This blog did not exist two years ago when my friend Alvin Klein, the longtime regional theater critic for The New York Times, died unexpectedly. I wrote this essay partly as therapy, partly as eulogy in the event that no one else at his memorial specifically addressed his years with The Times. That role was cast elsewhere, and in any case I would not have made it through. But this yahrzeit weekend seems a fitting time.

Heidi once introduced me to someone – I think it was Bonnie J. Monte of New Jersey Shakespeare – as Alvin’s boss. I nearly fell on the floor laughing. As if Alvin ever had a boss.

Everyone starting a career in journalism is given certain pieces of advice – for example, “Never agree to write a regular column” and “Never show your story to a source before it’s published.” Today I’m adding a new one: Never give the freelancers your home phone number.

Because if you do, they’ll use it. First they’ll call on Saturdays with questions about assignments. Soon they’ll start inviting you to use their second ticket, and then you’ll find yourself having long late-night talks about, say, how “The Iceman Cometh” exposed you personally as the world’s biggest fraud. And then you’ll find yourself attending their birthday parties, and their children’s weddings in far-off places, and their wives’ memorials. And before you know it, it’s today.

In 1995, I was leading a perfectly normal life when Chuck Strum stopped by my desk at The Times and asked, “Did you get my message?” I had not. Chuck had recently taken over the Sunday New Jersey section and wondered if I might be interested in becoming its arts editor. I didn’t know it then, but this was one of those moments that can change a life.

By summer I had started the job. It’s not unusual for editors to work with writers, especially freelancers, for years without ever meeting them face to face. (In this e-mail era, I freelance for a newspaper in Abu Dhabi where I’ve never even spoken to any editor.) In the first few weeks I introduced myself to Alvin and edited several reviews with him, all by phone. Somewhere along the line, he said, “What’s your home number?” I hesitated; I had been burned before. But for some reason, I gave it to him.

One day that summer, Chuck invited another editor and me to lunch in Jersey City with our bureau reporters there. I still knew next to nothing about New Jersey. I sat at the table listening to nonstop insider talk about Union County politics, wondering, “What on earth am I doing here?” Back at the office, I had no sooner sat down at my desk than a tall, long-limbed, shortwaisted man came up to me and said, “Hello! I’m Alvin Klein” – making a rare daytime appearance in the office to pick up his mail. (He much preferred late-night visits, after the theater.) We moved to a quieter area and talked, and talked, and talked. I know we talked about musicals; I think we talked about “A Little Night Music,” my all-time favorite, and that conversation was still going on in January [when Natasha Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave starred in a one-night benefit for the Roundabout]. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I thought: “Oh, I get it – those people talk about Jersey politics the way we talk about musicals.” Suddenly there was a we. Having Alvin to talk to was one of the things that kept me going on that job for nearly five years, and the conversation didn’t end when I left.

Soon I needed to assign a feature on the New Jersey State Opera. Our classical music writer was at Tanglewood for the summer, so I took a chance and called Alvin: “Do you happen to know anything about opera?” I soon learned there wasn’t much about opera he didn’t know.

Over the years, I came to realize what an incredible resource he was. I could call him to ask the most arcane question from the history of theater in America, and he could tell me the answer off the top of his head. When I moved back to the daily culture desk, he became my mole in the theater world. Alvin knew and cared more about theater than anyone else I’ve ever known — and I’ve edited four chief theater critics of The New York Times.

He could be absurdly prolific. One week he wrote seven pieces for the four regional sections; that’s more than some Times staff writers have been known to produce in a year. I remember one Thursday, our deadline day, when the page designer complained that he hadn’t filed at 4:30 for a 6 o’clock close, and I explained that he hadn’t been given the assignment until 1:30. Then, when I needed him to answer questions, he would disappear. It was years before I learned he was usually taking a nap.

Some of his pieces were incredibly beautiful – for example, his advance on “Rags” at Paper Mill Playhouse, a musical about Jewish immigrants to New York at the turn of the century that so moved him that he lent his father’s eyeglasses to the costumers for the run of the show. I tore up the arts pages on deadline to make it that week’s lede. Around the same time, he wrote an advance on “Do I Hear a Waltz?” at George Street that brilliantly summarized that rarely produced show from the mid-1960s, the only collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim, as the nexus between musical theater’s past and its future. One of our most heated arguments – and I was no more immune to those than anyone else – came when Athol Fugard had a world premiere at the McCarter, and the eminent Vincent Canby, then the chief theater critic, asked us not to review it so he could have the first word. Alvin fought me for a week on that one. Then he switched gears and went to Princeton anyway, attended a class Fugard was giving and brought all his expertise as a teacher to bear in writing one of the finest features of his career.

