Derek Crook

DEREK R. CROOK Age 34, died Tuesday, August 21, 2012. He is survived by his parents, Larry and Nonna Crook of Albuquerque; his brother, Colin Crook and wife, Sarah of Albuquerque; nephew, Oran Crook of Albuquerque; grandfather, Reese Bradburn of San Antonio, TX; step-grandmother, Blanche Crook of Portland, OR; and aunts, uncles, and many dear cousins. Derek was preceded in death by his grandparents, John and Wilma Crook; grandmother, Nonna Bradburn; and little cousin, Ainslee Soppe. Our beloved Derek was born in Gallup, NM. He graduated from Gallup High School in 1996, and then attended the University of Glasgow in Scotland, the Western Culinary Institute in Portland, OR, and the University of New Mexico. He was an Eagle Scout, a superb chef and craftsman, and loved to hike, ski and snowboard. Alhtough his life was short, it was rich in experiences. Derek travled extensively, and made lasting firends in many countires. A visitation from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. will precede the Prayer Service at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 25, 2012 at French ~ University Chapel, with Father Nikolay Miletkov officiating. Funeral Service will be held Thursday, August 30 2012, 9:30 am, at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, 2210 SW Dolph Ct., Portland, Oregon, with Father George Gray officiating. Interment will be at Belcrest Cemetery in Salem, Oregon. Derek wanted a career in international relief work, and to honor him, memorial contributions may be made to the Thai Burma Border Health Initiative ( www.tbbhi.org ). Please visit our online guest book for Derek at www.RememberTheirStory.com.FRENCH1111 University Blvd NE505-843-6333 Biography Our beloved Derek lived an extraordinarily full life, and we want to share with you some of our memories of this complex, intelligent, caring and loving young man. Derek spent his first seven months in utero in Nigeria, and to ensure that he had the best possible outcome at birth, we returned to the USA, to Gallup, New Mexico, where Derek was born at the Gallup Indian Medical Center on August 22, 1978. He was a big baby, with blue eyes and red hair, a real contrast to the dark-haired Navajo babies. It was easy to pick him out in the rows in the nursery. The nurses there told us they nick-named him "the great white whale"! He was a jolly, easy, bright baby, with a laid-back attitude even as a child. His red hair turned platinum blond by his first birthday, and he was a tow-head throughout his childhood. We started taking Derek camping and hiking with us very early. His first camping trip was at the age of 5 weeks, when we set up our tent at the Quaking Aspen Campground at McGaffey. He absolutely loved the outdoors, in any weather, and rode everywhere in a baby backpack. We took him on backpacking trips and cross-country ski trips, and he handled it just great. As long as we were together, and warm, he slept like a top in tents no matter the weather. It was wonderful to watch him explore the natural world, playing with leaves and sticks, wading in small streams. Perhaps this early exposure to nature led to his love of the mountains of New Mexico. He told us that he could not think of a better place to live, a place that he was happier, than New Mexico. We moved to Portland, Oregon, when Derek was two, to be nearer to family, and he charmed all our relatives there. He was the first grandchild on both sides of the family, but he was so sweet-natured he couldn't be spoiled by all the attention even if we tried. He went to Providence Montessori School for two years, and his teacher, Mrs. Pearl Wickremasinghe, told us that he had something so endearing about him, some spark that not all children have. For years after, whenever we returned to Portland, we would visit Mrs. Pearl at her home, where she would fix traditional Sri Lankan food for us - Derek loved it! When Derek was four we moved from Portland to Aruba, then part of the Netherlands Antilles in the Caribbean. Derek was absolutely in his element there. We lived within walking distance of an idyllic lagoon, Baby Beach. We went there daily, and Derek learned to swim, taught by the Dutch Marines. With his blond hair and deep tan, he was a beautiful child, and was often mistaken for being Dutch - local people would start talking to him in Dutch, and he would just smile and go along with it. He attended kindergarten and first grade at Seroe Colorado School in Aruba. His classmates came from many different countries. Kate Crotty, his first grade teacher, told us that every teacher has an ideal student in mind, a child who loved to learn, was bright and full of life, but who was just mischievous enough for fun, and for her, Derek was that student. We once heard Derek ask a classmate if he liked kindergarten. The classmate said he liked it, liked the coloring and stories. Derek just looked at him and said "Well, I'd rather be at the beach!". Derek's younger brother Colin was born during our years in Aruba. Nonna returned to Portland for Colin's birth, and Derek went with her. Larry had to stay in Aruba, so it was Derek who