When we drove my VW Passat from Denver to our new home in Indio, CA, I intended to remain there permanently. Mark would join me in a few months. We would likely then bring his mom with us to live. I could participate in the closing of the condo remotely, but I would not have a 17th and final Pride Parade Party. However, I was informed by our new Internet provider in California that service would not begin for at least a week, possibly longer. I wouldn't be able to do my job for IBM for several days. I had to fly back to Denver and remain in the condo until the closing on a Monday. I could host my final party. The two cats were now safely ensconced in the house in California, and Steve was now back in Canada. I was alone in 1355 Franklin St. #5 for the first time in years.
Here are Pudge and Tabby in the windows of the master bedroom after we first arrived in Indio:
Mark and I had already flown out to Sacramento from Denver in May of 2016, to take Aunt Jean to the VA cemetery for what we did not know was her final Memorial Day ceremony at the cemetery.
The drive in the Passat was our second trip through the mountains of Colorado, through Utah, Nevada, and into California. (It would not be our last.) What we had not taken in the comfortable van with Pudge and Tabby, we loaded into the Passat this final trip, to bring the last of my stuff to California. I had already donated the bedroom furniture to Habitat for Humanity that I had once bought new using some of the money I got from the Air Force for resigning my regular commission back in 1979. Like the dining table that I sold to the new owner of the condo, nobody wanted to buy the bedroom furniture on an internet site no matter how little I was asking. Sadly, nobody in the U.S. mass-made wooden furniture like that anymore: dovetail joints, solid construction. That furniture, including the nightstand in the living room, had endured my move to the apartments in Denver and then to the condo on Franklin St.
When the Habitat truck driver loaded up the furniture, strapped it down, and hauled it away, I felt as if I had betrayed and sold off an old friend that had been with me through so many years of good times and bad. So many potential boyfriends or one-night stands had slept with me in the bed, next to the nightstand. two dressers and headboard. Only Mark had stayed.
I took a few final pictures of 1355 Franklin St on that last full morning before I left for good.
The garden that Katie first had us pay for and plant. Every year we had to get new wood chips. Some plants grew wild and took over while other plants died. With her long gone, no owner was there who could give it the constant care it needed to thrive in a natural balance.
That front sidewalk looking toward Cheesman Park. How many times I had to shovel it? And then Steve shoveled it? After we finally eradicated the owls, we had crows in my final years in the three trees out front. They left a lot of debris on the sidewalk that needed to be washed off now and then.
The back deck. Steve, I believe, had planted these last flowers as part of Spring and the staging for the sale. When I had a dish system for TV, I could not open the French doors to brush the snow from the dish because I had to tape them shut to keep out the cold. I had to go out back, climb up upon the deck and brush off the snow that way to restore the picture.
After the Monday closing, I flew back to Palm Springs via San Francisco on Virgin America. Great yogurt shop exists in their terminal. Not only did the airport feature a number of United 747's taxiing by outside, I saw a couple of A380 airbuses.
Sadly, for us aviation enthusiasts, most A380's were taken out of service during the pandemic, never to return. Also, Virgin America was bought by Alaska Airlines. The interiors were always so stunning.
Here is the Virgin America A320 at Palms Springs Airport after I deplaned. (Mike and Ann met me in the terminal, and I took them to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory.)
The summer of 2016, while I waited for Mark to be able to join me in August, I attempted to use my profits from the sale of the condo to buy furniture, as well as purchase shower doors for two of the bathrooms, and plantation shutters for all of the windows throughout the house.
This is the first pass at readying the kitchen for Mark's arrival:
First pass at the dining room space (the Sputnik chandelier was the focal point):
The first pass at the media space in the living room:
First pass at the media room:
First pass at the Master bedroom:
Here I am in the mirror of the Master Bathroom:
In August I flew back to Colorado to help Mark drive his car and much of the rest of his possessions to Indio. We intended to bring his mom with us, but she did not feel up to the trip that month. As with the first trip with the van, on this third drive we arrived in Vegas to stop for gas late at night. But this trip, we were advised to try a route directly south of Vegas that would skirt the border of Arizona and reach I-10 at an abandoned locale called Desert Center, well west of Indio. Much of the route, the road was a single lane each way, with multiple dips that, because it was raining not far away, were crossed by relatively deep streams of water. We then got behind a semi at one point and took forever to find a stretch where we could finally pass him. Distant storm clouds eventually turned from black to gray with streaks of lightning as the sun was close to coming up.
During the summer before Mark arrived, Mike and Alex would invite me over to their new home for a late lunch after I shut down my work computer. After Mark arrived, that rarely happened. We were, however, invited to a breakfast place when Mike's Son-In-Law, daughter, and two Grandkids were visiting. Here Mark is outside the front of the place. Mike's mom, Katherine, is in the background.
