Scarlet Letters

The science fiction world lost another great one tonight, as Victor Milan left us. Pneumonia as a complication of myeloma. Dammit. Active since the late 1970s, Vic has  an impressive bibliography  under his own and several other names in a career spanning more than 90 books and 43 years. Winner of the Prometheus Award, Vic divided his time between media tie-ins and original fiction, writing both Star Trek  and dinosaurs, romance and BattleTech. In his own words, he was a cowboy, semi-pro actor, a radio DJ, pizza deliverer, tech support, and oh yeah, a writer. For some reason, I have no problem imagining Vic as a cowboy, and a much harder time imagining him as a pizza boy. He was well-known as a gracious and passionate writer, a gentleman of the first order. He lived in Albuquerque, but returned to our region every year as the perennial emcee of the Archon masquerade - a role he has held as long as I can remember. Faced with cosplay of all kinds and skits both terri...

I was doing all right until I dropped the sugar. We'd gotten the bad news at church Sunday morning: Candace had taken a turn for the worse. Candace Sauermann, our dear friend and long-time church family member, who had been battling her third round with cancer when she caught pneumonia. But we thought she'd been doing better. Candace, who a mutual friend once described as the sweetest, kindest woman in Edwardsville and who my son once described as "teddy bears and rainbows." He knew her better than most of my friends in our grownup-y world, because Candace was his Sunday school teacher from the time he could walk. Her unfailing patience and dedication to the kids of St. Andrew's is reflected in every child who passed through our red doors for the last two generations. Candace, the engineer who dedicated many years of her life to designing the roads and bridges that carry us through this metro-east, working for the state department of transportation before mo...

He called me his daughter. It was half-affection, half-running joke, because we couldn't have looked more different. But there was no doubt that Rudy Wilson was everyone's dad, complete with dad jokes, and his death this week is a blow to the entire community. He was a quiet groundbreaker, a man dedicated to education throughout his life. He was one of the first black faculty members at SIUE when it was a fledgling campus in 1970. He had already broken ground as the first black teacher at a California college, and when he came here, he taught in the school of education and became the assistant provost for cultural and social diversity. Part of his job was to mentor student teachers, including visiting them as they worked in area high schools. This became a problem at a local high school and its all-white faculty, according to multiple sources. It was indicated that he was not wanted, and therefore, the university informed them that they would get no more student teache...

I've never been all that good at the traditional Thanksgiving toast, where we go around the table and say what we're giving thanks for this year. Partly because my answer is always the same: my family. I am blessed with a wonderful family that loves me and that I love, and we all mostly get along, too. I am blessed with a husband and son whom I adore and for whom I cook bountiful meals, and they seem to like me okay. My favorite part of any holiday... or weekend, or spare few hours... is snuggling in with my menfolk to watch movies and laugh together. Our family "adventures" (as I always called them when Boy was small) are the highlights of my life. This year the family circle is a little smaller. We've faced that before, of course; I've lost several family members, as has Jim. This year has been tougher than most, however. I've not written in this blog for quite a while because it didn't feel right to post anything until I could write about Gram...

I'm writing this on the day the world lost a good man. It won't post for a while yet, because his family doesn't know.* It seems somehow wrong that those of us who worked with him know before his family does. But sometimes that's the way it happens. Shortly after work tonight - Wednesday night - I was killing time in a Wal-mart checkout line by cruising Facebook. I saw a post from a local police department stating that they had found an unconscious man in jogging attire on the running trail of a local park. They were unable to save him, and he was carrying no ID. They asked for the public's help in identifying him. I hadn't seen anything on our website about it, so I called it in to the newsroom. I asked one of the guys on the copy desk if we already had someone working on the unidentified man in the park. He said no, and I told him about the police department's post. "Mainer's missing," he replied. And heaven help me, for a brief secon...

Today is our Relay for Life. Usually I drive folks crazy in the weeks leading up to Relay with exhortations and incentives to donate, but life intervened this year and I've only issued the one plea. This is probably why as of now, I've raised $10 toward my personal $300 goal, and my team is still nearly $1,000 short of its $3,000 goal. I am speaking at tonight's Survivor Dinner (no, I'm not a cancer survivor, I just run my mouth a lot.) Below is the speech I intend to give. Please read it, and if you are so moved, consider donating before 10 p.m. CST. It reflects the number of people in my life who have been touched by cancer - at times, it feels like it is all around me. And if you're reading this, I imagine it has touched you, too. Thank you for your time. Fighting the Beast I’m Elizabeth Donald, captain of the St. Andrew’s team . I’ve been walking Relays off and on for 18 years, most of them here in Edwardsville. And I feel a little funny being the on...

Goddammit. Sadness comes, of course, but whenever I lose a friend to cancer my automatic reaction seems to be fury. I've been pissed off since Rachael died, and each time since it gets worse. This year has been particularly bad: at last count, we've had seven friends and family members diagnosed with cancer, and had already lost one only weeks after her diagnosis. And now another friend is lost to us. Shorty. His real name was Stuart Bergman, but I never once heard anyone call him Stuart. Nearly seven feet tall, of course his name was Shorty. He was known to everyone who traveled the con circuit in the mid-south - after all, he was hard to miss. Shorty. A gentle giant with a bellowing voice and an omnipresent bottle of the mysterious "blue stuff," an alcoholic mixture of his own devising that left your mouth numb if you were foolish enough to bolt the shot. Shorty. Master of the dealer's room, the man who corralled all of us in and out of the hall year aft...