first saw his little brother at the hospital. He was so happy and proud to be a big brother. When Larry finally flew up to Portland two weeks after Colin's birth, Derek raced towards the gate to Larry shouting "Dad, Dad! Come see my new little brudder!" It was on this trip back to the US that Derek caught his first trout on the Alsea River with his Grandpa Jack Crook and great-uncle John Pitardi. Derek was so proud of himself. They took that little trout back to the house and fried it up for lunch. While we were in Aruba we visited Venezuela, renting a car for three weeks. Derek made friends with local children easily, insisting that they spoke good English, when in fact they spoke only Spanish. Once we drove through a particularly poor area and we pointed out to Derek how these people had so little and he was lucky to have so much. "Stop the car," he shouted. "Why?" we asked. "Because I want to give them all my stuff." After two and a half years in Aruba, our family moved to New Jersey. Derek went to second grade in Clinton, NJ. We only lived there for a year, but Derek and Larry were able to go into New York City several times to visit the museums. On one trip they went to the Egyptian Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, and Derek was fascinated. He told Larry, "Dad, I never thought in my whole life I'd ever see something like this!". The following year we moved back to Gallup, where we stayed for the next 7 years. Derek attended Red Rock Elementary School, then Gallup Mid School and Gallup High. He participated in the Gifted and Talented program all those years, and also went through Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout. We travelled to Europe once to visit friends in Bavaria when Derek was ten, and then went to Hong Kong when he was twelve. Derek was required to keep a travel journal on his trip to Hong Kong as part of his school assignment, and reading it now is like reading a restaurant review - he was a budding Anthony Bourdain. It was during this time that our family had a condo in Telluride, Colorado, and we went up there most weekends to hike the mountains in the summers, and to ski in the winter. This is where Derek learned to snowboard. He and his brother Colin became became experts at this. We would sign Derek up for group lessons, but he was so advanced that there was usually no one else of his skill level, so he ended up spending the day boarding the slopes with the instructor. Derek and Colin shared the little sleeping loft in our condo, and we would spend our evenings listening to music, and playing board games. When Derek was in 5th grade he totally surprised us by coming home one day and informing us that he had got the lead in the school's musical production of "Scrooge". Not only did he have to act, but he had to sing. Larry and I were amazed. Derek put on a wonderful performance which we were able to video tape. Derek loved animals too, and in addition to our family dog Yardley, and our cats, Derek at various times had a rabbit, guinea pigs, mice, gerbils, hamsters, chameleons and a snake. When Derek was 15, Larry took a two year assignment to Kazakhstan. Derek, Colin and Nonna spent the first year in St. Andrews, Scotland, where Derek attended Madras College, a secondary school in the center of St. Andrews. Again, he made friends quickly, and kept in contact with many of them over the years. Derek is an excellent mimic, and was easily able to pick up the various Scottish accents. Once, when Nonna asked him to call her from New York when he went back to the US, she received a call from what sounded like an elderly Glaswegian Immigration official, who informed her that he had a young man in custody with irregular papers who claimed she was his mother. Nonna was panicking, trying to figure out what Derek had done, when suddenly there was laughter on the line. It was Derek, of course, who had totally bamboozled his mother. In Kazakhstan Derek had to learn Russian to attend the local schools. In spite of the language barriers, he had a lot of friends, and it was through one of them that he transferred to a private school at Alatau, just outside Almaty, where he received free tuition in exchange for teaching an English class. He had many adventures in Kazakhstan - he traveled on an overnight train with Peace Corps volunteers across miles of steppes to the town of Karaganda, he snowboarded via helicopter in the rugged Tien Shan Mountains which separate Kazakhstan from China, he hiked and cross-country skied in the steep foothills just outside Almaty, and traveled to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan with his family. Derek returned to New Mexico to graduate from Gallup High in 1996. He wanted to return to Scotland, so he applied to the University of Glasgow. He was accepted, and in the fall of 1996, he flew to Scotland. Many of his friends from St. Andrews had scattered to other parts of Scotland and England to go to school, but some went to Glasgow, so Derek was not totally without friends there. In one of his letters home he complained bitterly about the weather in Glasgow - "It rains all day, every