A Life in Four Colors Part Sixty

Our lives changed in so very many ways once we moved to Marietta.

You wouldn't think a move would make so much difference, but it did. Cedartown (and even Rome, eighteen miles away) was relatively sedate and stable; the wheels of change turned very slowly there, and we were young enough that many of the places that had been a part of our childhood lives still existed.

But Marietta in 1977 was a nexus for people in their twenties and thirties trying to build a new life for them in ever-growing metro Atlanta. When we moved into our apartment on Franklin Road in Marietta, many of our neighbors were nearly the same age as us (in contrast to our lives in Cedartown, where the neighbors around us were at least a quarter-century older than us, and some of them had children older than us). There was an energy to apartment life in Savannah Oaks that we had never experienced in Cedartown. 

In 1977, Marietta had a few 24 hour restaurants, a couple of 24 hour grocery stores, 24 hour drug stores--it seemed like a place that never stopped to rest. There was a vitality that the young emigrés brought with them, and it fed into our awareness that this was very different from anything either of us had experienced before. We had seen glimpses of it during our weekend visits to our friend Larry Mason, who lived across town in the Buford Highway corridor, but we never imagined that within a few years, we'd be right in the middle of it all. This may sound fairly insignificant now, but to someone coming into this world after living in a  town where pretty much everything closed at 9pm, it was a Wizard of Oz moment.

(Those of you who remember life before COVID have seen the world shrink in a mirror image of this. All those 24 hour stores started closing when COVID scared off some of their customer base, and few of them have returned to the pre-COVID boom era. I remember walking to Kroger or Walgreens at 2 in the morning to enjoy the night air as I made an impulse purchase, or driving th Walmart or Kmart at 3 or 4 am. Alas, the entire 24-hour economy seems to be one casualty of COVID that will not recover...)

With Susan's new job came more money--but with our move came more expenses. Even so, after paying $490 a month in rent for our two-bedroom townhouse apartment (a steep increase from the $75 a month we paid for a two-bedroom rental house in Cedartown), we still had unprecedented levels of disposable income. We also had health insurance, which we never had when each of us was in school; we had a retirement fund, which we had never even thought about in our early twenties; and we had comforts like central air conditioning, new appliances, and two and a half bathrooms.  While this is the sort of thing that a lot of people consider basic today, it was a significant step up from the simpler life we had lived in the first six years of our marriage. 

This was the sort of life that we had envisioned experiencing at some point--but we never imagined that we would be propelled into this life so quickly.

I know that it will surprised no one to learn that with more money came more books, more comics, more fanzines, more music... more of everything that had been a part of our lives ever since the time we met in 1968. Our entertainment budget grew almost ten-fold over the first few months. Where I used to have to make decisions about one or two albums a month, I could now buy the music I wanted as soon as it was released. I had Steve Leaf at the Book Nook hold one of every comic book for me every week so that I could pick up the entire stack every weekend. I started ordering more books from Donald M. Grant and Arkham House and a number of small specialty publishers. 

For fans, the things we collect have a tendency to expand exponentially while the space we have for them expands mathematically. So even though we had a much larger space than we had ever lived in before, we were rapidly filling up our library (the second bedroom). I had to move some of my comics into one of the storage buildings at my parents' house in Rome because I was buying so many books there wasn't room for them. But that wasn't a worry—we were intoxicated by the opportunities that came with life in Marietta.

Just a few months after we moved, I ventured into what seemed like the outer territories of Cobb County to check out a new store I had heard about, a place with used records, used books, some James Bond collectibles, and some back issue comics. I was intrigued by the store's name.

Dr. No's.

The owner, Artie Decker, had come out of the music industry where he worked on the promotional side of things. He had access to lots of promo albums from the label for whom he worked, and he had friends who worked for other labels who could supply him with surplus promo copies to stock his used record shelves. He had bought out the inventory of a used bookstore in metro Atlanta to fill his used bookshelves, and a friend had sold him about ten boxes of comics to start his inventory. Artie knew a lot about music, a bit about books... but nothing about comics. He did know, however, that it was a market that was growing rapidly for Alex Nunan at Book Nook on the other side of town, and he wanted to be Marietta's Book Nook.

