Mr. Johnson was the kooky English teacher who taught my class how to juggle.

It was the year 2000 and he was a Renaissance man living in the year 3000 who would commute to the American International School through the smog-choked streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh riding a literal unicycle, bobbing and weaving between buses and baby-taxis holding a thermos and a stack of hardbacks because you don’t need hands to ride a unicycle.

The first day of senior year lit class, Mr. J sauntered in with a cardboard box full of tennis balls and proceeded to teach us the fundamentals of juggling. There were many whispered questions that day including: WTF, Is he serious, and Will this be on the test?

Mr. J explained that juggling, which requires extensive hand-eye coordination, increases grey and white matter and builds up the corpus callosum that bridges the two brain hemispheres. In other words it makes you smarter.

I blame him, along with my AP French teacher Eleanor Leyden (who I adore and who bought me mezcal cocktails in NYC earlier this year), for cursing my teenage heart with literary aspirations by saying something along the lines of, “You’re a pretty good writer.”

With no regard for my future happiness they conspired to put books and the tools to decode them into my mostly idle hands. They let me convince myself that I could master the craft of language, arguably the oldest metric of intelligence and status, and in turn convince the world I had both in spades. In other words, convince the world I was lovable.

And so between lit-crit essays and procrastinating my senior project, I began to write poetry about how bored I was and how hard it really is to be an 18-year-old white expat brat in south-east Asia nursing a broken heart. And the world can thank Mr. Johnson, Mrs. Leyden, and let’s not forget my AP English teacher Mrs. Spisso, for the élan of literary ambition that culminated in the short poetry collection you can see teased below, self-published at my dad’s expense and to the critical acclaim of my mother in a limited edition of 200 copies.

Graduating from my small, tropical pond at the American International School of Dhaka to study at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in the 5th arrondissement of Paris was an invaluable lesson in humility. La rentrée des classes in the fall of 2001 turned out to be a learning experience with many sharp edges.

I learned the American High-School Graduation diploma is not equivalent to the Baccalauréat.

I learned that certified translators charge by the page and they charge a lot.

I learned very quickly that the publishing industry was not, in fact, waiting for my arrival on the scene.

Over time, I learned all sorts of writing and juggling tricks including the best trick of all: giving up writing and juggling. I burnt out on writing (or trying to). I juggled so much I got tendonitis. This taught me you can quit things and then rediscover and reclaim them down the line before quitting them all over again because muscle memory runs so very deep and there are 34 muscles in the human hand.

I learned through the grapevine that Mr. Johnson had been battling cancer the whole time and had passed away not long after sending me that email. My memory of him was altered and the smile he wore as he taught us the 3-ball cascade became that of a man who had looked into the face of death and laughed. The narrative of Mr. J crystallised into mythology.

Expert as I will always be at leaving people behind, I tipped my hat to the old mentor from across an ocean and moved on. I hadn’t thought about him in quite some time until just a few weeks ago when I found his short 2002 email at the very bottom of my Gmail inbox. It was the last exchange we ever had.

Devoid of context, the words opened themselves and filled up with 20 years of meaning.

In a bittersweet twist of fate, while drafting this piece I learned that Mr. J had not in fact passed away in the early 2000s. Turns out I mourned and all but forgot a man who had been very much alive until only a few years ago when he finally lost that private battle with cancer.

Like I said, leaving people behind comes naturally to me. I never thought to check.

It’s hard to say if it was the diagnosis that had made him a unicycle-riding Dead Poet Society type of teacher or if he’d always been one, but that doesn’t really change anything. Good teachers truly are the unsung heroes of the world.

This experience drove home a couple of old lessons that (apparently) still bear repeating: always check your sources, and make sure to tell people how much they mean to you while you have the time.

So with that in mind: Ms. Leyden, Ms. Spisso, thank you for everything you ever taught me.

I’m not sure Mr. J ever knew to what extent he inspired me as an artist, a thinker, a writer, and more generally as a human being, especially given the fact that I never replied to that email. For what it’s worth, I translate, write, and edit text for a living these days, and I can juggle a variety of props now including clubs, poi, staffs, and devil sticks to name a few.

Not sure that means I’m all that smart, to be honest, but I’m a bit less concerned with appearing that way nowadays. In my 40s I’m starting to really notice the overlap between writing, juggling, and meditative practices, something about trance and flow states. Listening to that voice of mindful awareness rather than the monkey chatter that keeps me awake at night may in fact be the whole point of the game, le combat d’une vie.

Like a wise man once said to me, maybe the poet way or the sage meditative way can work out.

I’ll let you know when I get to Paradise.

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