day, and I haven't seen the sun in about a week!" He went to St. Andrews for weekend visits with friends. Derek returned to New Mexico in October of 1998, and after a brief stint in Gallup, moved to Albuquerque where he worked at the Double Rainbow Restaurant on Central (now called the Flying Star). Here he met Megan Wortham, who he married in 2002. Derek started cooking at Double Rainbow, and decided that he wanted to go to culinary school, so in 2001 he and Megan moved to Portland, Oregon, where Derek studied at the Western Culinary Institute. It was a very intensive course, and Derek graduated in the top 3 of his class, with a perfect 4.00 GPA. He worked at several places in Portland before moving to Asheville, North Carolina, where he worked at the Left Bank Restaurant until 2006. Derek's marriage with Megan did not work out, and he returned to New Mexico in the late fall of 2006. He started going to the University of New Mexico in January of 2007, where he worked on a degree in Ethnology and Economics while supplementing his income by part-time jobs at various restaurants. In the summer of 2007 Derek went to Danang, Vietnam, for four months. He volunteered at the Bread of Life Foundation, supervising the operation while the founders returned to the USA for the birth of their first grandchild. His duties included managing two restaurants and supervising over twenty young deaf and disabled Vietnamese youth at their dorms and in the workplace. He found the work very rewarding, and then decided that he wanted to continue similar work after he finished university. Derek also developed a keen interest in sustainable development, "green" initiatives, and local agriculture, and spent several summers working on farm projects in the Rio Grande Valley and in the East Mountains. He loved farm work, but he also managed to do interesting things like catering movie shoots in Albuquerque. We visited him on the set of one movie he was catering - "Warrior Woman" - and the production staff and actors said they had never eaten as well on any other location! He had great organizational skills when it came to cooking, and was able to put three hot meals on the table, 6 days a week, for 6 weeks, with everything cooked from scratch. At University he discovered that he had a real talent for small metal casting. He took a number of fine art classes casting jewelry and bronze sculptures. His instructors were really impressed with his work, which they said rivaled that of fine art majors. We are proud and happy to have several of these sculptures that Derek crafted, and will treasure them forever. Derek was just one semester away from graduating at UNM when he died. He was such a vital and complex person. He loved the mountains of New Mexico, and in a recent road trip that he took with his mother to Carlsbad, Cloudcroft, and White Sands, he told her that he could not think of another state that had everything he needed to live happily. We have a small cabin at Chama, and Derek took every chance to go up there to de-stress. He would work hard chopping wood, clearing brush, maintaining the road, and then he'd hang out in a hammock and read, or go over to a rock outcropping to look for fossils. We have a logbook at the cabin, and it is a joy to read his entries. In one he wrote about how much the time spent at the cabin alone or with his family meant to him, and he thanked us for having bought the cabin years ago. Family was very important to Derek, and he cherished the time he spent with Colin, Sarah, and his nephew Oran. He loved Oran dearly, and would come by our apartment whenever we were babysitting to play with him. There is so much we want to write about him - his intelligence and intellect, his laugh and his sense of humor, how he read deeply and widely, how he saw humanity and decency in everyone, even those who intentionally hurt him. He was intensely loyal to those he loved, and above all, we remember his kindness and his sweet nature. As his family, we saw only one facet of this remarkable young man we were proud to call our son and brother. We know that all of you who were his friends knew him in different ways and can add your own facet. The brightest gems have the most faces cut into them. Add your stories about Derek to his guestbook, so that together, even after his passing, we can all continue to know him better. Derek lost a dear friend, Rosie, from Glasgow University, when she was in her early 20s. She courageously fought against a brain tumor, but lost the battle. Derek told us that one thing which made her passing even slightly bearable was knowing that Rosie would never grow old, would never suffer pain again, or diminish in his memory. We, his family, get some small comfort from knowing the same about Derek. We imagine him hand in hand with Rosie, with loved ones of his family who have gone before, in a better and brighter place than we can imagine, a place where he will meet us all some day. "He brought me out into a spacious place; He rescued me because He delighted in me." Psalms 18:19 "I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to Myself". Exodus 19:4