Oregon

A visit with John in Oregon during his Junior year.

John attended the University of Oregon from 2010 to 2014. He was also accepted into Clark Honors College. He majored in English and minored in Spanish. He did a lot of creative writing and as part of graduating from the Honors College, did an essay on "the Unreliable Narrator" which included three (I think) of his short stories illustrating the concept.

John met Pecos Singer at a new student orientation. They were roommates the first year. John picked him up in Santa Fe and they drove to Eugene together in our 2008 Honda Odyssey van to begin college. During the drive, in the middle of the night, John hit a coyote. He always felt bad about that coyote. I contacted Pecos after John's death. He said they immediately connected as roomates and he would always remember his smile. Pecos is now a professional cellist in Santa Fe.

John was impervious to our questions about college, Eugene, his teachers, everything. My only memories are that he hated living in a dorm and got out as soon as he could. The house he ended up sharing with some other students during his junior and sophomore years was owned by one of the original Merry Pranksters. It was while in college that he began to experience his first troubles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Another roommate was Sam Taylor who shared a house with John and another student named Nate during his senior year. Sam was a Cinema Studies major. He remembers watching very intense foreign films with John. John would be digging dirt out of his toenails while watching the film. He was apparently not a real thoughtful roommate. He had a girlfriend and he spent most of his time with her, coming home only to eat and then rush back to her apartment, leaving dirty dishes for the roommates to deal with. John's OCD was becoming noticeable in his constant hand-washing and a excessive fear of getting warts from other people. Sam noted that John never told him about his cancer experience.

We visited him at the beginning of his Junior year, which is where the photos above came from. Sometime earlier, on a Christmas visit home, he had told us about the OCD. He refused to hug me at the airport when he was leacving to fly back to Oregon because I had shown him a couple of wart-like growths on my hand.

From an early age, John had been hard to please ("picky" his girlfriend told us), and also became very private (some might say secretive). I have to say he came by it honestly, as his father has been the same his whole life. But in an odd way, he was also extremely gregarious when he wanted to be, something I didn't develop until I was in my 40s.

A Short Story

This is a story that John wrote. He used stuff that I related about Prather family fishing trips at a completely undeveloped Lake Travis in the 1960s.

Pecos Singer sent this to me after I contacted him about John's death:

I still vividly remember the first time I saw John. It was Duck Days at the University of Oregon. We were strangers, but I remember the smile that flashed across his face when our eyes met. It was just for a moment. We didn't exchange any words, and we wouldn't meet officially for another few months.

John was my first roommate, and we had an immediate bond. He was one of those people that caused me to smile uncontrollably whenever I saw his face.

I remember camping in Utah when we drove out to Oregon for sophomore year. He picked me up in his van on his way through New Mexico. We packed my stuff, including a drum set and electric piano, and headed out west.

We also connected through music. He was always very supportive of the band I played with in Portland with some of my other friends, and I always loved the way John played the guitar. He had a great sense of tone. I still consider him my first guitar teacher.

Even though we didn't communicate much after graduation, I always hoped to catch up with him in Austin the next time I passed through. He will be dearly missed.