Category Archives: Uncategorized

When Things Happen Too Fast

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When I got up this morning, this was the furthest thing from my mind. Two days ago he was bashing his head into my feet while I was trying to work, and I was saying, “Dammit, Lazarus, knock it off!” Last night he seemed very tired. This morning he wasn’t hungry. Tonight we know he has liver cancer and is bleeding into his abdomen. We don’t know the how, the why, or most of all the when. But he’s leaving us. Fourteen years went by too fast. Hope these last days slow down a little. At least, on his meds tonight, he’s not hurting. Tomorrow he may be able to come home and spend his last days with us. However many there are.

Dammit, Lazarus…

 

Farewell, Yoji Kondo

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Yoji presenting the Heinlein Medal at Balticon 47, with Michael Flynn.

Yoji Kondo, scientist, science fiction author, mentor and friend to me for the past 36 years, has died. Like my father, who died in May, Yoji’s last years were spent amidst diminishing brain function as dementia claimed one of the greatest intellects I’ve ever known.

Yoji introduced me (indirectly) to the works of Robert Heinlein. I say indirectly because, in the beginning, I was just a punk kid who wanted to date his daughter Beatrice, and he was a respected scientist, an Aikido master, if I’m not mistaken the one of the two or three highest ranked practitioners of Aikido in the United States, and a friend to people like Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, the grandmasters of a field I desperately wanted to pursue. I didn’t speak much in his presence. I was intimidated.

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24 Years Ago This Evening…

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Our first program book cover by Sonia Hillios, an amazing artist who got her start doing our committee’s fanzines.

I was welcoming William Campbell, June Lockhart John DeLancie and about 1100 fans to Marriott’s Hunt Valley Inn for the first ever Farpoint convention. Actually, if memory serves, John arrived the morning of October 9th, and Bill and his lovely wife Tereza had arrived the previous night, and we had driven them to the Inner Harbor for dinner at their favorite local restaurant, The Chart House.

Farpoint had begun a year before, when OktoberTrek chair Sandy Zier-Teitler had confided in me that perhaps she didn’t want to hold a fourth OktoberTrek, even though it was a record-breakingly successful convention. Weekend sales clinched it–Sandy didn’t want to hold OktoberTrek 93; but, bless her, she was willing to let me take over her five-year contract with the hotel (at no small expense to herself.) I met with the committee and proposed a slimmed-down, lightweight convention that would return us to our small-town con roots, bring a single, fan favorite guest (George Takei), spend only $30,000, and meet its startup costs by selling lifetime memberships at $100 each.

We did bookmarks…

The committee talked me up to two guests (John DeLancie would be our co-headliner) and $45,000, a lot of money for a 20-something librarian to commit to backing. And they voted in an older, wiser fan, my mother-in-law Beverly Volker, as con chair. Continue reading →

I Just Finished – Superman (1939) #150

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As was typical of the times (1962), this issue contains three stories. The cover actually references the third and shortest of them, “When the World Forgot Superman.” These were the days when the editor (Mort Weisinger, if memory serves) would have the artist draw a sensational cover, depicting an incident likely to make a reader ask, “How could that ever happen?!” And then the writer would be told to make that happen in a story. In this case, Superman returns from a mission in space to find that no one in Metropolis knows who he is, although, appropriately, they still know Clark Kent. How could this happen? Well, the answer is pretty obvious, if you know your Superman lore.

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I Just Finished – Uncanny Avengers (2015) #27

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A satisfying conclusion to the Graviton story, although the resolution of Rogue’s brief brush with madness at the climax is a little abrupt. The story celebrates teamwork, which is what the Avengers are all about. And the words “Fantastic Four” are actually uttered! Johnny Storm is a welcome member of this team, but it would be nice to have him back where he belongs. The subplot where an attorney is trying to catch up with him, and surprises him at the end of a boxer-clad battle, is appropriately funny and mixes the mundane with the fantastic in the way the best Marvel tales always have. I’m reminded of the first appearance of Henry Peter Gyrich (although that was more sinister) or the earlier Avengers tale in which Janet Van Dyne (the original Wasp, and still a member of this team) inherited her father’s millions.

The House Where I Grew Up…

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Is 50 years old today, we’ve decided. That’s based on the day we moved in. We narrowed it down based on my brother’s memory of watching the first game of the 1967 World Series at our temporary home at the Valencia Motel, and subsequent games in our new home. (Amazing what the memory retains!) My sister remembered we moved in on a weekend, and that narrowed it down to Sunday, October 5th, 1967. I was but two, so I had nothing to contribute to the discussion.

