"Too Wonderful for Anybody to Realize..."

 Life can be stranger, more unpredictable, and more wonderful than we can ever imagine.

It's been the better part of two years since I last posted here. So many things have changed since then, and as a result my life is better in ways I could not have imagined.

Karen and I got married; in fact, we celebrated our first anniversary on October 30th of this year. It has been everything that a marriage should be--two people in love with one another, sharing our commonalities and celebrating our differences. We haven't known each other for our entire lives, so we take joy in discovering more about each other's lives. Little things will come up in conversation that will lead to fascinating stories that fit into the puzzle of our lives. Each of us wants to know more about one another's life prior to our meeting, and the people who were important to us in those years. When Susan died in 2019, I envisioned a life of solitude; I had no idea I would find Karen, a kind, wonderful, caring woman who would help me to discover (and rediscover) so many of life's joys. 

Karen and learned that we both love dancing. She is very good, and I am very persistent. And through our interest in dance, we met our new friends Tatyana Heath and James Riley, the owners and instructors of Ballroom Dancetime. Getting to know them has been a wonderful experience as well, and I appreciate them more with each passing week.

I have gotten to know Karen's family--her four children and her six grandchildren, and her sister Nancy and Nancy's sons--and through them, I get to re-experience the love of my own family. I never had children and never thought it mattered, but I find it intriguing that several months after Karen and I became serious with one another I actually had dreams about Lulu, Donny, and Emma, the children that Karen and I might have had. Having lost my own family  a while back (both parents died, and my beloved sister still lives, but she is so devastated by Alzheimer's that I feel like I have lost all that made Kim such a wonderful person), it is touching to witness the love between Karen and her family.

We made a lot of changes to the house--adding a covered porch, replacing wallpaper with paint in colors that made the rooms warm and engaging, adding new furniture that reflected our styles and tastes, streamlining and rearranging for more eye appeal and flow, and getting rid of furnishings that had remained for years simply due to inertia. My mother used to redecorate and repaint the family house every decade or so, and now I see why--the changes help you to appreciate your home in all new ways.

Karen retired in the summer of 2022, and that has given her time to pursue interests ion music, acting, and writing. It makes me very happy to see her finding the time to be creative; I have been lucky enough to have that sort of time for many years now (although I'll have even more in 2023 (but more about that in a couple of paragraphs), and now we both have that freedom. It also means that we both are free to travel--something I haven't really done at all in the 21st Century, due to the chronic health issues that Susan suffered until her death. (Susan couldn't travel with me, and I had no interest in traveling without her.) Now Karen and I can enjoy time away from home and appreciate it even more when we return!

Our Wednesday dinner group has grown to a Wednesday-dinner-and-Friday-lunch group, and both gatherings are always festive and fascinating. Charles Rutledge, James Tuck, Darrell Grizzle, Eddie Coulter, and Ralph Groff are regulars for at least one of those meals every week, and we have a number of occasional lunchtime companions who join us as their schedules allow. Having such good friends as these is remarkable. I talk to so many people I know who lament the absence of good friends from their lives and I feel even more lucky to have so many.

After 35 and a half years of weekly deadlines, I have stepped away from Comic Shop News as of mid-December. I never dislike doing CSN, but in recent months I wasn't enjoying it the way I once did, and there were other issues that made preparing a weekly publication more challenging than it had been. So my business partner Ward Batty and I put CSN up for sale and found buyers who have a game plan to keep the publication going. It's fascinating to see something you co-created continue after your own involvement comes to an end, and I'm eager to see where they take it--but I'm also happy to have time to write what I want when I want.

Alas, there were some sorrows. We lost my beloved cat Mischa in the summer of 2021 at the age of 18, and eleven months after that her sister Anna passed just a week before her twentieth birthday. Losing a feline companion is always heartbreaking, but it's also one of those things that you realize you will have to endure from the very moment you let a cat into your heart. I found some solace in the facts that I gave the two cats the best lives they could possibly have had, they lived longer than any cats I ever owned, and they were happy and loved until the very end. For now, I will refrain from replacing them; this is the first time in 45 years I have not had a pet, and I'm not sure I could ever find two cats who could fit my personality as well as Anna and Mischa did, so I'm not going to try (at least not for now).

But as 2022 comes to an end, I am appreciate of all the joys that have come into my life since the last time I wrote for this blog. I promise that I'll be here more frequently from here on (it's up to you to decide if that's good news or a threat). Those of you who had followed my "Life in Four Colors" entries will see more about my life as that series continues, and I'll even use the blog as a place to talk about comics, now that I no longer have a weekly Comic Shop News deadline. But most of all, not much'a nothin' will be a place where I can once again discuss my life and the things that make it better--just as it was when I first launched not much'a nothin' as a fanzine back in 1968!