Morris lived in the room  next door to me in the Tuckaway dormitory at Sewanee, TN in the spring of 1976.

Habitating at such proximity, we soon exchanged greetings. Before long, he was telling me all about his life up to then, the high point of which seemed to be how he'd worked selling encyclopedias, and through this valuable experience had acquired sales skills, which he said woud stand him in good stead, whatever else happened, the rest of his life.

I didn't have any skills myself (except my post highschool stints washing dishes and life-guarding). I did know how to fiddle around on the guitar, however; and before long  Morris and I were playing guitar together in my dorm room. 

I had two guitars in my room-- a classical guitar from Valencia, Spain and a steel-stringed acoustic Epiphone guitar. When we played together, Morris always played the classical guitar. 

This guitar, when Morris initially picked it up to play, didn't have fret markers on it. Morris saw this a flaw in the guitar which would be an impediment to his accopanying me on it. To correct this, he fetched a bottle of white-out correction fluid he had stashed away somewhere in his dorm room and he dabbed little white dots on my guitar's fretboard where he figured that the fret-markers should have been.

 My classical guitar sits a few feet from me as I write this, bearing still those improvised white-out fret-marker dabs Morris endowed it with in the spring of 1976.

Although Morris, like me, mostly knew only how to strum basic chords on the guitar, he exhibited real proficiency playing the piano.  Whenever he and I came across a piano somewhere in those days (which, oddly, enough, was not an infrequent occurrence) Morris would sit down and tease out some extended jazz noodling on the ivories,some tune he'd apparently come up with, the performance of which might go on for ten to fifteen minutes depending on the night.  

Both of us were avid fans of contemporary pop/rock music. He introduced me to the album "So What" by Joe Walsh, as well as the Billy Joel album "Piano Man." I was knocked out by the Joe Walsh album, and  by the song “Captain Jack" on the Billy Joel album.

For my part, I had the recently-bought Neil Young album "Zuma." that I introduced Morris to. 

One day Morris took this record, and, placing it on his turntable, dropped the needle to the track “Cortez the Killer,”  then cranked up the amplifier volume to an ear-splitting max-level. I would have never thought of this-- because I wouldn't have dared it. Such, though, was Morris.

He intuitively grasped something of which I'd been unaware till that moment-- only ear-splitting max-volume would bring out the real glory of "Cortez The Killer."

Not long after, Morris took a notion one weekend afternoon to drag out his stereo and speakers to the front lawn at Tuckaway. He proceeded to fire up the tune “Fire” by Jimi Hendrix to maximum volume, for the entire Sewanee campus's benefit. Once again he'd demonstrated he best way to play a fine rock tune.

Aside from his interest in music, I found that Morris was a close observer of human behavior and its complexities. 

He often pointed out to me facts, quirks and complexities of our fellow-students--of people in general-- of the ways of the world-- that suprised me. He would explain to me human patterns of behavior, life-experiences, rituals, inclinations he'd learned about, none of which would have ever occurred to me, and of which, except for Morris's insights, I would have forever been unaware.  

It all came down to the fact that he took an avid interest in what makes people tick-- what they were really all about.

Maybe this was the reason that he agreed, eagerly, in that spring of 1976 at Sewanee, to accompany me on a field-trip to a snake-handling church somewhere way off in the hills. It was for an Anthropology class assignment I was undertaking. I'd located such a church- I can't remember now if it was in Tennessee or North Carolina-- and I was making plans to go there. When I mentioned my upcoming mission to Morris, he leapt at the opportunity to come along for the experience.

The day came and we drove and drove till we forked off the main road onto a rambling, gully-filled dirt road that after awhile brought us up beside a wood-constructed place of worship standing off in a clearing in the woods.

 Getting out of the car, we discovered that we weren’t the only inquisitive outside observers. A news crew from a TV station had arrived before us and wast busily engaged in filming interviews with members of the snake-handling church, and it appeared that they were seeking to portray the snake-handlers in the most ridiculous light, the idea being, I guess, that the more outlandish the portrayal, the better the news story.

As some of the snake-handlilng church goers were so kind as to give us a briefing on what we were about to experience, I was scribbling notess for my Anthropolgy class, while Morris listened attentively and surveyed the pre-service goings on.  It was expained to us that once the service would got underway, at some point the snakes and jars of poisonous potions would be brought out, at which point whoeverit was that felt moved by the spirit to handle a snake or to drink some poison potion would (per the inspiration of Mark 16:17-18) do so. 

After a few more exchanges of greetings and pleasantries,  Morris and I were ushered into the church, where we took a seat and awaited the service to start.

The service got underway, consisting at first of conventional songs of praise, and readings from scripture. Then, the snakes were brought out and placed up at the front, to the side of the pulpit, and parishoners began arising from the pews and heading up to the front where, to the accompaniment of sacred song, they began picking up the snakes.

Here was the big moment, the main event we'd come to witness, what we'd trekked so far that day to behold. 

I turned to my right to nudge Morris-- but he wasn't beside me any longer.

I looked up to the front of the church, to the snake-handlers, and there in the middle of them was Morris-- taller, bolder and more worked-up than anyone else, and in an apparent throe of ecstasy as he held high over his head a long somonolent-looking snake and shouted, "Praise the Lord!”

In the fall of 1977, I need edworked, when Morris offered me a job working on the staff of a newsparper that he'd started up with a fellow student and friend, Brian Cook, at the University of Alabama. (The paper was called The Alabama Post.)

While I was there, Morris introduced me to a professor of a Religion class that he'd taken, someone with whom he'd become good friends, the two having discovered they shared common intellectual, and perhaps spiritual, interests.  

One day Morris told me that the he'd told the professor about his snake-handler church experience, and the prof, afer digesting the tale, told Morris that he thought it signalled a profound urge in him to merge with the Holy.

Morris didn't tell me if he thought this was so or not. 

Yet, maybe so. Morris, unlike everybody, liked to live every moment of every day to the fullest. He didn't seek to; he did it.

A few years after the Alabama Post experience, one day Morris showed up at my father's house in Atlanta  seeking my Dad's advice on career opportunities in the publishing industry. (My father was The New Yorker magazine southern Sales Manager). I sat on a chair in the family room, vague;u noticing now and then the thread of their talk.

Years passed after that, and I wasn't in contact with Morris. I supposed maybe Morris was in publishing now.

Imagine my suprise on finding out, when I searched out Morris's Facebook profile, to send him a note and strike up a conversation again, that Morris had become doctor, a field for which he'd never expressed to me any interest whatsoever.

It was as much a surprise as my seeing him at the front of the church with a  snake over his head shouting out praise to the Lord. 

I shouldn't have been surprised-- with Morris, surprise is what I always, thankfully, got.