Widowed: Did My Husband Know I Loved Him?

Did my husband know I loved him? That is, did I tell Jon that I loved him often enough?

Jon was good at remembering Valentine’s Day with a corny greeting card, but he was not one to toss out a random I love you, just for the heck of it. And neither was I.

We were not gushy, Jon and I, and that was fine with me. I figured my husband knew that I loved him and that he knew that I knew that he knew that I loved him.

But since his death four years ago this coming Wednesday, I’ve been wondering — was I too stingy with my affections? Wouldn’t it have been a nice thing to do, every once in a while and out of the blue, to tell Jon I loved him?

Widowed: Did My Husband Know I Loved Him?

I’ve written on this topic before, and it was on my mind again the other day when I finally got started on a project I’d put off for years — get a history written of the news service Jon founded back in 1972, not long after we met.

It was called Zodiac News Service. It was an alternative radio station news service that provided small stations and print publications with daily, accurately reported, counterculture news on topics like the anti-Vietnam War movement,  civil rights, rock ‘n’ roll, marijuana, LSD, and the occasional goofy, man-bites-dog story thrown in, which Jon called bizarros.

Forty-Plus Years in Our Garage

When Jon sold the business in 1981, he packed up the office and moved all its records into our garage. For forty-plus years, a dozen Bankers Boxes stuffed with the original paper copies of the Zodiac news feeds, thousands of them, sat piled in our garage.

Whenever we pulled into our garage, there they were were — boxes of old Zodiacs pushed up against a wall, reproaching us, prodding us to do something about them. Get them scanned? Ship them off to an archive somewhere? Throw them out?

Jon was all for tossing those boxes out. He didn’t care.

I cared. Zodiac News Service had been Jon’s passion. He had poured himself into writing those stories, five days a week, year after year. No way was I going to throw them away.

So, over the years, I moved and stacked and moved and stacked the boxes, making room for station wagons, trash cans, garden hoes and kids’ bikes, then finally tidying things up by throwing an old bedspread over the stack of boxes.

This week, finally, I did something about those boxes.

A History of Zodiac News Service

I had hired a smart San Francisco Bay Area writer named Rina Neiman to write up a history of  Zodiac. And now this week, I finally pulled the dusty old bedspread off the bankers boxes.

What I saw surprised me.

It was a neat stack of twelve bankers boxes, each box wrapped in its own black plastic trash bag, the bags’ flaps pulled and tied in knots tight enough to keep out moisture, dust and critters.

The boxes were stacked in orderly rows, three wide, four high. All the knots were facing in the same direction. And a piece of tape with a year written on it was stuck to each box — 1972, 1973, 1974 . . .

Apparently, at some forgotten point in our life together —  2010? 2015? — I had taken the time to do all this for Jon.

A story about tough love at “The Dracena Is Dead. Long Live the Dracena.”  And here’s one about a guilty pleasure, “I Brake for Floor Plans.”