Santa Claus?  Sure.  My friend Doug is really Santa Claus, who just disguises himself as an ordinary fellow 364 days of the year to walk around with the rest of us, and then zips up to the North Pole to make his rounds on the 24^th of December.

This guy is amazing.

He is one of those truly kind and caring people who checks up on his friends when he knows they are hurting, and who constantly builds people up and supports them.  He is amazingly generous.  I’ve seen him leave tips for waiters and waitresses that are larger than the bill for the meal, and he is forever picking up the tab for the entire table when friends go out to eat together—and don’t try to stop him, either!

“Doug,” I once asked him, “when people ask you what you do for a living, do you tell them you are an artist, or do you tell them you are a teacher?”

“I’m a teacher,” he said, without hesitation. 

He teaches art—drawing and painting and sometimes photography.  He teaches life, too, and not just to the college kids who take his classes.

“Look at this one,” he says to me as I’m standing in the gallery in the art building looking at a painting.  “See how the horizon is placed back there through the window in the back wall of the house?  Now, look at….” And a half hour later, we are hunched over a coffee stained napkin in the cafeteria as he explains to me how an artist can command the viewer’s eye to view the painting as if the viewer were a tall person or a short person or a person looking over the shoulder of the artist.

And, when he’s finished with this utterly fascinating topic, I realize that I’ve just been reminded to keep the important things in life in the foreground and to push the annoying things off into the dust in the corner.

Not to say that my dear friend is a sober and serious fellow, or one who is incapable of losing his temper, because he’s just plain fun to be around.  He apparently has suffered a lifetime of corny jokes from his father and has never forgotten a single one of them, and can tell these wacky stories exactly when they need to be told. Or, if someone does something that he thinks is worthy of his anger, he ponders it, ponders it some more, deliberates, and then, if it still seems like a bad thing, he’ll sound off strongly, articulately and often in the relatively salty language of the Special Forces of the United State Army, of which he is a veteran.

Doug’s art is amazing.  To see this gentle giant work—and one seldom does because he works alone, usually in the middle of the night—is to see intensity personified.  He is a perfectionist.  One of his major works consisted of carefully constructed (he’s going to maim me for describing it this way) blue and red dots that nearly send the viewer to the nuthouse after a few minutes of viewing. The dots start changing colors and moving around.  Even Doug admits that when he painted it, he had to take frequent breaks to avoid insanity.

He’s a sports nut, and drives thousands of miles every year to attend track meets and basketball and football games.  Every student on campus seems to know Doug.  There may be two dozen men on campus named “Doug” but when someone says, “I saw Doug today,” everyone knows that they are talking about THE Doug.

He’s going to retire from teaching in May, and will go home to his wife and his newly-built studio to paint.  But, I’d be willing to bet that if anybody asks him a year from now what he “does,” he’ll automatically say, “I’m a teacher.”     

Did I mention that Doug is also very humble?  Man, is he going to kill me when he reads this. To my way of thinking, the only higher honor in the world than to be called “teacher” is to be called “friend.”  Doug—teacher and  friend. 

                              by Jim Whitehouse

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