The Mentor at the Crossroads

The best teachers aren’t the better teachers. The best teachers are the hero mentors who recognize you, single you out for individual attention, and broaden your horizons without harming or endangering you, regardless of how well or poorly they perform in a classroom or whether they teach in a classroom at all.

Tim Dale was still a bachelor and the assistant master in my boys’ dormitory the year that I arrived at the Stony Brook School as an undersized, fragile fourteen-year old leaning on a cane that I tried to pretend was cool. This was an evangelical school where one of my dorm mates was Billy Graham’s youngest son, and this was 1976. Tim was not only himself one of the youngest staff members at just twenty-seven years old but also the only man on the faculty who’d grown out his beard. Tall, thin, and long-nosed, with shaggy dark hair and wire-rimmed spectacles, he bore a notable resemblance to John Lennon ca. Abbey Road. In outlook as well as appearance, he was the closest thing to a rebel the campus tolerated. He lived in a two-room apartment at the top center of our dorm, with a collection of about three thousand record albums ranged neatly around the walls. You could open a classic vinyl shop in Brooklyn today with that pristine collection, although you might be sold out by the first afternoon.

Tim’s door was right down the hall from the room I shared with two other freshmen, the burly, bullying Gummer Gaebelein and the slight and fussy Bill Stauber. I could knock at Tim’s door almost any time, but it was in the school library where he worked that I first got to know him. Like all good librarians, Tim turned out to be awfully well read and firmly opinionated.

The library itself was small but elegant. Handsome, dark, polished wood featured everywhere, along with leather armchairs, brass lamps with green shades, and leaded, mullioned windows—it had been built after World War II at one end of a matter-of-fact brick classroom building, thanks to the money of an alumnus who obviously wanted it to look like a proper library.

I began hanging out at the library almost immediately upon arrival on campus. It was soothing. It had comfy armchairs next to a tidy rack of current newspapers and magazines. It had a decent section for fantasy and science fiction, which I devoured. After I had checked out about a dozen volumes within the first few weeks of the school year, Tim looked down his nose at me, pushed his spectacles up with a long index finger, and suggested that my tastes were narrow. If I wanted exclusively to read works that dealt with magic and fantasy, perhaps I should try something more daunting than Tolkien. He handed me The Magus and One Hundred Years of Solitude, the combined weight of which nearly overbalanced me. 

I read them both in my rickety bunk bed that month and had no idea what the hell I was supposed to think of them. I was barely turned fourteen, an inexperienced Baptist kid from suburban New Jersey, possessed of  a razzle-dazzle verbal fluency but zero social or psychological sophistication. My previous exposure to literary classics had pretty much begun and ended with a few chapters excerpted from The Count of Monte Christo and, of course, deep daily dives since early childhood into The King James Bible. I never forgave Fowles for not allowing real magic into The Magus, which I ever after thought of as the Scooby Doo of highbrow novels. I expressed my annoyance with him by turning up my nose at The French Lieutenant’s Woman. But I was delighted as well as thoroughly confused by Garcia Marquez. The description, “magical realism,” is still one of my favorite pompous oxymorons to mock.

And that was just the beginning. While steering me to books I never would have read (including, eventually, those monstrous 19th-c. Russian novels, which proved perfect for whiling away my occasional long hospital stays), Tim also blew open the doors on my views of pop music. 

One day in the dining hall, I was sitting at Tim’s table and brought up a TIME magazine article I’d just read that had presented a sniffy view of the new “punk” rock music. Having heard virtually no rock at all in my strict household, and having only recently been introduced to the likes of Simon & Garfunkel, Loggins & Messina, and James Taylor via my roommates’ soft-rock record collections, I was perfectly prepared to accept the TIME writer’s verdict that this “punk” stuff I’d never heard of must be worthless and nasty. I said so, and Tim asked me if I had listened to any of it. No? Then I should stop by his rooms so I could listen for myself. 

Before the year was out, I was a fan of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, but Tim’s album library stretched back into the depths of early blues, rock, and R&B, as well as out into the furthest tendrils of psychedelia, pub rock, glam rock, New Wave, reggae, on and on. I would stop by his rooms of an evening if I had finished my homework, and I would stop by on a Saturday afternoon if he was in and I was bored. Tim selected samples to play and opined. I listened and I learned. On occasion, as when we replayed Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" several times in a row, I just laughed.

One of the things I learned was to disagree with him, even to quarrel with him if my ears liked something his didn’t. I learned that aesthetic disagreement could be fun and no harm. Evangelical in my faith, I was becoming catholic in my tastes.

Tim’s company was a safe place for me, although that was no more than an instinctive, almost unconscious feeling. He taught upperclass English electives on topics like children’s literature, but I never had him in class. He matter-of-factly befriended me as someone he considered worth conversation. We would occasionally walk down from campus to the corner deli together, discussing. An alumnus of the school himself, he gave me the benefit of a longer perspective on the antics of the rich kids, the cool kids, the preachers, and the bullies. And he talked about a world of ideas, movies, movements, and controversies that I had no idea existed beyond the sternly disapproving allusions of my parents and pastors in church.