As Mike had wanted, we were all living a few blocks apart in the same gated community, in position to play Trivial Pursuit until we started to die off. Ann lived midway between Mike and Alex's place and our house. Mark and Alex loved to gossip and shop, especially for clothes. Mike and I did not (our vice was shopping for, or looking at, electronics). But as summer segued to Fall and Fall to Winter, something began to go wrong, the cause of which I was not even to know about for many weeks. Before Christmas of 2016, we accompanied Mike when he had to drive Alex to LAX for a flight to Mexico, to visit his brother and sister for the holidays. Mark and I held a Christmas Eve party at our place for my sisters Ann and Lorri, Ann's friends Jane and Tony, and Mike and his mom, as well as Aunt Jean who was staying with Ann.
It started before Christmas when Mike complained that he had come over to see our Christmas decorations, but we had not taken the time to see his. As the new year began, we were invited to a modest party at the house of a friend of my sister's. Mike had been rather cool toward me that evening. Whenever I called him in the days that followed, he would never answer the phone. I would leave a message, but he would never call me back. I finally had to ask my sister about what the matter was. It seems that the surface excuse was that when his security system was down for several days, and he was paranoid being without that protection, I tried to assure him that, from the outside, they kept their house so neat and tidy that there really wasn't anything visible that someone would want to break in and steal. He would later claim that he took my attempt to soothe his concerns as an insult that Mark and I might own stuff that someone would want to steal but he and Alex had nothing of value. His reasoning was absurd.
Finally, we learned the truth about why Mike blew something unintended so out of proportion. It reminded me of the line from
THE BOYS IN THE BAND. "Guilt turns to hostility. Isn't that right, Michael?"
What we had been entirely unaware of was that Mike's Son-In-Law had been asked to move to Phoenix by the company that he had been working at for a few years at that point. So, instead of being located two hours away in Orange County via a toll road from Mike and Alex and Mike's mom's residence, the whole family was moving to Phoenix. His daughter had been working on Mike for months to move from Indio (and from those of us here) along with them so that they would all be together in Phoenix. Mike had claimed for months that the move to Indio was the last time he was moving when they bought the house in Indian Palms. We moved there partly because he and Alex were living there as well as Ann. (Mike and Alex closed a couple of months before we did.) His mom was going to a new church and enjoyed the new friends she had made there. She enjoyed spending time at the local senior center. Now that we lived in Indian Palms, he was abandoning us. Clearly, he felt guilty. He had helped to lure us to where we lived, but now they were planning to leave after less than a year.
It took them six months to sell their house, from January to June 2017. They had to get up each morning, eat breakfast early, make sure the place was tidy in case potential buyers might show up to look the house over., and then hide out in their car or walk down the block when anyone did show up to check out their place. We didn't see much of them during those final six months. Eventually, the house did sell, they packed up their car and headed to Phoenix.
Mark and I certainly felt a bit betrayed.
But that was all in the near future when we decorated the house for Christmas in 2016. We picked up Aunt Jean at the Ontario Airport and took her to The Mission Inn for dinner. Of course we could not know that this would be Aunt Jean's last Christmas visit.
Our outdoor decorations in 2016 were quite modest, at best. But we were just getting started that year.
We would become far more ambitious out of doors in the years to come. But we started with nothing, and this was a decent start. A gay couple lived two doors down, and they certainly had a better display. We spent more of our efforts in doors. I was finally able to unpack all of my Coca-Cola Christmas village buildings and accessories and display them.
I was also able to get out and set up the Disney train that I had bought the previous year at a store in the California Adventure park. Tabby took a particular interest in the chrome train.
I took Aunt Jean to the Living Desert gift shop and got this picture of her by their huge outdoor tree. She collected the little life-like replicas of wild animals they carried. I believe this was the last picture I took of her.
We soon would buy our first outdoor fountain from an outlet in Banning, just beyond the Morongo Casino.
We would spend money in the coming years on ways to display our 1/100 scale airliners. The first attempt were these glossy black shelf units from Wal-Mart. I should have stopped right there.
We also began to replace any artwork prints on the walls with framed aviation artwork.
Aunt Jean had fallen in her home and required surgery to repair the broken bone in her leg a couple of years before she visited us in 2016. She suffered from brain issues during those same years. But she managed to survive to be 94 when she had a brain bleed in the bathroom of her small apartment in the senior community, fell to the floor and died on March 13, 2017.
Mark and I flew to San Francisco to attend the services. (Our flight to Sacramento was cancelled so we had to rent a car to reach Fairfield where the funeral was to be held in the same church where Uncle Lloyd's funeral was held.)
One of Doug's sons did not attend, as he had not attended Uncle Lloyd's funeral a few years before. As with Uncle Lloyd's burial at the VA cemetery in addition to Doug's burial there, Aunt Jean's burial was held a few days after the funeral in Fairfield. Mark and I could not attend. (At a VA cemetery, they conduct a service under a pergola near the grave site, but the physical burial takes place after the mourners leave the cemetery.)
Ann and I had already driven to Aunt Jean's house before she died because she was having an estate sale. She wanted us to pick up the items that she was giving to us before the sale commenced. I bought her beloved set of China, not wishing to have it cheaply sold to strangers. After her death, their custom-built home in Fairfield was sold. They had had it built for them in 1977; and when they moved in after it was finished, they immediately paid off the loan. The Buick in the driveway Aunt Jean gave to Ann since she really should not drive after she went back to live permanently in the senior community.
