Shale's Anniversaries - 2010

This round number year has four anniversary events for me, three quite happy and one quite sad. I will start with May Day 1980.

30 years ago today Brenda and I became a couple.

May Day was arbitrarily picked because we saw so little of each other during the month of May. We each took 2-week vacations from where we worked at the Boys' Home. I was gone the first two and she was gone the second two. What made us realize we were now a couple, were the long distance phone calls from New Orleans to St. Louis and Chicago during our respective absence.

By August of this year I had slept over enuf with Brenda at the apartment she shared with her sister that I effectively had moved in.

Shale & Brenda - Aug 1980 - Beechgrove Apts. Westwego, LA

 

60 years ago today, Brenda Williams was born at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

In May of 2004, I was visiting New Orleans with our grandson Kevin. Our hotel was just two blocks away from Charity Hospital. In fact our hotel was on Gravier Street, the actual main emergency entrance to the hospital.

I took a pic of Kevin in the front of the hospital where his grandmother was born.

Kevin in front of Charity Hospital - New Orleans


By August of the next year Hurricane Katrina shut down both the Ramada Hotel where we stayed and Charity Hospital. I still don't know the fate of the hospital, hope they fix it up and reopen.

I am glad that Brenda's grandson saw this important landmark of our family history. I think it providential that we were there in May of that year.


As of October 2007, the hospital was still boarded up and local people I asked didn't know the fate of the old New Orleans institution.

 

40 Years Ago Today, July 4, 1970, I drove from New Orleans with three friends to the second Atlanta Pop Festival in Byron Georgia.



I had been living in the counter-culture for half a year and in a way this was my Independence Day - hitting the road and going to the gathering of the tribes in the Southeast.

From there I drove the bug to San Francisco; a pilgrimage to the bay area, where I was born a quarter century earlier.

 

Very cool

 

I absolutely love this pic... I can literally feel the energy in the air when I look at this pic.

Oh and I'm pretty sure you can still buy that tank top the guy on the far right has on for 50x the price at an American Aparrel lol!

 

I had an article published in a gay weekly, about how I still donated my safe, disease-free blood, despite having to lie about it on the discriminatory donation form.

http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showpost.php?p=4247714&postcount=140

I just realized it was published on this exact date because the FDA continues to discriminate against gay men, even with nucleic acid testing of the donated blood and the debate continues on Hip Forums.

http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showpost.php?p=6453020&postcount=146

 

My half-brother JD was born in Mississippi.

I was still in San Francisco about to return to New Orleans and spend some time building a shack in the woods on my dad's farm in Mississippi where I would live a bit of a hermits life.

Shale & Jay - October 1970

 

Last nite for supper, I fixed some frozen cheese ravioli. Or at least that's what I thot I was cooking. Turns out, under the tomato sauce I realized there was something different about this ravioli.

I ate one before realizing it was beef ravioli. :ack2:

Oh, for those who don't know the problem - I haven't eaten meat for 40 years. In fact it was sometime in July 1970 in San Francisco that I quit eating meat.

Seems rather coincidental that this yucky experience should happen so close to the anniversary month of that life change.

 

if it makes you feel better the chances are really really low that it was actually beef

 

Ten Years Ago Today

Is the saddest of my anniversaries. My wife Brenda with whom I shared my life for two decades died of ALS. She was 50 years old.

We had seen each other just a few days before this at her daughter's home and in our parting I think we both knew it was our last time together.

She had been suffering from this debilitating muscle-wasting disease for a couple of years and this day was inevitable - but always "later."


Shale & Brenda - Last Foto Together 1998

 

Beautiful photo.

 

aww i feel so bad. I can relate about the whole "couple" thing. i know i'm young, but when i saw that, my heart sunk. I know the feeling of losing someone you love dearly. But Brenda is in a way better place tho.

 

I am so sorry about your loss, Shale.

 

You're easily the most interesting person I've ever met...err read about on the internet.

 

.........:iagree:



Cheers Glen.

 

Shale...your brother looks like stacy keach

 

Oh, one more!

Five years ago today, while getting a jug of water out of our office storeroom, I tripped on some trash and broke my leg

OUCH!!



It was my first broken bone and I picked a good one. Took over a year to get totally done with complications.

If you want to break a leg, don't wait til you're sixty to do it.

 

I knew it! You ARE all skin and bones after all! lol!

j/k!

I've never had a break that bad. A few cracks and that's about it. Not counting my hands (those small bones in the hand don't heal very well, still 30 years later they still hurt).

 

I know, 2010 is gone. Has it really been a year? Still, the one anniversary that continually hits me is this one.

But after 11 years, it gets better.

My attempt at poetry:

I Don't Cry So Much Anymore
August 20, 2011

I cried 11 years ago
Tho relieved that
Your suffering was thru

I cried for the past decade
In sorrow, Missing You

I miss you still
Miss what we were
But time does heal,
I don't cry so much Anymore.