I was born in 1964. I was five years old (just shy of my sixth birthday) when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I very clearly remember clustering around our old black and white television set to watch the lunarlanding, just as we later would watch the follow-up Apollo missions, Skylab and so on throughout the ’70s. I got caught up in the futurism which seemed to sweep everywhere that seemed to say we’d not only be traveling to the stars some time very soon, but we’d also have cities of tomorrow on the moon, under the ocean — everywhere. I have a copy of my annual primary school magazine that came out in 1971. Students were asked what they were going to be doing when they gew up. Aged 7, I wrote that I was going to be a geologist when I grew up and would live on Mars. I believed it in 1971 because it was believable then.

My friend girliejones is hosting a ‘Women in Music’ appreciation month.  There are a lot of artists, songs and albums I would recommend: Suzanne Vega’s debut, Rickie Lee Jones’ debut, Norah Jones’ debut, Missy Higgins’ debut, the Indigo Girls early compilation 4.5, Heart’s Dreamboat Annie, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and either of the first two Pretenders albums, but instead I thought I might mention something that I’ve been listening to a lot these past few months. Shelby Lynne’s Just a Little Lovin‘ is a beautiful tribute to the music of the late Dusty Springfield.  A successful country and western singer herself, she takes songs from Dusty in Memphis and elsewhere and slows them down a tad, sings them a whisker lower, and delivers a slow, sensual sound the caresses careworn sensibilities.  It almost doesn’t matter what she’s singing, because it’s the sound of her voice that gently picks you up and carries you away, not the words she’s saying.  In truth some of the lyrics are best left unparsed, but the sound is for late nights and perfect Sunday mornings.

Well, this weekend is going to be about three things. Finishing Eclipse and Subterranean, and planning my schedule for the US trip. I’m terribly, terribly behind on the latter. I know where the planes are going to leave me, but not much else, which is crazy. I’ve not got a final program from Anticipation, but I have a few programmed things. Nothing planned for California, the sightseeing day in Montreal, or for the convention. Must fix!

The family are out of the house right now. I’m playing The Weepies. It’s been a hard couple days, made a lot harder by some things I just need to filter out of my world for a while. I need to make things a bit simpler, rather than more complicated.

In the meantime, I’m going to spend the time before dinner reading Fritz Leiber stories. Charles and I had decided on a core short list for our ‘best of Leiber’ volume, but hadn’t finalised it. Now it’s something left to me, which is incredibly sad. Charles and Fritz were such good friends, and Charles loved his work so much that it seems wrong to make the final decisions without him. Nonetheless, the important thing is to complete the book and make sure it would be one that he’d be proud of.

I’ve been thinking about how I’d like to remember CHARLES.  I knew him for sixteen years, and during that time he both didn’t change at all and changed a lot.  Somewhere about 2005 he began to get older: he got tireder, more likely to fall asleep, and started needing scooters to get around conventions.  He found that the late nights took more out of him, and so the late nights on the back deck at Locus became shorter affairs.

Today I looked for photos of him, ones that fit the CHARLES I knew the most.  I stumbled across this one. It was taken in June of 2002, I think. It was a few months after we’d agreed I was to become reviews editor and not that long before I headed over for Con Jose.  Shortly, Marianne, a toddler named Jessica, and a baby named Sophie would pile in for a few days, inhabiting his downstairs and consuming his home for a while, all of which he graciously absorbed like the patriarch he was.

So this is the image of him I’ll keep: alert, full of life, completely himself, and with some of the best years of our friendship in front of us. I think of him every day.