In May of 2017, Ann, Mark and I drove north, to visit the VA cemetery where Doug, Aunt Jean and Uncle Lloyd are now buried. We likely would visit for the last time, given how far away the cemetery is located.
After our visit to each of their graves, I drove us on to the Vallejo Ferry station for a trip to San Francisco. We stayed at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, a favorite of Mark's.
We hiked to Coit Tower the following morning. On the uphill walk, Ann was exhausted. After we enjoyed the view from the top of the Tower, Ann insisted that we take a bus to Fisherman's Warf instead of trying to walk any further.
Later in 2017, we attended a few concerts at Fantasy Springs: The Doobie Brothers, Nile Rodgers & Chic, Lindsey Buckingham-Christine McVie, Judy Collins-Stephen Stills. Here is a picture of Nile Rodgers of Chic who, after the concert, came down to the edge of the stage to interact, and have photos taken, with the audience. He was so marvelous and personable. He talked about returning but, so far, has not. The Chic concert was our favorite.
Of course, no one could know that, five years later, Christine McVie would die in November of 2022. Among a very few, she was rock royalty.
In August of 2017, a 3-day Palm Springs Comic Con was held at the convention center. We were able to apply for and get a booth. The location was ideal, along the front wall, just inside the entrance.
We had a wonderful time, giving away candy and hero cards of all of the characters to many attendees. I gave away entire sets of books to many now that all of my books, including the ninth and tenth volumes in the series, were then available as kindle editions. At this Con I entirely depleted my remaining copies of
A Mile-High Saga and
Autunm Saga. (This was a year or so before print-on-demand copies on amazon became available so that I could slowly deplete my entire inventory of all titles.)
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Mark spent a lot of time wandering around the packed hall, checking out the many other booths and artists and vendors. He had never been to a Comic Con before, so he was mesmerized the entire time. He found a character artist who drew the two of us as superheroes.
On the final day of the Con, as the time for closing approached, we had two remarkable visitors show interest in the series. The first was a main writer for the TV series,
Xena, Warrior Princess. He took copies of all of the books. The second was a man who was friends with a famous director/producer who, a couple of weeks before, was interviewing writers of other superhero series of novels or comic books at San Diego Comic Con. He asked me which single book might give this fellow an idea of the entire series that he could take to his friend. I gave him the turquoise volume. We soon packed up and loaded my blue Passat feeling optimistic that we'd accomplished a great deal to advertise the series.
Unfortunately, as the days and weeks and months passed, nothing resulted from our efforts that weekend. We never again heard from either of the men who took one or more volumes of the series. Sales on amazon of kindle editions did not take off at all. Even though many promised to write reviews on amazon of any books that they read and enjoyed, no additional reviews resulted. A few hundred volumes in the series were given away, but no impact resulted in any way.
We were able to build the first pergola over the back patio the fall of 2017.
We tried one final time to bring Mark's mom to Indio. We again flew to Denver via San Francisco on Virgin America once again. We rented another van to carry his mom and whatever remaining items remained. But when we arrived, she told us that she was still not feeling well enough to travel.
Tabby and Pudge on chairs in the living room:
That fall, the print-on-demand copies became available on amazon. Steve Keil's friend Brian in Canada helped me create the files that I was able to download onto amazon.
Shattered Dawn and
Olive Branch were finally available for the first time in paperback editions.
We also began to decorate the front yard of the house for Halloween:
Christmas of 2017, we began to improve the outside over what we had done in our first year. The snow globe inflatable would become a centerpiece in the front yard for years until we began to set up the decorations in 2023 and sadly discovered that it was no longer working.
Two trees indoors:
Back patio:
Christmas village:
Joshua Tree National Park visit
We made a decision to try a different way to display the airliner replicas in the house. It would eventually prove to be a mistake, but they did look great in the beginning, using acrylic shelves and white rails and brackets to hold them up.
The magnetic light bars batteries wore out too quickly, and the shelves and aircraft accumulated desert dust way too often. We would eventually determine a better solution, but that was a few years off.
On May 26, 2018, the same organization that held the first two Comic Cons at the Palm Springs Convention center in 2016 and 2017, held a one-day Comic Con at the Agua Caliente Casino off of I-10. We had a great time, gave away a decent number of books, sold a small number, and met a couple of individuals, one guy who looked and dressed like Jack Sparrow, and the actor Matt Ryan who played John Constantine on the DC TV series
Legends of Tomorrow.
I finally ordered a banner for my Rainbow Arc of Fire series to use at conventions.
A woman who was part of the original Palm Springs Comic Cons created Palm Springs Comic XPo in June of 2018 at the Palm Springs Convention Center. We were going to have a booth regardless. But as the number of vendors and ticket buyers remained stubbornly low compared to those that had occurred earlier that year and the year before, our booth became more and more enticing. Eventually, we were given a corner booth in a 4-corner setting. We certainly enjoyed ourselves, but the numbers of attendees was nowhere near as many as the two previous Palm Springs Comic Cons that we participated in.
