I never said I wan't a bit obsessive. Who else but an obsessive information gatherer would spend more than three hours a day gleaming news from the papers, airwaves and web. So you take that away and something has to give, right? Right.
The thing that has absorbed me now is the yawning maw of research. I am living in the world of my new found companion, the man of the letter, he whom requested his young lover have an abortion in 1917. So far I know this man's travels around the world, his home on Park Avenue, but more accurately his home on board some of the finest steamships afloat at the middle of the 20th Century. The Queen Mary, the Aquitaine, The Empress of Russia. This man must have had a steamer trunk that never rested because he certainly didn't.
I realized that I had missed a blog entry yesterday and almost this evening as well. But I have mysteries to unlock and the dead only talk through the documents that they leave behind. So this is all the energy I have to devote.
The news would take a back seat to research as well. Most interesting to me right now, after sketching in the big milestones left in the trail of documents, is not the incredible globe trotting, the fortune made overseas and the relatives scattered around the world, but the two obituaries. One obituary for himself, dead, as he lived, abroad, documented in a US Consular report of the death of a US citizen out of the country and the other obituary for his wife, in Manhattan, years later. Neither obituary, both carried in the New York Times, mentions either spouse. What happened? Both survived by the same son and grandchildren, all duly noted, but a glaring lack of mention of "beloved husband of..." or "beloved wife of.....".
Mysteries call. Gotta go.
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