This is the second of an occasional series on storytelling.

As I headed off to college at 17, I was carrying the worries of certain members of my family with me. I had long hair, and a rebellious attitude, and so they naturally thought I was going to Hell in a collegiate handbasket. My grandmother, who lived in the town where I was headed, was enlisted by the family to keep an eye on me.

She devised a clever way to accomplish this task. She told me to come to lunch on a regular basis, knowing that the food at college was mediocre at best. She figured, correctly, that I would come for the food – and have to stay for the improving advice.

She didn’t tell me that she was planning to invite a serious-minded grownup to the lunch with me, in order to ensure that I would get sober advice and thus perhaps be more likely to stick to the straight and narrow.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I arrived at the first lunch, only to be introduced to the Dean of the College Chapel as my lunch mate. The three of us sat down, Grandma hopeful, me suspicious, and the Dean of the Chapel appropriately beatific.

The lunch was delicious, and my suspicion began to fade away with the soup course and was gone completely by the time the salmon arrived. Meanwhile, to my great surprise, I fell under the spell of the Dean of the Chapel. He disarmed me entirely, asking me what I was hoping to study, and then chiming in enthusiastically, when I confessed I wanted to be a writer and teach Dickens, that Dickens was his favorite novelist.

By the end of the lunch, the Dean had made me feel special, and even likely to succeed in my chosen career path. He was completely charming and made the lunch all about me. I learned next to nothing about him.

The lunch ended with a delicious bread pudding, and by then Grandma seemed decidedly put out for some reason. I didn’t think much about it. I was full of soup, salmon, and bread pudding. And I never saw the Dean of the Chapel again.

Thirty-five years later my partner and I wanted to watch a movie one night, and I was deputized to order the DVD. This was the pre-streaming era and so Netflix sent the DVD in a little packet a day or two later.

I found a movie that was highly rated called To End All Wars. It was billed as a true retelling of the actual events behind The Bridge on the River Kwai. It was certainly gripping, and the scenes of mistreatment and torture in the POW camp deep in the Burmese jungle were graphic and heartbreaking. It was only the spirit of one man, a Captain of some surviving Scottish troops, who kept the prisoners from despairing completely. His charisma and faith helped many of the prisoners survive the experience, and after the war was over, those survivors gave him a full measure of credit and gratitude.

Tears were streaming down my partner’s and my face by the end of the movie, and as the credits rolled, there was footage of an extraordinary true-life scene. The Japanese Commandant of the camp, nearing the end of his life, had wanted to ask for forgiveness from the interred men whom he had treated so cruelly. The Captain of the Scottish contingent had traveled to Japan, one of the few survivors still able to travel, for a powerful moment of reconciliation as the Japanese officer bowed deeply to him. And as we watched this stunning moment, with these two old men bowing to each other, and healing a broken piece of humanity, I suddenly said to my partner, “I know that man!”

It was the Dean of the Chapel, Dean Ernest Gordon, survivor and hero of one of WWII’s most horrific internment camps. He was the man who had made me feel special at a luncheon thirty-five years before. Of his heroism and extraordinary life story, he had said not a word.

I finally understood why my grandmother had not been pleased by the outcome of the lunch. She had invited him hoping that he would regale me with his heroism and straighten me out by clearly demonstrating the true course of his life of virtue.

Instead, I learned a much deeper lesson about the power of humility. I met him only once, and Dean Gordon died shortly after the movie was made, yet I think about him often these days. That a man of such courage, strength, and accomplishment could turn his attention to a college student and make him feel important for an hour without sharing his own story, showed that Gordon understood that the future is always with the next generation, and such hope as we have must be focused on them rather than on our own swiftly passing moments, noteworthy or not.

To me, Dean Gordon is a hero twice over: once for me, and once for the ages.