During the Palm Springs Comic Con in 2017, we connected with Ted Abenheim & Kevin Alpert who had taken over Prism Comics, an LGBTQ+ group that promotes gay comics and books, especially at San Diego Comic Con with a booth. We agreed to buy a space in the Prism booth at San Diego Comic Con that summer of 2018. (I had originally been part of the Prism booth in the early 2000's, and Joe Fludd and I shared a small press table the following year. But we were not able to get a table the next year, so we stopped trying after that because San Diego Comic Con had gotten so huge there was no room for us.)
We could not find any available hotel rooms in San Diego. The closest we got was a Ramada Inn, a few blocks from the train station in Oceanside. I had made reservations on Amtrak for each day of the five-day convention. Unfortunately, waiting at the station and riding the train, as well as making our way aboard the light rail trains across from the Con, each day's commute was 1-2 hours longer each way. We would leave the Con each day, and when we finally got to our hotel room, we would have to go to sleep. One evening I got a call from Rob McDonald who wanted to meet with us, but we simply had no time to meet up for dinner with him. But it was nice to talk to him on the phone. I was not aware that his cancer was getting worse and he only had another couple of years of life.
I was thrilled to meet and have my photograph taken with Nichelle Nichols. Even then I could tell that she was experiencing cognitive decline. I suppressed my sadness for the photograph because I was sitting beside a legend from the show I had watched religiously starting in the Fall of 1966 when it debuted.
Lee Meriwether was so delightful and warm. I had the best time sitting beside her and being photographed with her. This was another highlight of the Con for me.
In August of 2018, we got a call that Mark's mom had died. She succumbed to cancer at 94. She was never well enough to join us in Indio, and she never got to see our house. Unfortunately, the way she set up the will would dog Mark and me for years after Mark heard the terms from his mom's lawyer. I learned from Mark's nephew what had been done, and I knew immediately that Mark would have trouble getting his share of the house from his niece, either from a sale or a buyout. The obvious conflict that was inherit in that will would drive a wedge between Mark and his niece after six frustrating years had passed with no resolution of any kind from her.
Since his mom was cremated, they had no funeral or memorial service after her death. We flew out to Denver via San Francisco on Virgin America on August 18, 2018. We would stay at a motel since the house smelled so badly of Jesse's several pets. We drove to a restaurant off of South Broadway after we checked into the hotel in Aurora. We spent the remainder of that first afternoon in Cheesman Park. I got to look one last time at 1355 Franklin St where nothing seemed to be as nice as it had been when I left. The security bars had been removed from the two windows in the bathroom. The back gardens seemed overgrown.
I lived there from December of 1997 until June of 2016. The family that lived there from when the house was built in 1896 have certainly all passed on. Many of those who have lived there after that first family passed on are likely also gone. And, of course, long after I am gone, that house will remain. Like that first unknown family, we'll all have been forgotten in time.
Here are some of the photos we took in Cheesman Park where I read books and played volleyball and walked through the park for exercise in those last years. (I would walk the entire periphery a few times every other day, weather permitting.) And, obviously, Cheesman Park was where I put the underground headquarters of the
Rainbow Arc of Fire superhero team late in the series.
It was in Cheesman Park where Mark and I first walked together after we chatted in the coffee shop on 9th and Downing. During the walk, Mark would later tell me that he became smitten.
Mark and his Nephew Nick.
Mark in downtown Denver.
Voodoo Donuts on Colfax, just before Franklin St. (I took the photograph from the car on Franklin St.) The most unique and delicious donuts ever. For the last few Pride Parade Parties, I would buy a variety box of donuts for my guests.
The organizer of the previous Cons in the PS Convention Center was going to be charged way too much by the city for security to repeat using that location. He made a choice to have his next (and, ultimately, last) Comic Convention at the Palm Springs Air Museum hangars for the weekend of August 25, 2018. But holding it in August was a mistake. The hangars were not really air conditioned. Our booth was in front of one hangar door. By midday each day, the temperatures were brutal and stifling. We did get to take a photo with Jerry Mathers, The Beaver from the 50's TV series, Leave It To Beaver. The late Tony Dow was at the next table. I was also able to have the DC artist Jim Lee sign one of my superhero cards. But the heat indoors was almost too unbearable.
The fall of 2018, we extended ourselves to decorate the house for Halloween.
We increased our outdoor and indoor decorations from each of the previous seasons for Christmas 2018.
We participated in the annual Golf Cart Parade in the community. We finally saw our competition on the circuitous route through the entire community.
We took Mark's niece to Morongo Casino for dinner.
I found cool replicas of the Rayolite Santa and Snowman on the Internet. We had originals back in the 1950's when I was a kid.
Mark always took pride each year in his Thanksgiving and Christmas tables since we would host those two holiday meals for ourselves and Ann and Lorri.
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Christmas Day, Pudge and Tabby. Again, we would not know that this was the last time the two buddies would be photographed together for Christmas.