Those of you who follow our family on Facebook know we were hit with some rough times this past month. Jim's mother passed away, and while it was not wholly unexpected given her health and age, it was a heartbreaking loss that has affected us all deeply, especially Jim. It's hard to know what to write, because her story really isn't mine to tell. What I know of Pauline Adams came largely from stories told by others. I know she was a stalwart mother of twelve children, ten of whom survived infancy, nine who lived to mourn her. I know she had the bravery to stand on her own as a divorced woman in the early 1970s, which can't have been easy, especially since (I think) at least seven of her children were still at home. And I know how much she loved Dick Adams, Jim's stepfather. They married when Jim was very young, and Papa Dick, as they called him, must have been one hell of a man. There's hardly a person in Jim's very extended family whose voice doesn'...

I've told this story before. But it bears repeating, given the death of Sir Terry Pratchett today. The author was mourned by more than his friends and family; he was mourned by the many readers who loved his work and had the honor of meeting him and being charmed by him, as I was, on one of the more nervous days of my life. In 2007, I attended a convention where the famous Terry Pratchett was the guest of honor. I was a nominee for an award and much consumed with my own panels, making sure there were people on the booth in the dealer's room, assisting my friend with her book release, and other such convention business. On Saturday, Pratchett had been scheduled for a signing one hour before me. Only one hour, which meant that by the time he was done, the line still stretched to Spain. There were a handful of us supposed to go on after Pratchett, which is a bit like scheduling a bar band to follow the Beatles. Fearing a riot, the powers that be kept Mr. Pratchett in place and...

This morning was spent in the company of current and former co-workers, as we shared stories of the late Jayne Matthews and celebrated her life with laughter. That's what she wanted, of course; she had told me years ago that she would be annoyed if no one was telling funny stories at her funeral. Jayne, we gave the best we had. In my case, by the way, I told the story of Jayne's " divorce presen t" to me in 2003. I didn't need to preface it with explaining Jayne's opinions on marriage, because as soon as I mentioned it, there was a scattering of rueful laughter. Everyone who ever met Jayne knew her opinions on marriage. We celebrated her life and her passion, and bid her farewell the best we knew. But that wasn't the only goodbye today. My mother informs me that earlier today, my adoptive godmother died. By the way, it may be January but 2015 is fired. This takes a little explaining. As is the tradition of the Episcopal Church, I was baptized as an...

Today I finished my annual report for our Relay for Life team. Of course, it was due yesterday. I'm a reporter, which means I'm deadline-oriented... only, you know, sometimes those deadlines kinda creep up on a person. What. I'm not team captain because I'm organized, I'm team captain because I was the one without a chair when the music stopped. Silliness aside, we had a good year. We topped our goal by more than $600, which means in the ten years that St. Andrew's has had a Relay for Life team , we've raised more than $25,000 for the American Cancer Society. I have a fantastic team: we are small but mighty. And we pulled it off last year despite me being so terrifically distracted by weddings and babies and an above-average busy year for Ye Olde Newspaper that I think I actually forgot to do one whole fundraiser. Still, I fired off my report, and then Boy and I spent way too much time going through old photos. It was ostensibly for Throwback Thursday,...

Dave Wenrich met Lorraine Costa in a high school band room in 1941. They flirted in that 1940s teenager way, and she even sat on his lap in a crowded band bus on the way to a lake picnic. But he never got around to asking her out, and proper 1940s girls didn't ask boys on a date. Dave graduated a year before Lorraine, the war began and they went their separate ways. They had similar lives: both remained dedicated to music, both married and had children. Dave did his time in the Navy, graduated from UC Berkeley and helped found the alumni band. Lorraine became a violinist and helped found the Merced Symphony Orchestra Association. Time passed, as it always does. Lorraine became a mother and a grandmother, passing her love of music on to my mother, to me and eventually to my son. My grandfather died in 2001, and some time after that a bad fall pretty much ended Lorraine's lifelong dance with the violin. By then, however, my son had picked up the habit, with Gram's enthu...

Goddammit. Just when I thought we were going to get out of this year without losing anyone else, Fred Grimm has a stroke, and isn't expected to make it to New Year's. So how is that allowed, since Fred is eternal? Fred and Stephania Grimm have been friends for years. I don't always end up friends with the folks who run the cons; cons are business, and I try to be a professional. But once you meet Fred and Steph, you're not just friends; you're family. That's one reason why Hypericon has been such a blast each year: it's like a big, rowdy family reunion with costumes. I introduced Jim to the Grimms when we did Hypericon earlier this year. We were talking about Fred stories, and Jim said, "But I only met him that once." I said, "And that's all it takes. You experienced Fred." And that's really how I think of him. His personality fills the room. The eternal smartass - God, what a smartass! He loved reading and collected autho...

I want you to meet David Black. I met David when I hired him to be my son's tutor. Ian was struggling with middle school, ADHD and generally being a teenager. He was very good at being late to class, ignoring his homework and not paying attention; he was very bad at passing the seventh grade. His teachers were giving up on him. I didn't have the luxury of giving up on my son, and David was our lifeline. Hired with the generous help of my folks, David was more like Ian's warden than his tutor. Every day after school, he picked up my son and took him to the library. They studied American government and English and fractions every afternoon, with an extra dose of study skills and work ethic. David had just graduated from the university with his teaching degree, but it was the recession, and he hadn't snagged a full-time job. So Ian became his classroom. He had worked extensively with special-education kids as a student teacher and came with glowing recommendations th...