On Halloween I think of John Block. I last saw John 15-years ago sitting on a pile of his belongings near the corner of Stone and 3rd. It was always hard to read John's ever expressionless dead-pan face or get an indication of what he was feeling from a hint of inflection in his flat monotone. I couldn't tell if he was happy or sad when he told me he was on his way to New Mexico with his dogs. His dog had had puppies, so all five dogs and John had lived happily together in his little apartment. I believe his landlord evicted him for excessive poop on the premises.
Some years prior to his departure from Fairfield, when we first arrived from Amherst in 1979, John had been working on MIU kitchen staff. I was on CCP (Creating Coherence Program) at the time. There was a kitchen in one of the frat buildings I reported to once a week to chop veggies in exchange for CCP. One day around Halloween, on my way to kitchen duty, I happened to walk by a storage room near the kitchen. I peeked into the room and there was John sitting on a large pile of nearly floor-to-ceiling, overly ripe pumpkins. He had been tasked with removing them from the room. As soon as he saw me, I don't know what came over him, mania? In that same dead-pan expression that never left his face, without a word or a grunt, for the next 5 minutes he began leaping from pumpkin to pumpkin, smashing them into a pulpy mess. I laughed myself silly at the sight of him. I'll never forget it. God Bless John where ever he is. Happy Halloween. Smashing Pumpkins in Slow Motion http://youtu.be/4bALl6dhVRk