Our fanzine Future Retrospective had been sufficiently well received that we were on the comp list for a lot of SF and fantasy publishers--and a lot of the books we got were reissues or paperbacks releases of hardcover titles that we already had. I began taking those books to Artie to trade in, because SF was like gold in the used book market in the 1970s: it was the ultimate printed commodity, and he would offer universal trade credit for anything he carried in order to get SF (most stores only let you trade genre for genre in books, and never for comics or records). 

As I read the comics I bought at Book Nook, I discovered that some titles didn't appeal to me, so I would take them to Artie to trade them in for books from his boxes. This piqued his curiosity even more, since I had comics he had never even heard of. "I want to get into new comics," he said, "but I don't know anything about them." I assured him that I did, and that for a modest payment in new comics credit, I could help him to order properly on a few titles to test out the four-color waters.

Artie was enthusiastic about that arrangement. As a result, within a few months of my move to Marietta, I began my first limited foray into actual comics retailing, albeit in a behind-the-scenes capacity.

I had no idea just how much this was going to change my life over the next few years...

"I Swear It's Not Too Late..."

Soon after Susan died in 2019, I began a still-ongoing process of evaluating my life to determine what I possessed and what possessed me, so to speak. There were many things that I had kept for years without even looking at. Susan's death helped me to realize that in many cases, the joy is in the memory. But sometimes the burdens of owning Too Many Things inspire changes. This is one of the reasons I sold my comics collection a couple of months ago. I still love comics, but I have collected editions of the things I truly love, and don't have to have the physical comics any longer (and this was the fourth time I've sold my collection in my lifetime, so it wasn't an unprecedented decision).

In the past few years, I have re-homed Susan's antique cross-stitch collection, as well as her cross-stitch flosses and linens; our voluminous 25,000 book mystery collection; over a dozen items of furniture (some no longer needed, some that reflected tastes that have now changed); over 500 laserdiscs; an enormous amount of clothing; multiple sets of dishes and small appliances; and a huge assortment of holiday decor items that I had not used in years. Along the way, I found a box that I had packed up in 1986, when I moved from my Kennesaw home to my first Marietta home; it had not been unboxed in the almost 40 years since. I looked through the items once, smiled a the memories as I said goodbye, and donated what would be useful before I discarded the rest.

Recently, I referenced the whole "Swedish death cleaning" concept, and a friend who is a part of the Dr. No's team laughed and said, "I started to say something about that but thought it might be taken the wrong way." I assured her it wasn't. While that's not the inspiration for my cleaning (my primary goal is to implement a five-year plan that would enable me to sell the overflow house after I have sufficiently downsized), it reflects a similar attitude. When Mom died, when Dad died, and when Susan died, I spent a lot of time going through the accumulations of three lifetimes and I became aware how many of those things had not brought joy into Mom's or Dad's or Susan's lives for many years prior to their deaths. It took me many months to go through all of those things and deal with them, and in some cases I had no real idea what to do with them (JM Early was a lifesaver when it came to re-homing cross-stitch and quilting materials).

I always recall the final moments of Citizen Kane, when the workers are destroying the accumulations of Charles Foster Kane's personal life (largely the items he had boxed up to save after his mother's death). To him, those items had meaning; to everyone else, they were junk. I didn't want my junk to be a burden on those who survive me--and I didn't want my junk to be a burden on me.

I am lucky that my memory remains sharp and vivid at 72. I carry the wonderful memories of every item that has brought me joy in my life, even though I haven't seen some of them in almost six decades (I still smile when I think about my Man from UNCLE gun and shoulder-holster set). I can get rid of some of those items and still have those memories. And if I someday get to the point that my memory isn't so sharp and vivid--well, having the items probably wouldn't do me much good at that point anyway.

This is not a somber, melancholy, or depressing process. It is a celebration of the myriads of things that have helped to make my life so wonderful, and a recognition that life is always an ongoing process of change. Life is not and should not be a museum of one's past. It should always be a process of finding joy and contentment in life's present, and an eagerness to experience life's future.