Correction: We pulled the wrong day out of Google for 10/5/67. 1967’s calendar was actually identical to 2017’s. So the move-in date was probably October 7th. This is an early announcement, then. The house’s birthday is this Saturday. 

The house is pictured here in early 1969. Note the tar-paper-covered hole where a bay window was planned. It’s still not there. 50 years later, this unfinished house is back on the road to completion.

There’s a story in there somewhere, you say? Actually, there are a lot of them…

A Birthday Letter to my Father

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October 4th, 2017

Dear Daddy—

Today is your 95th birthday. I know you wanted to see it, and more after it. I can’t say that I wish you had seen it, not in the state you were in those last few months. But I wish you have lived as long as you wanted to, and that you could have enjoyed living. I guess that was the problem with those months—you weren’t enjoying them. I don’t think you were enjoying anything.

I took you to the doctor in January, after you’d spent three or four days of Christmas week in the hospital. We knew you had a failing aortal valve in your heart, a condition called aortal stenosis, where the valve becomes to stiff to open and close the way it needs to. We knew you were not a candidate for surgery. We did not know, until that day in the doctor’s office, that you had so little time left.

When your new doctor explained to us that your life expectancy was six to twelve months, I wasn’t sure what I felt. I looked at you. So often in the past I looked at you to give me the answer, to tell me how I should feel, to tell me how we were going to get through this. I knew that, this time, when I looked in your eyes, I wasn’t looking for those answers. I was only looking to see how you felt about being told you were about to die.

And when I saw you, I knew how I felt. I knew my heart was breaking. I had picked you up and driven you here. I had put on your flannel shirt, buttoning the cuffs exactly the way you liked them, tied your shoes, zipped up your coat and placed a step so you could get into the car. It was like getting a toddler ready to go somewhere. It was like bringing an innocent, frightened child to the doctor, to be told he was going to die.

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It’s Just Football! (Isn’t it?)

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All right, I said I was just going to do short reviews until I was ready to release pieces of a bigger project. Said bigger project is at 8,000 words, and I’m still mulling it over. But this only-reviews thing just ran headlong into the thing that everyone seems to be talking about: football players standing, not standing, kneeling, hiding in the locker room, etc, during the playing of the National Anthem.

So I feel moved to say, “It’s just football!”

Isn’t it?

No, it isn’t, and I know that. It’s not just a game, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry which is part of America’s civil religion. That’s not me being sarcastic, either. There is a recognized civil religion in this country, and pro football games are one of its sacred rituals. So, for a lot of us, those who would fail to behave as per accepted norms during one of the religious observances which are key to that ritual–i.e. those who are unwilling to stand for the National Anthem–are heretics.

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I’ve been off in my corner

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The boys are in my corner, at any rate.

Really. I’ve been hiding in a corner for all of 2017. You’ve barely heard from me at all, unless we had specific business to transact, or a family event to attend together.

Well, I’m coming out of my corner. Some. A little ways, maybe.

I want to tell you why I’ve been in hiding, but I don’t want to say too much.

I don’t really consider this vague-booking. Vague-booking is making a statement on Facebook (or, I guess, other social media) that grabs people’s attention, but doesn’t tell them what the hell you’re actually talking about. “I’m really upset with you. You know who you are. I think you suck.” That’s vague-booking.

Well, first, this is my blog, so I think that disqualifies my somewhat cryptic content. Second, I’m not hiding information from anyone because I want to taunt them, or because I’m trying to be mysterious. It’s just that I’ve gone through a hell of a lot in the past few months. A lot of it was painful. I’m not ready to talk about it in public. I may never be ready to talk about it in public.

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In Honor of Father’s Day

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My Dad isn’t here to spend Father’s Day with me. He died on May 6th, at the age of 94. This past Tuesday, we buried him in his native North Carolina mountains, after a funeral at which I delivered the eulogy. So, in honor of Father’s Day, here’s what I decided to tell people about my Dad:

That’s me on the blanket. My father is the one who’s obviously old enough to be my father.

The topic of today’s lecture is Snell’s Law. Snell’s Law describes the relationship between the angle of incidence of a light wave as it passes through a transparent medium, and the resulting refraction of that light. Which is a fancy way of telling you why sunlight looks different when you see it from the bottom of a swimming pool–because the light comes through water and twists and bends before you see it. Which is another way of saying that the way things look depends an awful lot on what you’ve come through before you see them.

Col. Charles Edwin Wilson Sr., US Air Force Retired, Physicist, Engineer, Teacher and researcher… my Daddy… came through a lot. And it definitely shaped how things looked to him.

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