Memories of George Dunlap bless me and haunt me to this day. He was the most jovial, unpretentious, and singularly kind teacher I ever knew.
As a boy of 13, the son of an Army Lieutenant Colonel, I attended a somewhat snobbish, all boy, southern boarding school. Quite luckily, Mr. Dunlap was my very first English teacher and table master. When I showed up at the place, I noted immediately that my wardrobe was a good bit smaller, and my weekly allowance was a good bit less, than most of the other boys. Acutely aware of my relative poverty, I felt, quite frankly, a bit inadequate amongst the largesse.
Back in those days we convened three times a day for meals at a family-style table. The new boys, “rats” we were called, sat in the middle of very long table which could accommodate 16 chairs. At each opposite end of the long table, a school master presided. His family would cluster around him, followed by upperclassmen in descending order down to the four lowly rats in the middle. Rats sat two-by-two across, with each pair of rats devoted to serve and pour water, tea or milk to the folks at their respective ends of the table. The rats also were required to scrape and stack the plates after the meal and memorize the desert (“the boss”) and menu. The consequence of a memory lapse meant forfeiture of your boss to an upperclassman, or as they were known to us, “old boys”. After the meals, the most colorful and free characters in school, the student waiters, would retrieve the plates and serving dishes from the rats. The waiters wore special crimson jackets, and held the high privilege of private dining in the kitchen, away from the watchful and strict eyes of the masters. They were not given complete immunity however, as the waiters rotated in two shifts, thus requiring every boy in school to spend some time at a family table on a periodic basis.
This school was as wild and savage a place as the Amazon, and often quite lonely, but George Dunlap had so much empathy in him that he knew no strangers. He actively sought out the loneliest of boys, always giving a healing word of hope, kindness and encouragement when and where the words were needed the most.
His nickname was Dewey and he had a wife and a boy and a girl and he drove an old yellow checker sedan as his means of off-campus transportation. Every boy who ever sat at Dewey’s table was immediately adopted, and made to feel at home. Meals with Dewey were a feast, because the man knew how to love.
We had a rather byzantine set of rules, as all boarding schools do. Once snared in the rules, a student would continuously become more and more ensnared through the accumulation of demerits, until at last, all semblance of freedom disappeared entirely, giving way to desperation. Demerits were the negative currency of the one commodity we occasionally shared and all prized most in the institution: free time.
Within my first month I had accumulated every conceivable kind of demerit for all sorts of minor and major offenses, infractions, and vices: tardiness, sloppiness, procrastination, and unpreparedness, vices which have followed me still. I remain unbroken of my brokenness today, a proud graduate of the demerit system.
To regain freedom, one had to walk, write or work for a master. Dewey, sensing my mounting accumulation of infractions and my hopelessness, took me under his wing one Saturday morning and gave me complete amnesty by letting me work for him around his house. However, “work” with Dewey was not work at all; it was an adventure. Off we went in his checker yellow sedan to the hardware store to gather up things for our project with Dewey laughing, smiling and singing the whole way and just chatting with me the whole time as if we had been friends forever. The man seemed completely mad in his peculiarity and familiarity; he was unlike anyone I ever met. He had none of the tell-tale symbols of madness; however, his only concerns seemed to be of others and for others. I rather suspiciously wondered how anyone could be so damned good and whether anyone in their right mind could indeed be this jovial, this kind, this sane, and this serious about decency and yet take themselves any less seriously than Dewey.
Dewey taught me several times over the course of my four years. In class he was absolutely theatrical- laughing, crying, singing and always kind and encouraging- and yet we all suspected that no man could ever really be so- that deep down he had to be well- quite frankly- faking it –for he was- in the highest, best, and archaic use of the word- a “gay man”. No other words can describe him so aptly. I can only surmise from his actions that he was also a man of deep and profound faith.
By the time of my junior year, however, Dewey began to suffer a string of cumulative setbacks and personal tragedies. His wife left him for a seminary student from the theological college next door, taking his beloved children with her. Profoundly saddened by this, but yet remarkably courageous and upbeat, Dewey moved out of his faculty house into the student dorm as a hall master, the regular domicile of the most junior and youngest faculty members who generally taught for a few years before moving on to new careers and graduate school. There he lived among his adopted boys with the same unflappable generosity as he had shown before the tragedy until he could no longer stay. I continued to view him with much suspicion, wondering how anyone could remain that steady and seemingly invincible as I moved on to my senior year, ever cautious about Dewey.