In January of 2019, we gave t a belated present to ourselves: the Restoration Hardware Concorde. We had seen it a few years before in the RH store in the Cherry Creek Mall. It did not quite fit together properly. So, we had our Indio handyman Tony take it away a couple of years later and fix the way it bolted to the stand.
Even before Mark arrived in August of 2016, I got my hair cut at the Great Clips in La Quinta. That shopping center featured a popular breakfast restaurant. We went there a few times; however, they closed. A new French Rotisserie Chicken restaurant opened in its place eventually. It became a favorite of ours. Here are two photos of Mark at different times in March and then May 1. (I would have my 70 birthday there. But the restaurant eventually closed because of the Pandemic. They would eventually open in Palm Desert, but the one time we were able to go, they were too busy to seat us.)
We added a second, round fountain to the paver patio.
Mark and I had become engaged while we still lived in Colorado. But by 2019, we decided to marry since the Supreme Court had made gay marriages legal not long before. We needed to choose a date and started asking friends and family what date would allow most of them to attend. We settled on May 4th, not realizing that it was a significant date for Star Wars fans, "May the Fourth be with you", Roger Hunter informed me. We had already had
Star Trek: Discovery uniforms made for us, including the boots. We were pleased with the gay couple stationed on the ship. Mark also found an Internet site in China that made custom cake toppers that looked like the two partners. Mark also found that there was a gay-owned bakery that could make us a cake as well as luscious cupcakes to serve. He also found a small boutique that could provide the finger sandwiches and deviled eggs for the reception after the wedding ceremony.
We sent out invitations that featured those two palm trees next to the fountain above.
The orange flowers are in vase behind the cake, not on the cake.
Here we are emerging from the house to the strains of the theme from
Star Trek: Discovery.
Of course, I asked Mike Mebs to be my Best Man, and it was natural for Mark to pick Mike's partner, Alex, to be his.
Our handyman's wife was our minister.
Jesse, Mark, me, Ann and Lorri:
May 4, 2019, was one of the most enjoyable days of my entire life. Mark feels the same. I could not have imagined when I realized in the early 1960's that I was gay that I might meet my soulmate and marry him. Our rings:
Tabby hiding in her cylinder:
We attended Comic Con 2019, July 17-21 in San Diego and again sublet a space in the Prism Comics booth. We were able to wear our
Star Trek: Discovery uniforms each day. This was probably the most enjoyable Comic Con where we were able to sell and give away books. Because we were wearing Star Trek uniforms, we got feted at the Star Trek booth and were able to be almost first in line to meet Sir Patrick Stewart since he would be appearing in the first season of his new series
Star Trek: Picard. All I could say to the great actor after he signed my poster was, "Thank you."
Surge of Power creator and Superhero:
Mark about to greet Sir Patrick Stewart wearing his Captain Pike uniform:
Feted at the Star Trek booth with the transporter to one side of us. Everyone at the booth was helpful and friendly. Great time.
Each of us in front of the booth before the crowds were admitted.
After we returned from Comic Con, we had a second pergola installed because the heat is always intense in summer. We then added a second, round fountain under the first pergola.
Ann, Mark and me at the Cliff House.
Halloween 2019
Tabby 2019
Early on Monday, November 8th, Tabby slipped out of the house when Mark was taking trash out for trash day through the garage. He did not see her go. When I got up to feed Pudge and Tabby, I realized when she did not appear to eat that she was gone. For days we searched, and in the dark of night, too. We put up flyers throughout the neighborhood. We posted notices on FB and elsewhere. We checked at a local shelter. I put out a litter box and food and an article of my clothing in an attempt to lure her back. After a week, I got a notice that someone had seen her drinking water out of a gutter on Lincoln Street. We searched that area repeatedly, calling for her. Apparently, she did not want to be found.
Eight days after she disappeared, I got a garbled phone text message from a man who lived on Lincoln Street where she had been seen a couple of days earlier drinking from the gutter. The only two things I could read was a location between his house and the next house and the word "unfortunately". I assumed the worst and went to retrieve her body. She was lying on her right side. In the fine gravel, it was obvious that her legs had struggled a few times before she died because the gravel had been swished back and forth. Mark and I were devastated. Perhaps she knew she was dying and wished to go off somewhere to do so.
Not long after we arrived in Indio, Tabby had developed a fatty tumor at the base of her tail. The vet removed the ping-pong-ball-sized growth, and she recovered well. But perhaps her kidneys were failing. We simply did not know for sure. I posted the following photo of her on FB, and an artist friend created the image after that. We miss her to this day. She was 15.
Christmas 2019
Our Christmas was somber that year. Tabby was not there to sit under the tree, amidst the Coca Cola village buildings. We put up just one indoor tree. And I did not put out any of the village buildings.
It had rained in early December, so the outdoor decorations got wet.
Here are the outdoor decorations that year.
