Where on Earth is Stuart Fletcher?

Occasionally, I'd like to blog about people I've lost touch with for one reason or another. While the Internet is a big place, there are some five billion folks on the planet, many with nary a web presence at all. Stuart's right on the edge, barely flitting in and out of the websphere.

Let me back up a little in the story. Sometime around 2000, I was teaching introductory C programming. Stuart Fletcher was a student in the class. Of the hundreds of students taking the class, Stuart ended up with the highest grade in the class. He had lost something like 30 points over the entire semester.

If you think about it, that's amazing. We had two midterms, a final, quizzes, projects. There were people that lost 30 points in one exam.

Later on, Stuart took another class with me (a programming class), though he ended up taking discrete math with the other guy. He decided to add a second major to his computer science major--mathematics.

I had known that Stuart was a little older than the average person in class, in fact, about 6-7 years older. One day, while getting (I think) an award during some award ceremony, held in the rotunda part of the math building, I bumped into Stuart, and asked him what he had done during the intervening years.

He said he was part of a band. I asked what kind of music did they play. He said it was hard to describe. He would get me a CD so I could hear it. That didn't work out, as it turned out. However, I did buy the CD somewhere. I believe that was Contemporary Music by The Sorts.

Stuart became a TA for me when I taught computer organization. He was a TA for two semesters.

Stuart ended up finishing his B.S. in two majors, with a 4.0 average. I met his parents when they came out for his graduation. They were originally from Washington State (I assume they are still there) as was Stuart.

For a while, Stuart and I got along, at least we'd occasonally exchange email, have some tea, that kind of thing. Over time, things got a bit busy for Stuart, and I rarely saw or talked to him, though I consider that there was some sort of falling out.

When he graduated, he was thinking about grad school. I had recommended him for some research thing, which he got. I don't know how exciting he thought that was. But with grades as good as Stuart had, grad school seemed like the best option.

In the end, going to grad school would mean giving up music. He had been a bass player for quite a few years between the time he tried college the first time and came back to college the second time. I assume the thought of giving up music was something he wasn't quite ready for.

Ever since he left college, it's been a bit difficult figuring his whereabouts. For a while, he had a Sorts webpage, which had photos of their tour of Japan. It stayed up maybe two years or so, but never had its content changed. I sent email to it once or twice, but never heard a reply.

It seems he's been to Europe possibly once or twice since graduating, mostly helping out other bands. He mentioned to me once that he'd like to live in Europe, most likely Germany. I suppose if he were a soccer fan, he'd be lamenting Germany's loss today, with Italy hitting two goals late in overtime.

A little over a year ago, he was touring in Europe. I must admit that while I knew him over the course of his years at Maryland, I didn't really know him. To be fair, how well can you know anyone, especially when you see plenty of students, right? Even so, Stuart was a bit of a quiet guy, and I think he kept a lot to himself. That kind of personality can be intriguing, because maybe there's a viewpoint that you didn't know unless you ask.

One odd recollection I had of Stuart was his watch. He owned a watch that reminded me very much of the watch that I had back when I was a teenager. It was an LED watch. Yeah, something like that. Those watches looked real cheap. Heck, they were cheap.

Apparently, he had had the watch for years.

This would be interesting, but as it turns out Stuart is fastidious about lots of things, and that's probably why he did so well in his classes. It turns out, little did I know, that he had used the same mechanical pencil the whole time he was at Maryland. Now, I used to lose pencils left and right. In fact, I used to lose digital watches left and right (I'd hate to wear them, then forget where I had left them). That kind of attention to detail is rare.

Stuart kept so much bottled up inside that I wondered how much of what he was going through had to deal with trust issues. Who in his life did he want to tell things to? Could he really trust anyone in his life completely? (To be fair, a tall order).

I suspect where I knew the least about Stuart was his passion for music. This was clearly important to him in a way that I didn't understand. These days, I listen to a lot more music than I used to, but still, to pick up music so late in life, when I hadn't listened during my formative years meant I lacked some appreciation.

This post is something akin to a bottle in the water post. Perhaps it finds its way to someone who knows what's what.