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it all out myself. I used to tell people that I was an autodidact, then smile smugly when I could tell, by the look on their face, that I was so autodidactic that I had taught myself a word they didn’t even know. What a schmuck. I do understand that the greatest influences in my life have been and remain those folks who keep me connected to the world around me and concerned with the people in it.
    John Wooden, venerated coach of the UCLA men’s basketball team during its dynasty years, recently celebrated his ninety-ninth birthday. To mark the occasion, ESPN interviewed Bill Walton, the gangly, garrulous center on two of Wooden’s ten championship teams. Not really an interview, it was more of a soliloquy, with Walton launching into stanza after stanza of breathless praise for a man who had obviously influenced him in a profound and formative way. The stories and remembrances were peppered with Woodenisms that Walton and his fellow Bruins probably heard every day on the court during their college careers. “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” As well as: “It isn’t what you do, but how you do it.” And my personal favorite: “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.”
    But it was obvious that the coach’s relationship with these young men transcended basketball. More than a coach, to Bill Walton at least, John Wooden had become a mentor. And it must have been a complicated relationship; in Walton’s voice, it was easy to hear not only his obvious affection and regard for his maestro, but also an ache as well, an enigmatic sense of remorse and regret, vestiges of a situation, or situations, when the bond had been threatened. After all, the formative years of their relationship coincided with the escalation in Vietnam, and Walton’s youthful rebellion must have been an uneasy mix, at times, with Wooden’s old-school conservatism. Perhaps it would have been easier for Wooden to remain purely the coach: to motivate, organize, maybe even inspire, but not risk seeing his players as any more than the means to another winning season.
    Bill Walton’s tribute brought to mind the gratitude I feel toward a number of people in my own life who have taken the time to express a belief in me, teach me, encourage me, inspire me, or just steer my ass out of oncoming traffic. And there have been a few whose shepherding of me toward my better interests surely qualifies them as mentors.
    Ross Jones, my junior high drama teacher, awakened in me an understanding that a creative life could, indeed, be a productive life, and that it was perfectly acceptable to consider a career in acting. He was that rare authority figure who didn’t mind stirring things up a bit. When I think of Ross, I think of two words that he would say again and again. A sly grin would appear on his thin, bearded face, framed by a mop of hair radically long for a teacher, even in the seventies. He’d splay his hands out in front of him like a close-up magician revealing his palms and ask, rhetorically, “Why not?”—a textbook piece of mentoring. Mr. Jones awakened in me a penchant for questioning and an acceptance of possibility as infinite.
    Teachers and coaches, with exceptions like Ross and Coach Wooden, are distinct from mentors in that they have broader agendas, to adhere to the lesson plan or focus on the interests of the team, not the individual. They may develop a special interest in you, but they don’t choose you, nor you them. In the same way, I don’t include parents in my own definition of mentors, although parents are undoubtedly the principal influence in most of our lives. They brought us into the world and they may do everything in their power to get us through it safely, but in a way, that’s their job.
    On the subject of family, I do credit my mother’s mother, Nana, for the space I was given as a child to be a dreamer and to color outside the