In Memorium: Jeffrey Charles Moore

If I close my eyes and go back to my most vivid early memory of Jeff Moore, he’s sitting at the end of his bed in Barrows, guitar in hand, head bent forward so I can’t see his face, his hair reddish-blond, cut close and he’s trying to learn the chord changes to Michelle My Belle. It was early 1966, I'm guessing, the back half of our freshman year; the song had just been released and Jeff wasn’t singing, he was probably humming it in his head trying to find the notes.  I don’t remember him ever making lots of noise. His New York roommate, Andy Meltzer, a conducting major from the Bronx, a tale teller, a big laugher, was the noisy one, a hurricane of a guy who blustered so magnificently, one could hide behind him, which Jeff kind of did, staying quiet in his shadow. I liked Andy, but I really liked Jeff.  He was more or less my athletic equal; we played tennis, I think we tried wrestling, we might have played intramural soccer. We double dated. He’d grown up in Lakewood, not too far from Oberlin and was a paper boy for the Cleveland Plain Dealer when he won a scholarship to Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for 4 years. That’s where he became a lover of literature, and, he later told me, a secret smoker, scoring cigarettes in a downstairs hideaway Exeterians called the “butt room”. When I met him – he was in my freshman section -- at first I thought he was shy, but he wasn’t, not really. He was just quiet. Being from New York like his roommate Andy, I was used to New York decibels, New York manners (loud) and wasn’t too familiar with modesty, where one listened more than one spoke and one listened hard – where one kept his troubles hidden and tried to be kind --  people like that were rare for me. In a way, Jeff introduced me to Midwestern manners.  From him I learned patience. Over time I learned to sit with him and say pretty much nothing for long spells. I learned to wait.  I don’t know what he got from me, but by the time we graduated I could go over to his apartment above the old Co-op bookstore, collapse on a bed or couch and have what I now think of as almost wordless conversations, which I thought ran deep. And maybe they did. Later, when we left college, I would call him when I could, but Cambridge, Mass was a long-distance charge, and he had no money and neither did I and our conversations got fewer. Then stopped. About three years out, I got to wondering what he was up to and tried to find him, calling the last number I had, but there was no answer and I was worried. I asked around and was told – I remember the phone call; it was in the middle of a work day and my boss handed me the phone – that he was gone. Suddenly.  Apparently by his own choice. I didn’t know why, hadn’t a clue, couldn’t understand what had happened. Writing this now, almost 50 years later, I can still feel the shock of that call. And my blankness. About 20 years after that I bought jerseys for my daughter’s basketball team and had them labeled “J. Moore” on every jersey, for no defensible reason. I just liked watching his name go by.  So now, another 20 years on, I’m summoning him back once again, slipping past the jerseys and that phone call, all the way back to him on the bed,  leaning in, his fingers trying to capture McCartney’s tune. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking down at the fret, working his fingers, and I flop down, and say….nothing. Not even hi. And it felt so nice.