My first year at Natick High School was 10th grade, beginning in September, 1975. I had an English teacher that year by the name of Mr. Garnett – Harry Garnett, as I would soon know him as. Not that I ever called Mr. Garnett by his given name; he was always Mr. Garnett in person. He dressed in the modestly dapper style that older public school teachers adopted in those days – the men especially. He wore glasses than sat low on his nose, so he could peer over the top of them out at the class. He was a bit heavy, in the usual spot, and had a full head of very grey hair, cropped in a typical men’s cut. He struck me as refined, and even perhaps a bit fussy and stuffy, and not particularly intimidating.
I can’t be sure that I had him for English that entire year, but probably did, and I certainly had him during Spring semester. That sophomore year was a brutal year for me, even if it was less gruesome than the preceding one or two had been. I was in school most days, at least physically, but I was seriously alienated from the world around me, and was seemingly incapable of making a good decision. If asked at the time, I would have asserted that I was an atheist. My life reflected an impoverished ignorance of the reality of goodness, of holiness. And I looked the part: attired in boy-sized knockoffs of the uniform garb of post-radical delinquents, while weighing in at no more than 120 lbs., soaking wet, with hair so long I was not infrequently mistaken for a girl.
There wasn’t much of reality that I was open to embracing at that time, but there were two sparks emanating from the realm of beauty that were persistently penetrating my consciousness: an appreciation for literature, which was largely at that time focused on science fiction, and a new-found appreciation for artful music, specifically a budding encounter with the contemporary music of Yes. Mr. Garnett had his students keep journals of their thoughts, which he would periodically review for cogency and literary merit. He was always kind and encouraging in his comments on my journal, and later told me that he was impressed with my writing. I thought my scribblings had been heavily influenced by the literature I was encountering in my reading and listening – to the point of mimesis – but he shrugged that off, and told me that I wrote with a genuine writer’s voice, and strongly encouraged me to pursue writing more broadly. His words were kind and uplifting, providing me a rare glimpse of hope and the possibility of meaning to life, given in an environment where my own insolence put me constantly at odds with authority figures, especially the school administration.
I entered the first of my two senior years under an academic repair plan constructed over the previous summer by myself, my parents, and the school principal, Mr. Rosen. It was a two-year plan designed to allow me to make up for the many credits I’d lost due to failing classes – mostly during sophomore year. About half the credits I would earn over the ensuing two years would come from completion of a work-study arrangement that allowed me to get high school course credit for going to work at 1:00 every day. I was excelling at work, unlike at school, and I was happy for the steady paycheck, especially under an arrangement that often left my evenings free. But beyond being deficient in credits, my academic status was also pretty severely deficient in what was called merits, which amounted to a currency measuring behavioral compliance. A student came into the school with 100 merits, and, in order to graduate, needed to either have retained all 100 merits, or have found a way to make up for any that were lost due to the issuance of demerits. I’d had my share of demerits.
Into this void stepped my old sophomore English teacher – now head of the English department – Mr. Garnett. He had approached Mr. Rosen and offered to employ me as an office gopher during a pair of study hall periods every week, in return for granting me sufficient merits to compensate for my earlier transgressions. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this simple act of goodwill on Mr. Garnett’s part saved my high school career, and in doing so quite possibly saved my life from serious ruin. There seemed to be no one else at that school offering to help me at that point, not on their own initiative at any rate, and I was far too obstinate to go begging for the help I needed. Had Mr. Garnett not pulled me from the rubble of my foolishness, I would have had no real prospect of graduating, and cannot imagine I would have stayed the course for very long in such a state of futility.
I likely would have fallen away from school, and deeper into the self-destructive, deviant culture I had embraced since early adolescence. I very well could have ended up dead by my early twenties, as several of my teenage acquaintances did. Instead, I graduated high school, a year late, in June of 1979. Eight months later, I married my wife Joyce, whom I’d met in a writing course during my final year of school, which was taught by a teacher Mr. Garnett had arranged for me to study under the year before, confident that Dr. Fred Ganong’s intellectual vitality and no-nonsense demeanor would be a good fit for my needs. Forty years later, those two men remain among the most powerful positive influences in my life, and the gratitude I owe them, especially to Mr. Garnett, is immense.
Over the years, I have often thought of Mr. Garnett, and of how indebted I am to him. On numerous occasions, I contemplated writing him a thank-you letter, and dropping it off with the Natick School Department, which surely would have been able to forward it to him for me. But I never wrote it. The thought crossed my mind again earlier this week, when a colleague at work (half-?) jokingly asked me to go easy on her initial draft of an operating procedure when she circulated it for review, a request which reminded me of comments Dr. Ganong had relayed to me back in 1978, relating to my penchant for double-barrel contributions during peer review exercises in a writing class. Feeling nostalgic, I did a Google search for Harry Garnett, and found his obituary.
For at least the past 25 years, I’ve felt the duty to acknowledge Mr. Garnett’s kindness toward me, and to express my gratitude to him. To my great shame, I never wrote a letter. I guess this is that letter.
Harry Garnett died in a Missouri nursing facility on February 26th, 2015, at age 89. The only surviving family appears to be a brother-in-law and a niece, both in Missouri. Harry’s wife Thelma had died in Framingham in 2008, at age 80. They appear to have had no children. This guy I had considered a little soft in the middle turns out to have been a retired World War II U. S. Air Force Staff Sergeant Aerial Gunner, who’d fought in campaigns at Normandy, northern France, and the Rhineland. So, while he was a prim and proper gentleman on the outside, he was a battle-hardened man on the inside, but one with a soft heart for a needy, struggling kid, who salutes him today, and thanks God for all the good Harry did in the world. And I am so sorry I didn’t tell Mr. Garnett twenty years ago how grateful I am for all the good he did in this kid’s life.
Eternal rest, grant unto him O Lord
and let perpetual light shine upon him.
May he rest in peace. Amen.