--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer rick@... wrote:
From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com]
On Behalf Of raunchydog
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 10:42 AM
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Smashing Pumpkins
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.
Another John story: at Livingston Manor he was working in the kitchen, and
one day decided to put himself through the Hobart dishwasher. It was a large
industrial machine with a conveyor belt. I don't know how he did it without
getting burned - maybe there was a way of turning down the water temperature
- but when he came out the other end, Neil Paterson happened to be standing
there.
Another John story: One evening, I got into a limo with John and a few other
whacky friends and we drove all over Fairield so that John could lean out the
window and say to passersby, Pardon me... would you have any Grey Poupon?
What a hoot.
