PAUL THOMAS STRACHAN 1944 - 2007

Paul was the third child and the last child. My father had made a great fuss about only having two children and the proper use of condoms, but when Paul came along three years or so after Mark (In those days one was supposed to leave a two-year gap between children), it was my mother who went back into the hospital for “repair work.” It was a tubal ligation.

Once Paul’s arrival was perceived, he was welcomed. My mother used to say that the last child was like a caboose -- having a little more play on both sides -- but he was a bright, eager, lovable child with bright red curls. When he got to the “don’t touch me” stage, he habitually wore a big black watchcap pulled down low to keep the little old ladies out of his hair.



My mother was basically a farm girl and Paul was up for all her adventures, especially the ones that ended in the kitchen.



She thought that Paul ought to have a dog when Mark and I went off to school. One day someone remarked, “I wonder what dogfood tastes like.” Paul piped up, “Like meatloaf.” A spoonful for the dog, a spoonful for himself -- it seemed perfectly natural to him.



But still, sometimes it just got kinda lonesome. Especially if you couldn’t find the ball. Duncan McTavish wasn’t much of a retriever and the ball was soon slimy with dog spit, but it was something to do.



I’ve often thought about this photo. The boys were “shooting” dandelions with 2-4D spray guns and they got quite a bit on themselves. They are quite different from me in some ways and I’ve wondered whether they were seriously contaminated by what was thought to be “entirely harmless.”



Still, it seemed as though we were all three big healthy kids who did well in school. Mark and Paul went through the steps of scouts but dropped out before getting into the higher reaches. Somewhere in there we switched over to 4-H and my mother took on a camp-cooking class for boys that was a big success. She got a permit to build a bonfire in Alberta Park and they all made little reflector ovens out of old shiny 5 gallon tins -- you cut out one side and make it into a shelf on the interior. Then they all made baking powder biscuits and were proud of themselves.



Of course we were all bookworms and, as a consequence -- or maybe it was a cause -- we all had huge intricate interior lives. I doubt that there was much, if any, overlap between us -- even between Mark and Paul. Yet we were all three about the “same smart,” meaning we did well on IQ tests, and definitely looked as though we were related, with hazel eyes and varying degrees of curly, red hair. Mark's hair was least red and curly but Paul was the only one not near-sighted.



In order to escape me -- the boys told anyone who would listen -- Mark and Paul went to Benson Polytechnical High School which in those days was "boys only." Both seemed to do quite well there. Paul was more into the machines and Mark focussed on radio and debate.

In later years, Paul always liked these technical, craftsman sorts of things, like both his grandfathers. He always kept a lot of tools and could repair things like toasters or mixers. He understood electrical motors and liked carpentry. Even when he was living in humble, even dubious, circumstances, he got all his tools lined up and decorated the place with pictures and sculptures. He liked to garden and in one place helped to make a couple of scarecrows that looked like an old man and an old woman on their hands and knees as though they were pulling weeds. Late in the evening they moved them around, which sometimes tripped up garden raiders who had observed where they were during daylight.



Both boys went into the Marines right out of high school so they could use the GI Bill to pay for college. Neither saw combat but Paul was an MP and was nearly sent into the Watts riots. He was stationed in Yuma to teach marksmanship and spent his days off riding a motorcycle around the desert trying to catch rattlesnakes. When he came back, he walked into the anti-Vietnam sentiment, which left him severely conflicted. On the one hand, he loved being a big guy in uniform who could throw his weight around -- though he was never one for fights and didn’t drink -- and on the other hand, he identified himself as a Eugene artist, which meant being a bit of a hippie.

He would have liked to be a painter, I think, but I never saw a finished painting. Instead he earned an MFA in metal-smithing and did a lot of silver work. His master’s thesis was a collection of fantasy armor fitted around small skeletons of birds and animals he’d found in the woods. One of the most memorable was a little helmet built over a child’s toy. It had a friction motor in it and when it was primed and put on the floor, it ran along occasionally flipping up a visor and peering out with two orange owly eyes.

He taught at Linn-Benton Community College where he built a foundry. One day he had a sack of cement on his shoulder, meaning to load it into his pickup, and stepped onto a bit of ice. He fell, the cement sack lit on top of his head and he suffered a concussion on his forehead. It amounted to a "trauma lobotomy."

When he could drive, he went back up to my mother’s house in Portland and said he could not work. He would have to live with her. He would not go to the doctor. All his friends agreed that doctors would only torment him and couldn’t do anything to help. This was in the early Eighties and was probably accurate, but it meant that there was no record of his injury and therefore no hope of qualifying for disability. After a while he went back to doing a bit of metalsmithing, giving it away, but mostly he lived like a retired person.


This was at my mother's house on September 15, 1990.

When my mother died, he took his third of the estate and lived on that back in Eugene. He became more and more paranoid and inclined to fantasies about being an undercover officer with a special commission. When he ran out of money, these fantasies got in the way of getting financial help. He was afraid of authority figures, tried to bluff them, and ended up being nearly arrested for impersonating an officer. He seemed so normal and was so clever that the caseworkers were always baffled and exasperated. Neither Mark nor I was in a situation where we could even send him money or take him in. We've all always been "arty" and broke.

For a while he lived with Tom Hatfield and his parents. Tom’s mother was my mother’s sister and sinking into dementia. When both parents died, the cousin who manages the ranch threw Paul out. Paul went back to Eugene, living in his truck, until he had a very serious heart attack before Christmas. He refused to stay in the hospital, was secretive about where he was at all, but was helped by a friend who took him in until he died from the effects of the heart damage, which meant it would no longer stay in rhythm. He would have been 63 in April. He is the second cousin of his generation to die. (The first was Carol Lee, who died of cancer.) My father died at the same age, but of a massive stroke about the same time of year.

Paul’s life and death raise all sorts of questions. Should my mother have forced him to get some kind of job? Should she have forced him to go to the doctor? I don’t think she could have. I gave both a try with no results except rage storms. Was there something genetic? Was it the time in the Marines that triggered something? Was he fooling around with drugs in the Eugene years?

Clearly his constant smoking was a major contributor to his death and his nutrition wasn’t that good once my mother was gone. Probably he would have died at about the same age even if he hadn’t been living in his truck, though that must have taken his stress level up.

Why didn’t he ever marry? He had a child out of wedlock, a little girl, but after the early years the mother clearly wanted to marry and he didn’t -- so she married someone else and no doubt the girl thinks that’s her father. If he’d married a good woman, would that have made his life longer or better? Maybe.

It’s ended now.