2020, The Pandemic
I found very few photographs on my phone from the many initial months of the Pandemic. I was so much more fortunate than most because I was still a contractor for IBM, working from home. Mark had been working for the Life Style Center at Indian Palms, and the facility was closed for awhile. They wore masks and moved some equipment outside for use later as scientists knew more about how the disease was transmitted. A few moronic owners in the community refused to wear masks. We heard that some owners got sick. Very sick. But I do not recall hearing that anyone in the community died. We stopped going to stores or to restaurants. We had so much delivered from amazon or Walmart. For a long time, we could not get Charmin toilet paper. Only the lousy stuff that Mike's daughter referred to as "gas station toilet paper". We did not have guests or visitors. We did not have our annual Thanksgiving or Christmas day dinners with Ann and Lorri, my sisters.
I did contribute to the Biden-Harris campaign by buying, and displaying, the following yard signs.
We celebrated Halloween that year, even more than in previous years. But we put candy in bags and set the bags on a table at the edge of the driveway. We wore
Star Trek: Discovery medical uniforms, and we wore masks and stayed way back if any kids approached our property, typically with their parents.
And, of course, when the vaccines became available, and they were properly distributed, not everyone got vaccinated, and some were even defiant in their opposition to science and smart health. We had uniformly gotten vaccinated against polio in the 1950's and early 1960's. We had gotten small pox vaccinations. But Trump had gotten so many riled up and paranoid and just plain mean. That would only get worse.
The Thanksgiving table was set for the two of us that year. We provided plates of everything for Ann and Lorri who came to the door and took their food away. (Ann would still travel, and Lorri worked at a Walmart, so we could not afford to be in prolonged or direct contact with either.)
2020 was yet another Christmas in Indio without Tabby. And with so many Pandemic deaths in America and world wide, we went crazy decorating, outside especially. This was a "forget your troubles come on get happy" time in our house.
A friend of my sister's, Jane, who has dogs and loves them, gave us a lovely cat ornament because we lost Tabby. We hung it, along with several Justice League figures, on the indoor bubble light tree in 2020.
The lone indoor tree that year.
Tabby's scratch cylinder we put outside. In our attempt to lure Tabby back in 2019, we had instead lured a black cat that had been TNR'ed and had come around to eat the food we had left out for Tabby. Mark would call him Buster, and he would become a permanent fixture on our patio to this day, along with a couple of his buddies whom we also acquired over the years, Max and Benny.
Again, our Christmas dinner table was just for us two.
That 2020 season when nobody could attend Dodgers stadium in person, they asked for donations. You could have an enlarged photo of yourself displayed in a seat at the stadium. We got ours back before Christmas. These were ours when they were returned at the end of the baseball season.
You have to look closely to find our two photos. They put someone in between the two of us, unfortunately. From the right, we are the fifth row down, Mark is fourth to the left and I am on the other side of the person in between us, further to the left.
Here is a photo of our patio on February 16, 2021.
Not long before that, a woman in the community who rescues cats contacted Mark about a kitten she had acquired who needed a home. Her mother had been hit by a car; but before she died, she led the driver to her two babies near the road where she was hit. He took the mother and the two Tortie babies to a small, local shelter. They alerted a woman named Rose because they did not have the capacity to raise two, very young kittens. She nursed the two babies until they were able to be adopted. When we learned of a sibling through Laura, the local cat lady, we offered to take then both. They were so scared when we brought them home. We named them Vera (Ellen) and Veronica (Lake). Vera was the most fearful in those first few days, but that fearfulness would not last.
Here are the two of them eating from 2/19/2021. The second photo is of Pudge, looking at them eating. He eventually accepted them and they would eat together. The two would also try to sleep near him on the ottomans in the media room.
We visited the Marilyn statue in downtown Palm Springs on August 24.
Comic Con San Diego had not had a convention in 2020 because of the pandemic. Nor in the summer of 2021. But with the vaccines widespread and masks on every attendee, they created a Special Edition convention for 11/26 and 11/27 November. Because it was nowhere near as attended as a regular Comic Con, with not nearly enough vendors present, we were able to get a table in the small press space. Here I am in my Star Trek Christopher Pike uniform. The next photo was taken in our Town & Country hotel room. I am wearing the medical uniform for a later season of
Star Trek: Discovery. We sold or gave away a number of books during that shortened Con. However, we were never again able to get a small press table for San Diego. We were able to share a portion of a small booth with Prism Comics in 2022. But that was only a couple of hours each day. And sales, of course, were not very good, no way justifying the expense of the hotel and travel and meals.
Here are three photos from our Halloween decorations in 2021.
Here is Mark's holiday table for 2021:
Here are photos of our Christmas decorations that year.
I had put up the metallic green tree initially. Unfortunately, Vera and Veronica tried to lay up in the tree and mashed down the branches. I had to replace it with one of the LED spiral trees that we usually used out doors. They even bothered that tree somewhat, but it remained.
Here was the metallic green tree before the young girls destroyed it.
We would soon face a another tragedy in 2022. But before that, here are Pudge and the three girls.
You read correctly. The smaller Tortie is Bella. She was found wandering around a street in our community as a small girl by herself. Of course, we added her. We also took in older Hannah, another Tortie, who was gong to be taken to a shelter. The single mother was moving her young son and daughter to Montana, with their two dogs. Hannah did not like dogs, so she had retreated to a closet to avoid them. The two young children stood silently in the entrance of our home as we took in their cat. Their mother seemed glad to be rid of her, but the children seemed truly saddened,. Hannah lives in our media closet. She did not take to our cats, but she seems content in her bed on the shelf unit in the closet. She has her own litter box. As one cat woman told me, it's better than being in a shelter where she might not have been adopted and might have been put to sleep.