The graduation litmus test for any senior was something we approached with great fear and trepidation: the senior research paper on tragedy, and my teacher for the course was, of course, Dewey. By the time the paper was due, I had been in the midst of a triumphant senior wrestling and lacrosse seasons, for I fancied myself as a big man on campus, team captain, monitor, proud and invincible, not yet broken on the wheel of life. Consequently, I had ignored the paper and just put it off. Not to worry, I thought, Dewey is a pushover. When the time came, I hurriedly slapped something together and simply turned in a rough draft to Dewey, confusing his characteristic kind nature as being weakness instead of strength. Already accepted at Washington and Lee, I was looking for the gentleman’s C, an easy way out: the nice easy slide to graduation. Relying on the good graces of the friendliest teacher on campus did not seem to be taking too much advantage of the system, surely I deserved a break.
I think Dewey was sadder than I was the day he called me into his apartment and told me personally, that I had failed his class. He told me simply that I was capable of much more, and that the work I had turned in was not up to par for me. He told me this in a firm, yet compassionate, way, and he set off a flurry of panic and nausea in my wild beating heart. Failure of the tragedy term paper meant a fifth year of school, it meant no graduation, no college, it meant failure and ridicule. I took the matter personally, of course, not really knowing Dewey’s motives at the time as a mere boy of 17, knowing him now only in hindsight, as a man of 51. I failed then to know, see, and appreciate his love, a love which expects the best, yet forgives the worst.
What I did not know then and know now is something I learned in prison ministry. Something the prisoners taught me, something deep, spiritual and profound: that people who are hurting, generally and almost universally hurt others. “Hurt people hurt” is the way they say it in prison, and it is at once an explanation, a statement of empathy, and a slogan of love and understanding. I have seen so many teachers or anyone in a position of authority who is hurting, simply mete out their hurt on others in this same way- they become the mirrors of their own reflective hurt and anger over the hurt. It would have been so simple for Dewey to crush me like a bug and then turn his back on me, because I know the man must have really hurt at that time in his life. Here the man was, of all ironies, teaching tragedy at this boarding school, and living out the tragedy of his very life- but living it out with joy and love, as a complete comedy. He was suffering, and by all justice and rights I had failed and there should have been no second chance- no forgiveness at all- for I should have gotten exactly what I deserved and this hurting man could have and by all rights should have given me the door, but instead he simply gave me another chance and a big cosmic hug. I suspect that this kind of love and grace is nothing, if it is not supernatural agape love, and I now know it as the rarest of pearls.
Dewey said simply you have the weekend to re-write the paper and he handed it back to me. When I went back to work on the wretched thing, I found that Dewey had probably taken more time constructively grading it and commenting on it than I had taken in writing it. The margins contained red penciled questions, the text contained circled words, circled modifiers, questions of diction and spelling. I went to work, turned in the paper, received a “C”, graduated, and never thanked Dewey for the opportunity for a second chance, lost completely in my sense of entitlement.
A boarding school experience can get in one’s DNA. It becomes hard to stay away, and in my first few years after graduation, I occasionally returned to “the Hill”, if only to see old friends. It was on one of these occasions that I saw Dewey for the last time, and he was not walking, he came along on a motorized scooter, wearing a hat and his characteristic grin, and he warmly greeted me and a few of my friends, calling us each by name and then, he scooted off, the same wonderful jovial man he had always been. It was then that I learned that Dewey had developed a debilitating, horrific and terminal disease. I understand that soon thereafter, when the paralysis of his body made him no longer able to teach, he left the school, bound only for heaven.
One of the biggest paving stones on my road of good intentions was my failure to run after Dewey at that last moment. I want to run after him now. I want to chase him down and tackle him and hug him around his neck and thank him. I want to tell him I love him, that I know and understand his pain, but that I am blown away by his love. I want to tell him what an amazing example of Christ’s love and mercy and forgiveness he was. I want to abide with Dewey just a moment or two longer and hear him sing and laugh and make his silly jokes. I want to know the man a bit better: the greatest teacher I never knew.
© Free Anglican Press
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