Louis Wilson, Jr. remembered yet again

Louis Wilson, Jr.
at the Grand Canyon
(February 2009)

"My life has turned out pretty well, considering what I had to work with." –Louis Wilson, May 4, 2000

On November 19, 2009, eight months after his death, I remembered Louis Wilson, Jr. A telephone call from his widow the evening of July 18 brought him to mind again.
    See was diffidently unsure how a "cold call" would be received, but Joan (pronounced Jo-Ann) Wilson's call didn't seem cold at all. I didn't recognize her voice, but I realized instantly who she was and remembered visiting her and Louis in May 1990, on the occasion of the Society for Technical Communication's annual international conference in Santa Clara, California.
    She said she'd located my number through the services of whitepages.com. "I just entered your name and North Carolina, and it didn't even cost me anything."

Before I posted my November 2009 remembrance, I had tried and failed to reach someone in Louis's family. I hoped that at least one among them would happen on the post. My first thought when Joan called was that she had finally found it.
    But no. She told me:

Your Christmas card from 1990 mentions that Louis had said he was planning to do some writing. That dream was never fulfilled. He suffered about three strokes over a period of years, and the one in 2001 was too debilitating for him to use the computer and to organize his thoughts. But he never lost his good cheer. Stories that widows have told me about cranky husbands in their last years do not apply to Louis.

    And, for my wife's sake, I hope they never apply to me either.

During my 1990 trip to California, I'd gone to my and Louis's old haunts at IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory, where I had the first strong inkling that something might be seriously wrong with me.
    I told Joan that while attempting to summarize for my old Santa Teresa colleagues a presentation I'd given at the STC conference, I'd simply run out of steam and become unable to speak coherently. At the time, it must have been pretty embarrassing, not to mention bewildering.
    I think it was the next month, back home in North Carolina, that I'd fallen asleep driving home from IBM Cary (south of Raleigh). The bumpy but fortunately wide median on Interstate-40 woke me up to discover that I was traveling at fifty-five miles per hour toward the oncoming traffic. I managed to regain control of the car, just barely, and was lucky to be able to veer back across the ongoing lanes onto the shoulder without being rear-ended. The tire came off a front rim was all.
    A week later, my doctor diagnosed CFS, chronic fatigue syndrome, and I was prescribed aggressive rest therapy (called "ART" by Dr. Dykes), which I applied diligently during a six-month medical leave from work.

I told Joan she could google "moristotle 'louis wilson'" if she wanted to read my 2009 blog remembrance. The next morning she emailed me:

Reading your blog brought tears to my eyes. You said things about Louis that I had known, but you included vivid details, especially about that Carmel Writers' conference. Louis's two children and my three children will be very happy when I give them the copy I printed for each.

    I'm delighted to have reached several members now of that special audience I'd hoped to have for my remembrance of the unforgettable Louis Wilson, Jr.

Joan & Louis Wilson,
in front of their home in Sedona, Arizona (2006)