That May, Pudge was not doing well. We called in a mobile vet. She foresaw expensive, and likely unsuccessful, treatments regarding his urinary tract or bladder and kidneys. She recommended putting him to sleep. His passing has always left me bereft. He was one of the very last ties I had to Denver and his and Tabby's lives there with me. He was 19 and I had had him longer than any previous pet. Here is Vera, exploring the package of mementoes the Vet gave us when we showed for his ashes.
With Comic Con in San Diego becoming financially and physically out of reach, we turned to WonderCon in Anaheim. In 2022, we had our first Small Press Table against the wall, just down from a food court. We did OK selling and giving away RAoF books. WonderCon was a start, and our only major option.
Here I am behind our table. The second photo is me with a Trekkie by the Prism booth. (I split time between my table and the Prism booth, but this would be for the last time. Prism could no longer afford the increasingly expensive large booths at Comic Con. They had to go with a smaller booth that only allowed them to sponsor an author in a corner of that booth for a couple of hours each day.)
We would stay for two nights at the convenient Hilton Hotel next door to the Anaheim Convention Center. During each Con, we would pay for our Small Press Table for the following year.
We attended QCon and had our own large table. We sold and gave away a few more books. We entered the Cos Play contest with our
Star Trek: Lower Decks uniforms but did not win.
In July, we attended what would likely be our final Comic Con visit. We had a couple of hours each day in the Prism Booth. But the few sales could not justify the four-night hotel expense at the Town & Country, nor the food we had to buy, nor the gasoline a round-trip to San Diego cost.
Mark at a nearby seafood restaurant we enjoyed.
In September we adopted Buddy. We had no idea he would grow into such a large cat as the months went by. He had been rescued by another cat lady in the community. She was going to have to return him to a shelter after she cleared up his respiratory illness. We could not let that happen.
In November, I bought a new carpet for the dining room. It caused the space to pop.
We went crazy indoors and out of doors that Halloween of 2022. I bought several "Spooky Town" buildings for inside the house on the kitchen island.
Again, for Christmas that year, we had to go minimalist with an indoor tree. The three girls left this tree alone.
Out of doors, we likely had the most spectacular decorations yet.
We had rain at one point.
The year 2023 was certainly our worst in Indio. Perhaps one of the worst in my life. The Sales Manual and Announcement Letter teams had lost our beloved IBM manager in 2022. Brian Shipley in the fall of 2022 was forced into retirement. He had been my supervisor and manager and coworker at various times during my 31 years working on the IBM Sales Manual. In January of 2023, we were informed that our jobs would end in June of 2023. Mark had never resolved the issue of the Aurora house with his niece who said nasty things to him in a contentious phone call and then unfriended me on a social media site that same night. Times were going to be lean, going forward. I would apply for unemployment insurance after two weeks had passed in July. But I somehow failed to read the fine print and my benefits were tied up for months. Lean times indeed existed through the summer and fall of 2023. That would continue well into and through 2024.
The worst part for me personally was that I did not know how to deal with retirement. I was 73 and had worked since I was a senior in high school in 1967. Certainly, I had been unemployed a few times in my life: When I was fired from Kaman in the Fall of 1972 after Marine OCS. When I was forced to resign from the Air Force in October of 1979. After the Teacher Education Program ended and I could not find a full-time secondary teaching job in 1989. But that was all in the distant past.
When the IBM job ended, several weeks later I was called by my contract company about another IBM job that they thought I would be perfect for. However, the job requirements changed and I was no longer a perfect fit. I was permanently out of work. And in the fall of 2023, I turned 74. I would still get up early each morning, walk to the media room to watch
Morning Joe after I turned on my home computer. But my IBM laptop had been sent back at the end of June of 2023. I was faced with a void in my life.
In June of 2023, before my job ended, we had our table at QCon in West Hollywood. We actually came in second in the Cos Play Contest, quite trilled at getting the trophy. But the location of our table, hemming us in between two popular tables, and with bears hanging around in front of our table for much of the day, blocking our vision, we did a terrible business that day.
In the fall, I took a number of photos of flowers in our front yard.
Here are photos from Halloween of 2023.
Mark's holiday table for 2023:
Here are photos of our Christmas decorations in 2023: (We lost several of your favorite inflatables. Without realizing it, Mark had packed away too many in one tub with moisture. The Christmas train, the Penguin Snow Globe that we had had for years, and the helicopter were dead.)
I took a gamble that the cats would not bother small, indoor Christmas trees. That ended up being true.
Here are our three outdoor cats, Max, Buster and Benny.
On February 2, 2024, we realized that our leased Taos was going to have to be returned by year's end. Mark bought a 2023 Tiguan:
The cat lady in the community who gave us Buddy, offered us Vinnie. She had rescued him from a trailer park where he was sick with a respiratory infection. She had nursed him back to health but was otherwise going to have to take him back to the trailer park even though she realized he was quite tame and adorable. We could not allow that to happen.
