[The following is a letter to the wife of Andrew Lapidus, a teacher and mentor from my prep school days at Williston Academy in Easthampton, MA.  I received a note from her recently informing me that her husband had died in June.  In 2002, I found a copy of a play he had written called "The Sentence," an absurdist comedy that was performed by the Williston Studio Theater in 1966, and sent it to him.  We kept in touch briefly after that.

He left the school after my junior year, but his influence remains with me today.  I've included his obituary at the end of this post to give you a sense of this remarkable man.]

Dear Roxanne,

Please excuse the delay in responding to your letter.  I was away for a couple of weeks and just picked up my mail yesterday.

I am greatly saddened to hear of Andrew's passing.  We exchanged emails for a while in 2002 after I sent the play, but soon after, the hard drive of my computer crashed and I lost his contact information.  Regrettably, I let the correspondence lapse.

Your husband played a pivotal role in helping me adapt to Williston when I came to the school as a sophomore in 1964.  I was a short, pudgy kid in the throes of a late adolescence and a year younger than most of my classmates.  I was an easy target for bullies and desperately short of friends.  Andrew was my first ally as well as a kind and generous mentor.

He was my French teacher that year, and I certainly didn't impress him with my linguistic skills.  He once described me as a mechanical translating machine and even suggested that he could hear the gears spinning in my head when he asked me a question "en Français."  Nonetheless, he always encouraged my efforts and treated my shortcomings with humor.

It was the time spent with him outside the classroom, however, that had the greatest impact on my life.  Intuitively understanding my pariah status, he let me assist him in the darkroom with the developing and printing of photos for the school paper.  During those sessions, he let me ramble about whatever was on my mind while gently leading me to the realization that my quirks and oddball status weren't fatal and in fact would eventually make me a more interesting person.  His wide range of knowledge and keen intelligence (mixed with perfect comic timing) also convinced me that it was no crime to follow intellectual and artistic pursuits.  In a school where athletics were the principal criterion of status, this was no mean feat.

Thanks to his encouragement, I joined the drama club the following year.  Here, I discovered a whole world of misfits as well as girls, and inconceivable as it was to my skeptical brain at the time, the girls often liked the misfits, a revelation I still believe saved me from ending up a "troubled loner."  Andrew became an informal advisor to a group of us known derogatorily as "The New Breed" by our more mainstream classmates.  He arranged for us to see plays at local colleges, kept us awash in pizza, and allowed us to glory in our anti-authoritarian identity.  With "The Sentence," he became our personal Ionesco, adding his own healthy sense of absurdity and anarchy to our burgeoning ones.

I am forever indebted to him for engendering in me an appreciation of literature and music and a love of foreign languages which I bungle mercilessly.  Perhaps more importantly, he introduced me to Tabasco Sauce as a way to mitigate the execrable dining hall fare, thus making me a life-long fan of spicy foods.

It doesn't surprise me that he went on to be a tireless and beloved advocate for troubled children - he was a natural when I knew him.  The world is undoubtedly poorer for his absence, and I only regret that I didn't express my admiration to him personally.

With sincerest condolences to you and your family,

Jeff Brawer

(courtesy of The Coastal View News)