I’ve said more than once that when Alvin’s time came, I wanted to have the contents of his brain downloaded directly into mine – not the personal things, but everything he knew about theater and opera and New York. In the event, I missed my chance. And I would have liked to have memories of the original “Death of a Salesman,” and Alfred Drake in “Kiss Me Kate,” and Gertrude Lawrence in “The King and I,” and, of course, all the Sondheim – especially “Anyone Can Whistle,” the original production.

But I’m lucky enough to have my own memories of sitting next to Alvin in the theater, and that was always an education – sometimes sublime, sometimes ridiculous. He took me to the musical “Footloose” on Broadway – mainly because Janet was smart enough not to go  — and I never let him live it down. Once we went to the Public Theater to see Cherry Jones in a play so awful I can’t even remember the title, but we marveled at how such a fine actress could make us believe that she believed in every word. A couple of years ago, I took him to see the National Theater of Greece in “Electra” at City Center. At first he didn’t want to go. “Come on!” I said. “What could be more fun on a Friday night than watching a bunch of Greeks kill each other?” He went along. When I asked him if he was enjoying it, he answered, “I stayed awake, didn’t I?” Yes, we had a good time.

I don’t think I ever saw him look better, or happier, than the night I sat next to him and Janet at the New York Philharmonic’s concert version of “Sweeney Todd.” And I remember how we made peace after another major argument, just about a year after Janet died, by going to see “Falsettos” at Barrington Stage. We both cried through most of the second act, so you know it was good.

For a long time I’ve thought that, when today came, I would want to tell that story of my first meeting with Alvin. The trouble was, there’s a passage from Shakespeare that I happen to think is the most beautiful speech in the English language. I wouldn’t mind if it were the last words I heard on earth. For some time now, I’ve realized that the voice I’d like to hear reading it was Alvin’s, and I couldn’t figure out how we would manage both. Maybe when my turn comes, I’ll hear his voice in my head:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

This essay is the product of an “assignment” given to me by Susan Shapiro in her recent workshop on how to sell a first book. As a way into a project that was just starting to take shape in my mind — a memoir of my experiences as both student and teacher of language — Sue assigned me a 900-to-1,500-word essay on how I became an ESL teacher. The essay is below; the book, “Traveling in Tongues,” is now well under way.

It’s finally happened. I’ve turned into the old-lady English teacher I was always meant to be.

Like the man who had that appointment in Samarra, running away from Death only to find it waiting at the end of his journey, I have long had an appointment  — not with Death (though eventually that, too, or so I hear), but with teaching. A 35-year career in journalism? That was just a detour.

I was the youngest of four children born over a 20-year span to a mother with a high-school education and a father pulled out of school after eighth grade to work in a shoe factory. Married at the height of the Depression, they spent their early lives scrounging for a living in rural Pennsylvania. But our  family was upwardly mobile in its own modest way. My three brothers all went to college and all became high school teachers. It was good, solid, steady employment when they graduated in the 1950s and ‘60s, and it paid well, compared to anything my parents ever made. As a child who did well in school, I knew early on that I wanted to go to college someday. And what we knew was this: you go to college, you come out a teacher.

Besides, playing school was always my favorite “let’s pretend.” (Producing my own one-sheet newspaper on a toy typewriter came in second.) In the basement of the neighbor kids down the road, somehow it was always the first day of school, and I was always the teacher. We had a decades-old green-and-red textbook titled “Human Use Geography.” I would start with the first chapter, about the Kirghiz and the Kazakhs, nomadic peoples who swept across the steppes of Central Asia on horseback. I had no idea what steppes might be, or even how the word was pronounced — one syllable? Two? But I was the one with the book in my hand, and thus I learned the first principle in methods of teaching: all you really have to do is stay one step ahead of the class.

School was a place where I could succeed, where I could win favor with adults  that was hard to get from parents who worked too much for too little, who rarely showed  affection and, in my father’s case, grew increasingly authoritarian. I adored my elementary-school teachers and often sat in class observing  their methods, thinking I would be one of them someday. In first-grade reading class (a skill I had mastered by age three and a half), we were taught to “frame” words with our fingers, to understand one at a time before stringing them together into sentences. “That’s an interesting way to teach reading,” I remember thinking. I was 6 at the time.

