Blog is back again with Disney, Depression, a deadline and more!

For anyone still accessing this blog, I am going to begin posting again – sorta regularly. I know, I know, I’ve made this promise before, but this time the promise will be kept.

We have a big incentive!

Joyce and I are writing a book -- for a small audience: Our family.

There’s so much we want to share with them that they simply don’t know (or, perhaps, fully appreciate). And this effort is spurred, in part, because we’ve come to have so many questions we wish we’d asked our grandparents and parents. For example, Joyce has no idea why she’s named Joyce instead of the original choice her parents made: Leila Agnes, after her maternal grandmother! For me, my father wanted to name me either Keith or Valerie (not sure why), depending on gender, but my mom won that battle – perhaps because they were going through a contentious divorce – by naming me after a good family friend.

In Catalina, with (of course) a good martini! This was on our 48th wedding anniversary in December 2019. The past December for our 49th, we spent quietly sequestering at home -- but with martinis (of course). For our 50th, hoping we'll be post-pandemic and resuming travel to faraway places. 

And, for example, my Grandpa Charles Thatcher, my mom's dad, reportedly turned down a job offer as an illustrator/cartoonist from Walt Disney himself because he didn't want to move his family (a wife and 10 children) from Attleboro, Mass., across the country to California in the midst of The Great Depression. He had a secure and well-paying job during that unsettled time as the lead jewelry designer (at either Swank or Marathon), and Walt was a bit of an upstart!

Or that Joyce's dad, Jim Lockamy, a lifelong car mechanic and great gardener, once owned a gas station in Columbia, S.C., and moved to Florida with wife and son shortly before she was born because he didn't like the red clay that stuck to everything when he had to crawl under cars! And that he didn’t want me to marry Joyce because I would just get up and go somewhere, like Africa; he thought I’d love her and leave her. What he didn’t know at the time was that he was right about the get up and going, but not about the loving and leaving her. Always loving, and I wanted to take her with me every place I went. And I did, with 50 years of adventures in marriage this December! (That was the case even in Uganda. While executive editor of the national newspaper there, I was the only editor ever to visit all 10 up-country bureaus – many remote and difficult to get to on Uganda’s pothole-ridden roads, some paved, many not. She was with me on all those trips.)

This effort is for Jennifer and Ian, our two wonderful offspring, and especially our grandchildren: Jennifer's son, Adam, 22, and Ian and Andrea’s two boys, Sebastian, 4, and Alex, almost 3 – and their upcoming, yet-to-be named daughter due in April. (We love all the boys, but this will be the first grand-girl in both the Gibson and Garcia families! We’re already thinking of special ways to spoil her!) Oh, and for the grandkids’ (eventual) kids, too!

There is so much our children and grandchildren don't know about us: Joyce and me, our parents, and our grandparents. And we want them to know that they all are unique individuals with special talents and skills. And quirks. We plan on telling as many stories as we can recall, and we plan to include everything we know, warts and all!

I plan on posting most, likely all, of what we produce, including photos, right here. I want y’all to be our other set of eyes, our sounding board, our jury, our editors.

Stay tuned. Please!

P.S.: We have a deadline (something I’m used to, having spent a life in journalism): Christmas 2021.

P.P.S.: Anyone familiar with posting on blogger.com? Apparently, there have been a lot of changes, and I need help posting. 1. How to get photo and caption into the text, not above, and without the white space to each side. 2. How to make text white in post, but black when going back to try to edit. (Text in posted blog is mid-gray so I can read it when editing and in preview (posted) mode; let me know how it is to read in post, please. If OK, I found a solution.) 3. And/or a place where there might be an easy-to-understand tutorial. And, hey, remember I'm old. (Quickly approaching 78!) Easy-to-understand is the key. Cheers.

P.P.P.S: Or a better alternative to blogger.com, if there is one, but one where I could easily transfer all that's on this blog to the other. Thanks.