to become myself. I am amazed at how much his class shaped who I am today. I teach in a similar fashion to him, and I am grateful to Dr. Reid for demonstrating to me how to make connections to my life through characters in poems and stories.

It has been twenty-two years since I took his class, yet I can still picture his wry grin and rosy cheeks that reddened when he chuckled. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I have since come to appreciate that I was not just studying literature with Dr. Reid, but I was gaining an understanding on how to live.

Teachers sometimes change lives and in miraculous ways. This to me is the ability of all great teachers, regardless of the grade level or subject they teach. They leave a lasting impact on your life, even long after their last class is over, in a way that enriches your life in some way you most often fail to recognize.

Thank you, Dr. Reid, for inspiring my love of literature and writing.

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