By junior high, I was starting to realize I didn’t want to spend my life trapped in a classroom with 30 kids. Not cute, not popular, just smart – the kiss of death for a teenager in small-town America – I looked for validation not from my peers (many of whom came to me for help with their homework) but from my teachers. I received it mainly from those in whose subjects I showed promise: literature, foreign languages, writing. “Great!” my parents must have thought. “She can go to East Stroudsburg State, and then she’ll come home and be an English teacher.” I knew differently. It was clear I’d have to earn my own living as soon as I graduated from college, and my business would be words. But I was already chafing at small-town life. Which old-lady English teacher would I become? Miss Bryan, who humiliated me in ninth grade for using “like” as a conjunction when “as if” was correct? Miss Sloat, the white-haired, straight-backed retiree who was much respected but intimdated me? Or Miss Paul, the eccentric who talked to her plants?

So I rebelled and fled to college – not East Stroudsburg — intending to be a writer. But I found the English professors pompous and discouraging. Having already started to work on the college newspaper, I declared a major in journalism instead. It was still the word business, and besides, it would give me job skills to tide me over until I could support myself as a writer. Surely that wouldn’t take more than a year or two.

Thus began the detour, not only from teaching but, as it turned out, writing. Early on, I realized I didn’t have the right temperament to be a reporter – which I assumed was synonymous with writer – but my ease with language brought me jobs as an editor. I worked my way up in classic fashion, from low-level  jobs to more responsible ones, from small papers to larger ones. My journey took me as far as The New York Times, a workplace by turns rigorous and rewarding, exhilarating and exasperating. In a hard-driving, politically charged environment where every day survived is an achievement, I served honorably for 20 years.

An editor works at a desk in the newsroom, not out in the wider world like a reporter. Yet my own world gradually grew ever larger, for I had developed a serious and expensive addiction: travel. From a two-month study-abroad in England at 20, I brought home a firm resolution — “I want to see the world”  — and over the years I had, one vacation after another, on multiple trips to Europe, three to Australia, 10 weeks circling the Pacific, cruises and sailing trips almost beyond number.

As time passed, I realized two things: sooner or later, The Times would come to an end for me, and if I wanted to spend my golden years traveling, I’d better find a way to finance it. The solution I came up with was teaching – not journalism, since a multimedia world had largely lost interest in the print skills I could impart, but English as a second language or, in current parlance, to speakers of other languages. In late 2005 I enrolled in the English language teaching program at New School University in New York. Two years later I had not only earned my certificate but also taught abroad, in the New School’s teaching practicum at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw, Poland.  “Why are you doing this, when you have such a great career?” other practicum teachers would ask me. “It’s for someday,” I’d answer.

 “Someday” arrived within the year, in the form of the Great Newspaper Meltdown of ’08. The Times, looking to reduce staff by 100, had a buyout offer on the table, and I took it. Three days later,  just as I was reaching the “Oh, my God, what have I done?” stage, two invitations landed in my e-mail: one to teach that summer  in the American Language Program at Columbia University, and one to go back to Wroclaw. I jumped at both.

Standing at the head of a class takes me back to the neighbor kids’ basement. As a native speaker with professional training (much in demand abroad), I’m more than one step ahead of the already well-educated adults who are thirsting to improve their English. I enjoy breaking down lessons into digestible chunks and seeking out just the right readings or media clips to illustrate them. (I can’t wait for the next time I teach the tongue-twister “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck . . . ” as a pronunciation exercise, now that I have the Geico commercial that shows woodchucks actually chucking  wood.)  I also enjoy what I call “the kindergarten aspects of the job” – cutting and pasting materials, decorating a classroom with visual aids, devising scenarios that will help people learn. Most of all, I enjoy the students, who are so grateful for any vocabulary word, correct pronunciation or snippet of American culture that I can teach them.

After four trips to Wroclaw I’ve become a regular, and last spring my world widened yet again when I taught oral English in China for a full semester at Hunan University of Science and Technology. My repertory has broadened as well, from language into content: a course I was unexpectedly assigned to teach in China, “Cultures of English-Speaking Nations,” traveled well to Poland last October. So do the  teaching skills I learned in my ESL training when I make occasional visits to journalism classes as a guest speaker.

My hair is graying, I’m a big fan of Celebrex and I have no firm grasp of why the Kardashians are famous.  But I’m a stickler for proper English. (No text-message baby talk, please!) In short, I’ve turned into that old-lady English teacher, on my own terms. It’s not how my mother or even my most visionary teacher would have pictured me — leading a class on the other side of the world, almost within sight of rice paddies where peasants wade barefoot behind water buffalo. I haven’t seen the steppes of Central Asia yet, but in a world where “Human Use Geography” is available on Amazon.com, you never know what “someday” may bring.