Former mayor was my teacher, too

By Will Doolittle

Vincent DeSantis was elected as the mayor of Glens Falls in the early 1990s, not long after my wife, Bella, and I and our daughter, Ginny, moved to Glens Falls. We rented the downstairs of a small house on Cortland Street half a block from the school.

The city was much less busy then. Many downtown storefronts were empty and the buildings in poor condition. Meanwhile, taxes were high, discouraging home sales. The mayor faced a huge challenge.

I came to Glens Falls from Malone, where, as the editor of the paper, I had insisted on an aggressive style of reporting, always pushing to get the story right away and get it into the paper.

I was the night editor at The Post-Star, working until the paper came off the press at midnight, and one evening around 9 p.m., I felt a story I was editing needed a comment from the mayor, so I called him at home.

He answered the phone but wasn’t happy about it and said he would talk the next day when he was at work. I pestered him and, although I don’t remember the details of the conversation, I may have refused to get off the phone, forcing him to hang up on me.

Then, probably, I put a line in the story like this: “Mayor DeSantis refused to discuss the issue Monday.”

He came in to the office the next day to speak with me. He had been relaxing at home with his wife, he said. He shouldn’t have to take work-related calls during his personal time at home.

“Yes, you should,” I said.

I didn’t budge, and, appearing astonished at my attitude, he left.

These days, my wife and I are often in bed by 7 p.m. and asleep shortly afterward. I leave my phone downstairs on the kitchen counter, and we are rarely disturbed.

My wife has Alzheimer’s disease, and I am her full-time caregiver. Mr. DeSantis, too, cared for his wife toward the end of her life, something I know because a few years ago, he called to tell me.

I started writing a column about my and Bella’s experience, called the Alzheimer’s Chronicles, a few months after Bella’s diagnosis in 2017. One of the first calls I got was from Mr. DeSantis, offering sympathy and encouragement. He arranged to have a book — “The 36-Hour Day,” a guide for caregivers of loved ones with dementia — left for me at the Queensbury Hotel, where I picked it up.

He told me that touch can become very important to people with dementia — holding and touching and expressing love in this most basic way.

His effort to reach out touched me as a gesture of caring that transcended my callousness of years before. No mention was made of that previous interaction — perhaps he had forgotten it.

But it had stayed with me, and I came to see my behavior that night when I called him as a way of being in the world that I wanted to avoid. Mr. DeSantis’  kindness years later was, meanwhile, a model of a different, more graceful way.

He died in the fall of 2018, after a long and productive life. We barely knew each other, but I know he was a longtime primary school teacher before he retired and was elected mayor, and in one instance, he was my teacher, too.

Readings

I read “The Bridegroom,” a collection of 12 stories by Ha Jin, a celebrated author who emigrated to the U.S. from China after the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in 1989, when he was in his early 30s. He writes in English but sets his stories in a fictional town in China called Muji City. His writing is spare and simple with the occasional four-star word thrown in. Although he has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years, now working as a professor at Boston University, his stories are suffused with the strangeness and mystery of a foreign culture. His characters act in surprising ways and say unexpected things, their motivations obscure. The pleasure, for an American reader like me, is not in connecting to the familiar but puzzling over the foreign, realizing that responses I take for granted are, after all, culturally prescribed and can, in a different cultural context, take very different forms.