So far, just 3 days into this retrograde, it’s been pretty typical: computer glitches, billing weirdness with Sirius radio, miscommunication. But there have also been some interesting things – finding lost objects, for instance.
I had a box of ornaments that contained a bunch I inherited from my first editor, Chris Cox, at Ballantine Books. I found them wrapped in colorful pieces of Christmas paper, so they wouldn’t get broken, and had looked in this box a dozen times and hadn’t seen them.
Chris was a terrific person and editor. We became good friends and he and my agent, Diane Cleaver, both of them also writers, went on one of the Amazon cruises that Rob and I had led for Avianca Airlines back in the late 1980s. I don’t have photos of that trip. But that video gives you a sense of what the Amazon was like even back when we led these tours for travel writes.
Chris died of AIDS in 1990. His partner, Bill, had died the year before and I still recall that conversation with Chris when he told me Bill had AIDS.
“He’s going blind, Trish. His parents are coming to pick him up and take him back to Minnesota.”
His voice was choked, he started to weep. I didn’t know what to say, what to do. Bill was a senior curator at the New Museum of Art in NYC at the time, a big deal in the art world. I offered whatever solace I could, then we got interrupted and Chris said he’d call back. He eventually did, one Monday after he’d returned from Minneapolis where he flew nearly every weekend to be with Bill. “I want to be with him when he dies.”
And if memory serves, Chris was with him and died not long afterward. Editor Cheryl Woodruff, another Ballantine editor and friend of Chris’s, asked me to speak at his memorial service. We flew to NY. Megan was barely a year old and while I spoke at that service, he and Meg were at the back, near the doors, and when she started crying, Rob stepped outside with her.
I used this wooden sculpture of the traveler when I spoke about Chris. I bought it on that Amazon trip and it’s how I saw him, a nomad who traveled through many strange worlds as a senior editor at Ballantine. After his death, Cheryl mailed the ornaments to me. So every Christmas as I’m decorating our tree, I think of him. And thank him for being my first editor and my friend.
So this is what Mercury retro often does: you find lost stuff and it triggers memories from the past.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry on Chris:
Christopher Cox was born in Gadsden, Alabama. At 16, he worked for conservative Senator John Sparkman as a page, but would later found a local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Alabama.[1]
In the 1970s, he moved to Manhattan and pursued a career with the SoHo Weekly News as both a writer and photographer. Cox, who was gay,[2] is perhaps best known for his collaboration within The Violet Quill.[3] He later went on to become senior editor of Ballantine Books.[4] He appeared in William Shakespeare‘s Two Gentlemen of Verona, and later directed several plays at the Jean Cocteau Theater, New York City.[1][4]
He died of an AIDS-related infection in 1990.[4] His partner, William Olander, had died of the same disease in 1989.[5]
