Monday I woke up with a scratchy throat that by midday blossomed into a sore-nosed, miserable cold. Didn’t feel so great this morning, but wasn’t quite as out of it as I had been. I had to pick up Frank Robinson before I went in to work. Charlie wants him to write Heinlein’s obit and since Charlie has more reference material on Heinlein than anybody else, Frank would spend the day (and night) at Locus. He lives in a very nice Victorian on the corner of Noe and 20th. He was sitting on the steps waiting when I drove up. We didn’t talk much. I was beginning to have awful, gagging coughing fits.

Frank Robinson is an elderly gay man with a moustache and a cap. He speaks with a broad, blunt New York accent that turns “Rs” into “Ws” but sounds nothing like Elmer Fudd. His voice is too deep.

At work I sat at the computer and put in corrections, running out pages for paste-up. Charlie and Frank sat in the living room talking about Heinlein. Charlie is getting morbid, as he often does after a major figure dies. “It’s not the emphysema that’s going to kill me,” I heard him say to Frank. It’s my heart.”

For dinner, Charlie fixed barbeque for us all. It was good, but Frank seemed on edge, perhaps intimidated by the task before him. He retired early, shut the door to the middle office/guest room, and typed.

It was, indeed, Charlie’s heart that killed him, but not until more than twenty years later, at 72, when he died in his sleep on a plane while it circled Oakland airport. He was returning from an SF convention. I like that he passed away still busy with what he loved to do.