Loving Unlovable People

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It is not easy to love people when they’re lovable. It’s harder when they’re not. In high school, I learned intricate details of the battles of the Civil War. I knew my U.S. presidents frontwards and backwards. I could recite the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and William Faulkner’s remarks when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. I could wax poetic about the drafting of the U.S. Constitution: who was there, who wasn’t (women, for example, but don’t get me started).  

Why did I know so much about history?

Not because I was naturally predisposed to love studying bygone days, but because I had a brilliant young teacher who made the past exciting. Mr. Snow turned the whole school into a history project, with generals and kings and soldiers running through hallways, acne-prone battalions raging across the lunchroom, skirmishes reenacted in the band room and chemistry lab, gangly teens as Napoleon and foot soldiers. We had Patrick Henry’s liberty or death, “two if by sea” lanterns, and all that tea in the Boston Harbor.

We knew it all because Mr. Snow made it come alive with never a dull moment, nor a lesson that wasn’t experiential and active, with us moving through history, seeing it unfold, acting out our parts with hormonal gusto. He was an inventive and dazzling teacher, fresh from graduate school and bursting with ideas and staggering creativity in teaching a subject that in other, less capable hands is often soulless and pedestrian.

Many of us lose touch with our teachers, even brilliant ones significant to us. I don’t know where many of my high school teachers are, but I do know exactly where Mr. Snow is every moment of every day.

He is in prison for the rest of his life.

On December 16, 2002, Mr. Snow was convicted after facing hundreds of counts of first degree statutory sexual offense, sexual activity with students by a school teacher, and first degree kidnapping of two male students.

What happens to a life?

How could I reconcile this new information, this horrific, awful data more troubling in its details of decades of abuse, with the Mr. Snow I knew? What utter disconnect! How things fall apart.