Tim married over the summer after my freshman year and moved with his bride into a small house just off campus. My casual drop-in listening and bull sessions about music were done, but his wife Debby, a sparrow of a woman from the Carolinas, was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. They would have me over to dinner and board games, and Debby brought her own rich set of opinions and preferences into the conversations, her folk music and activism, her soft spot for liberation theology. I never once sat at their table where they didn’t bring up some topic I hadn’t yet heard about. And nice, kind Debby was a killer at word games.

Tim introduced me to a bigger world, but he also warned me off whatever he felt I wasn’t ready for yet. He lectured me against trying to sneak in to CBGBs underage, and he tried to dissuade me from hanging out in the seedy Times Square of that era. He gave me fair warning that David Lynch’s Eraserhead would give me nightmares, and he was right, even after I waited a few more years to view it in Lynch’s own birthplace, Missoula.

By the time I was a senior, Tim and Debby had left to work together in Manhattan. I took the train in from Long Island to the city to visit them in their narrow railcar apartment, but the distance was daunting. During my years in and out of college in the early eighties, I drove in to pick them up and head out to a concert a couple of times. The last time we went out, Debby was pregnant and chose to stay home, while Tim and I drove into New Jersey to catch a new band from Georgia called REM.

Although I admired Tim and Debby, although I valued their friendship, at the time they felt like friends who had influenced me and been kind to me but were sort of enmeshed in a tangle of relationships of all the other peers and adults who were important to me during my teens. It was hard to see them as especially important among all the rest. We corresponded occasionally, but this was years before email and decades before Facebook. They moved south, then to Europe. I moved out to Montana. They had two sons. I got a PhD. We lost touch.

In 1997, Tim tracked me down on the Web, or maybe I tracked down him. He and Debby invited me to visit them. In the spring of 1998 I did. They were teaching at the American School at Lugano, in the Ticino Canton of southern Switzerland, bordering Italy. Their sons were adolescents, about the age I’d been when I first met Tim. I flew out for a week on spring break, partly in celebration of just having been awarded tenure. 

They were as hospitable and kindly as ever. Tim, about to turn fifty, looked almost unchanged in his wire-rimmed spectacles, although his hair was shorter, his beard was long gone, and sciatica was bothering him. Debby appeared just a few crow’s feet removed from herself fifteen years before. The boys were tall, cheerful, bilingual in Italian, and precocious. Tim was still opinionated, but this time, finally, I was the one who brought news of a new world to him. His intellectual blind spot had always been the sciences, and by the late nineties I was obsessed with the debates over human evolution, mind, and cultural change, although I was still a couple of years away from returning to grad school to formally study them. I spent the days touring the Lake District while they were all at school, and in the evenings we debated new music and whether Steven Pinker or Richard Dawkins were right about anything. 

I asked Tim what happened to his albums. We had reached the heyday of music on CDs, several years before MP3s and streaming services muscled in. Vinyl was not yet quite the retro cult it would become. Tim said he had several thousand records in a storage unit in South Carolina. I wonder now what’s become of them. 

After I left, we stayed in touch but we descended to the Christmas-bulletin level of relationship after a few years. I abandoned my career as an English professor to study and teach human evolution. Tim and Debby’s oldest son sent me a link to his radio show when he was an undergraduate DJ at UNC Chapel Hill. Then one year, after I had married and was living in Salt Lake, we failed to exchange holiday updates. Since then, I’ve not heard from them.

So what was it about Timothy Dale, school librarian and assistant dorm master of the no-longer standing Johnston Hall? It was partly his simple kindness, partly respect—the mentor who can engage you, despite a sizable gap in life experience, as an equal if not a peer. It was partly my first experience of exchanging idiosyncratic opinions with someone who had them in surplus, had reasons for them, and made no bones about letting you know what they were, unasked, but who yet was never compelled to bend you to his worldview or else quit the friendship. I never became a leftist evangelical like him. I early ceased to be an evangelical at all, except in the cultural sense of having been shaped as one (and in the narrowest theological sense, particular to evangelicals, that a person who has once accepted Jesus Christ as personal lord and savior and thus been genuinely “born again” is presupposed not to be able to reverse that rebirth). Unlike Tim, I never excoriated the natural sciences even in my lit-crit days; indeed I came to dabble in their black magic professionally. And truth be told, although I’m still fond of a bit of angry, propulsive song and drums, I long ago began preferring the spookier sorts of chamber music to punk. 

So? Shall we draw ourselves a moral? It’s not how far someone accompanied you down any particular road. It’s whether they alerted you to new roads in the first place, warned you of where the shadows might be, and then let you go. Heaven send I’ve done that for someone at least once myself. Heaven send you do so, too.