There was a man who worked at a local CVS who had an amazing smile and a laugh to go with it.

When I say amazing, I mean the kind of amazing people talk about when they talk about meeting the Dalai Lama. I mean that when you handed him your deodorant and your toothpaste and let him scan your CVS card and hand you a two-foot-long receipt, you couldn’t believe that the person on the other end of that transaction could be so blasted happy about it. There was something about him that lit up that whole dreary place.

You don’t expect to make a connection in a place as corporate and bland as a CVS. We have a collective nostalgia for a Main Street Past, where everyday transactions were attached to real characters: The counter boy at the soda shop, the old pharmacist, the saucy waitress at the diner. We may get this craving from Jimmy Stewart movies, rather than our own pasts, but it’s no less potent a longing.

The closest we come these days is the Starbucks barista who knows that we take a Caffe Latte with skim milk and an extra shot.

So when one of my 1,105 acquaintances on Facebook mentioned the other night that her “favorite CVS employee Jack Wilson died on Friday,” I knew who she meant immediately — even though I’d never bother to learned his name.

She hadn’t either. Neither of us knew it until a sign appeared in the store, with his obit pasted on it, and information about his memorial written in marker.

I certainly had the opportunity to ask his name, to share a few words, to learn something about Jack Wilson. I remember, several years ago, thinking about writing a story about him — that’s more my style than casual banter—but I didn’t do that either. It would have been awkward. It’s easy to interview someone who makes puppets or writes an influential column for The New York Times. It’s harder to go up to someone and say, “I want to write a profile about your amazing smile.” And so I didn’t.

Arianna Huffington writes movingly, and powerfully, about eulogies in her new book, “Thrive.” That’s where we celebrate people’s smiles, or how they loved their cats, or (as I hope my children will point out when the time comes) how they had a really embarrassing laugh, which could be heard even from the depths of center field and always, always from the stage at Ridgewood Avenue School.

So, without any standing whatsoever, I offer this eulogy of Jack Wilson: He didn’t know me from Adam either, but he always greeted me like I was just the person he was hoping would walk into the store. I would wait in a 20-minute line rather than use self-checkout if he was at the cash register. He may not have amassed wealth or power, but using Arianna’s third metric — the one that incorporates “well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving”—he was a king.

I saw the Dalai Lama in person at an event at NJPAC in 2011. He was okay. But he was no Jack Wilson.