This morning I did not get up in time. I kept having such fascinating dreams that I would go back to sleep to see how they ended. Never returned to the same one, though. I only barely remember a couple of them. One was about a burglar in an attic and another had me talking to Alice Walker while she lay in a hospital bed.

It was one of those vague, gray days at work that are common in between issues. Since the next issue is Locus’ 20th anniversary, Charlie wants to publish a list of the original subscribers when Locus came out in 1968. I typed the names in from the card catalogue Charlie (or his wife) had put together two decades ago. Quite a distinguished list — Robert Silverberg, of course, A.C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, George Scithers, Chelsea Yarbro…

He wants the rest divided up into those who still have subs, those who have died, those who are still active in fandom, and those who aren’t much of anything. I spent most of my time working on this and his CD file. Charlie wasn’t there much of the day because he and Shelly had to go to Sacramento to check the issue.

How long ago “two decades ago” seemed to me back then, and how short a time it seems now.

Perhaps this was when I found the photos of Charlie and his first wife in Locus’ “morgue,” — black and white shots of them picnicing with friends, lounging on the grass in a Boston park. She was pretty and slender, Charlie stout, crew-cut, clean-shaven and serious. I looked at these with the slightly disbelieving curiousity of a twenty-something examining a youthful photo of an “old person.” (Charlie was fifty-one in 1988.)

1968? That was a lifetime ago! I was TEN that year.

I wish I could remember what I was typing these lists into — Wordstar? More likely it was Dbase, the first database I ever used, or tried to use. I remember it as nightnarishly clunky and non-intuititve.