In the seventies we had a family friend; I don’t know how or where my parents met him but my first memory of him was when he was grown up at age 18. His name was John and as long as I knew him he was a hippie. He had the long hair, the beard, blue jeans, flannel shirt. I think the first time I remember him was when he came for an extended visit to our apartment in California. He looked like I described and he was traveling around California with two friends in a beat-up old Station Wagon. I was in fifth grade at the time. I always liked him, him and his two friends stayed about a week and a half and John would come outside and play touch football with me and my friends. I thought that was pretty cool. He was just a likable guy.
Being a hippie, he was also into eating organically or naturally so he was one of the first vegetarians I ever met. He ate a lot of nuts and before Silicon Valley became a center for technology it was largely orchards at that time and he would take a burlap sack and go to various orchards and pick walnuts or almonds which were plentiful. Well, he visited us occasionally over the years, he would just sack out in his sleeping bag on our living room floor at night.
Then, to everyone’s great surprise to he got married. Everybody thought he would settle down. He brought his wife to our house and they stayed awhile and then a few months later he wrote us a letter saying he had a kid with his wife. And so for the next couple years that’s how he stayed in touch by writing long letters, obviously no computers or e-mailing back then.
Then things got a little weird, things began to unravel. He separated from his wife and moved up to Washington and Oregon. Then he wrote us a letter saying he had got picked up and put in jail. That was totally out of character for him, he was just never a troublemaker. So his letters started sounding a little weird and we started to understand something was wrong. The last time I saw him was in 1977 when I was in high school.
Well the next thing you know his mother sent us a letter. I guess John had told her about us and how close we were to him. Her letter said John was homeless and in jail again and acting bizarrely. When I saw him in that last visit to us he was quiet, but wild-eyed and confused.This was before anybody had an inkling that I had schizophrenia but his mom visited our house with him and told us he was schizophrenic and this was the first time in my life I knew or met someone who had it and she told us she didn’t exactly know what that meant but I remember being shocked along with my family. It sure explained things about his behavior.
I remember feeling very sorry for him. I had never had a reason to feel sorry for him before. He was a nice guy and a happy-go-lucky guy before he got sick. Then one day his mother wrote us. John had been homeless for awhile and survived by eating produce and nuts. It was winter time and he had picked a sackful of nuts (his mother wrote us) and his mother said someone had found his body on the ground leaning on a tree in an orchard. It had snowed and he had frozen to death.
It was just sad and shocking. You may think mental health treatment is bad now but in lots of areas back then it was nonexistent. I guess he had slipped through the cracks of the mental health system. That was thirty years ago. I still think of him every now and then, playing with us kids, laughing and smiling until he got ravaged by schizophrenia.