We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly at WonderCon 2024. However, we had the worst sales and book give away ever of any Convention. I was incredibly disappointed. We had done so well, the best ever, during WonderCon 2023. But in 2024, we only sold five books over the three-day Con. Free book giveaways were also extremely poor. Our Star Trek: Discovery uniforms were quite popular, as was our table. But the books themselves drew so little interest, we were disheartened. The crowds on this Easter weekend seemed more family oriented. Was our table too gay? Nothing was much different than the year before when we did so well. Was the super-hero phase over? I did have one woman stop by the table to tell me that she had finally read the entire series and thoroughly enjoyed it. That made my day, I told her.
This is what I posted when I copied the following paragraphs below over to my social media site:
I rather wrapped up my blog posts this morning, chronicling my life in words and photos from the early 1950's until this Spring at WonderCon. The final paragraphs are provided below.
As the Stage Manager warns in OUR TOWN, my final two sentences "may hurt your feelings", but having experienced so many people in my life passing on, I am not sure what else can be said about our individual lives and times on this Earth.
In my first novel in the Rainbow Arc of Fire series, the main character wonders early on if he will ever reach a time where he can connect the dots of his entire life and determine what it was all about. I believe I have reached that time. For some of us, the cartoonist Jules Feiffer had one of his characters look at the disappointments in her life and come to the conclusion that while she was able to stand up to each individual disappointment, as it occurred, looking back at all of those many disappointments in one lump sum, she did not think she could stand up to it. I, on the other hand, having spent most of my life alone, have significantly lived the last eleven years of my life with Mark. In the words of the late poet Robert Frost, in the poem THE ROAD NOT TAKEN, "...that has made all the difference."
Several weeks ago, I came across an online article about the Air Force's plans for the future of the nation's ICBM's. They have developed a new ICBM to replace the venerable MMIII's that we missile officers watched over for so many decades. More importantly, after all of the years that the Launch Control Centers (LCC's) were constructed underground and buried back in the 1960's, they will no longer serve to control the new missiles. Those old LCC's are being dug up, demolished and replaced. Where thousands of missile crewmen such as I worked over those several decades, they will be no more. New LCC's will be built in their place and likewise buried for the new missile crew forces of the future.
In a related matter, while I have no confirmation, when those of us on the IBM announcement letter and sales manual teams were let go last year, none of the IBM divisions had the manpower to do what we did. Likely, the sales manual especially might even have been suspended. It would be no more. When I first began to work on the Sales Manual team in 1992, they printed the Sales Manual as a long row of paper documents for each product. The end result was so huge, heavy and unwieldy that Brian, my boss, determined to replace that inefficient form of communication with a CD-ROM. For years we produced and distributed the IBM Sales Manual that way, even to the point where those of us on the team would package them in bubble mailers, slap a label on each one, and carry a filled bin to the IBM Boulder mailing center for distribution. Finally, even the CD-ROM was dispensed with by the Sales Manual becoming available online only. And, of course, the IBM site where we worked, first opened in the 1950's, is also no more. IBM sold it off. (I was told that the Sales Manual had been moved from Dallas to Boulder in the late 1980's, not that long before I joined in 1992.)
The Kaman Corporation facility in Colorado Springs where I worked through most of the 1980's was sold years ago. I am not even sure that the facility is there any more. The old WWII Army barracks where I taught part-time English, history, humanities and communications classes through the 1980's for Pike's Peak Community College were torn down back in the early 1990's. The WWII-era Marine OCS barracks where we slept and trained in 1972 were also torn down and replaced, possibly in the 1980's.
When I was back in White Cloud, KS, for Uncle Robert's funeral at least a decade ago, my Cousin Jim Rowe took me on a drive north of the town (we were headed to a Dairy Queen in the Nebraska village of Rulo). There had been a bridge across the Missouri River connecting Missouri with Nebraska, completed in 1939. Mom, a trombone player for the White Cloud High School band, performed at the dedication of that new bridge in 1939, along with her band mates. But, as Cousin Jim drove us in his pickup truck, I was surprised to see that the old bridge had been bypassed by a brand new, modern bridge over the river, completed in 2013. (The old bridge, deemed too narrow for larger, more modern vehicles, was torn down in 2014.)
Only the several houses or apartments where I lived in Tampa, FL; Santa Ana, Whittier, Orange, & South Gate, CA; the BOQ in Minot AFB, ND; the house in Colorado Springs, CO; the Park Humboldt Apartments (with a new name) and the condo in Denver, CO; are still where they were when I lived there. Otherwise, the work I did at several jobs over the entire span of my life has been obliterated by time and changing circumstances.
At a certain age, one begins to feel as if one's entire life's work is being swept away by progress or convenience. "They don't do that kind of work anymore, at least not the way you did it or where you did it so long ago."
Eventually, one ends up in the ground, or a box or urn, or scattered to the four winds and forgotten. The world moves on.
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