I had a mentor once.

His name was John Simons, and he was an English professor at Colorado College. But to many of us mentees, he was better known as the Emperor of Ice Cream.

Our first meeting did not go well. I was in his freshman Shakespeare class, and when taking roll, he came to my name and just stopped.

“Good lord,” he said to the whole class. “This is the most bizarre sequence of consonants and vowels I’ve ever seen in my life. Vinny Blahhhahh. Where are you, Vinny? You a hit man from Jersey or what?”

I picked him as my adviser a few days later.

John, a great lover of Westerns, liked to run his classes the way John Wayne might. “Well, pilgrims, why don’t y’all round up your good selves in a circle so we can talk about the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock? Come on now, we’re burning daylight.”

Later on in our long acquaintance, he’d invite me along for hours-long, epic lunches of green chile and tortillas at Roger’s Frontier Bar in Old Colorado City. There, I got to join a passel of professors at a roundtable in the bay window, where we drank our beer from glass chalices and talked of books, movies, philosophy, politics, love lives and fathers and sons. I think I learned more at Roger’s than I did in four years of college.

***

Teaching was always John’s first love, but for many of us he was mentor above all.

What is a mentor? I’m sure John would point out that the word comes from literature, from the “Odyssey,” which John made me read one summer in preparation for his class on the “Odyssey” and “Ulysses” (more on that in a minute). The character Mentor is entrusted with guiding Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, while Odysseus is away for 10 long years. A mentor takes the handoff from mom and dad and becomes a long-term marshaller of your development and character, more interested in your becoming than your learning.

The best mentors like John can see around the corners of your future life better than you can, and somehow gently guide you to the best version of yourself.

Speaking of “Ulysses,” John’s class on James Joyce’s 900-page stream-of-consciousness doorstopper was “an enthralling, breathtaking experience,” as one of his former students, Laurie Laker, recalled in an article for a campus magazine.

On the first day of the Ulysses class, Simons entered the room like a colossus with his well-worn copy of the book, “Post-It notes protruding from every possible page,” and then he proceeded to spend three hours on the first page alone.

Laurie recalled a line from “Ulysses” which perhaps describes better than anything what John taught us all:

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”

Said Laurie: Thank you, John, for helping so many of us meet ourselves.

***

He helped us do so because John’s mentoring was not just academic, but emotional as well. Mentoring us in how to be well-rounded, empathetic and, above all, curious. I found to my surprise that this professor of mine cared not just about my brain, but equally about my heart and soul, and quietly demanded that I leave college with a good heart, a heart commensurate with my brain, or maybe superior to it.

I worry, in our modern offices with our hybrid schedules where we only come in a few days a week and we all communicate via screens and chats and emails, that the person-to-person piece of true mentoring that John practiced so well — the friendship of it — has been lost.

***

Maybe the best thing John ever did was to share with me some of his own failures and flaws, the challenges that gray-skyed his days at times. I’m not sure why he did that. He never put himself forth as a granite monolith of an intellectual giant, although there was no question to all of us who took his classes that he was. For many of us boys he mentored into men, many of us who came from an era of emotional crouching, when we weren’t really supposed to show weakness or even much emotion, John insisted on a full range, anger and joy and confession and redemption.

He sent a paper back to me one time, on “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” pointing out that not once did I mention love in the paper. “THAT’S ALL THIS PLAY IS F-ING ABOUT!” John wrote in brilliant red. “In my class, you’re going to have to talk out loud about love!”

It took a while, but John probably taught me how to be human. Not perfect, or always right, or even good, but how to be flawed and contradictory and emotional and sometimes utterly befuddled without giving up. To be satisfied with being human.

What a gift to give someone, the permission to be comfortable in your own skin. The more human and flawed I let myself be, the more our friendship deepened. He never said such a thing to me, “It’s OK to be human,” rather, he taught it just by showing me great humanity himself. Which, of course, is the first rule of all good writing and teaching: Show, don’t tell.

***

“So much depends upon

A red wheel barrow

Glazed with rainwater

beside the white chickens.”

He once taught me that, too, which is a William Carlos Williams poem. That’s it, the whole damn poem.

John had to hammer me over the head with it for years before I truly understood what it meant.

Your day-after-day, your relationships close at hand, the small things, they are the most important, John was saying.

“Say it: No ideas but in things.”

That was a line from another Williams poem John taught.

Don’t let yourself be too abstract, too head-in-the-clouds. The big things – life, work, survival, beauty – all rely on small, overlooked things. Put your heart into the small things and the big things will come. What is real matters more than what seems proper or refined.

John himself was a master at this. Finding just the right moments, things and words day after day to infuse with great meaning so as to live a life that was vital and real, never fake, never false, never too far removed from love and green chile and prayer.

Because of that, to me, he will always be the Emperor of Ice Cream, even after his too-soon passing a couple of weeks ago now. He will always be the man who knew that in the face of mortality, simple, earthly pleasures like ice cream and friendship are the only true “emperors.”

No reason not to finish with a verse from that Wallace Stevens’ Emperor poem, then, about a joyous, celebratory wake, which is exactly what happened at John’s house a couple weeks ago when those old professors and I and John’s many friends and his wife, Frear, and daughter, Daisy, and son, Jack, and neighbors and many other loved ones gathered around his living room bed to reminisce and say goodbye. When John woke up to join in our joy as we recounted stories and jokes and old sports scores, he grabbed my hand and held it tight the whole damn day.

“Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”