I left middle school for high school and never ran into a good writing teacher again until my second year in college—and maybe I’ll write about David Huddle next week. But many years later, many many in fact, after I graduated from Bennington College, enlisted in the Peace Corps, did my stint in yeshiva, in my father’s Kay-Bee business, after I was already married, had a couple of kids, and moved to Israel, I was lucky enough to get my first novel published—-and how can you call getting published anything but some name of Providence?—by Walker Company, now a division of Random House. And when that summer following the publication, my parents threw a signing party at the local book store in Lenox, Massachusetts, I looked up Mr. Benson’s number in the Pittsfield phone book. I called him up and invited him to the party. He showed up in golfing cap and clothes, Scottish-looking, like he’d just strode in from the links at St. Andrews. He was trimmer than I remembered him, with a cherubic pink on his cheeks. I autographed a copy of A Good, Protected Life and showed him in the Acknowledgments where I mentioned his name. He shook my hand enthusiastically as I said thanks for the great teaching those many years ago. And I heard from my mother via a friend of hers who was a guidance counselor at the middle school and witnessed this, that Mr. Benson took the book to the teacher’s room and held it up to everyone and said, “Sometimes it’s worth it.”