While I Was Out

[tamaranth]

I think I've discovered another definition of the verb 'to gafiate'. (Which is (for readers outside the sf community) getting away from it all.)

To gafiate: to lose touch with goings-on to the extent that one misses the announcement of a friend's death.

Dave Mooring's dead. He was one of the crowd I used to hang out with at conventions before the BSFA and I became closely acquainted. I spent whole afternoons -- especially at Novacons -- indulging in comfortable conversation with Dave and Sarah. Wicked sense of humour, generous, playful: I have a photograph somewhere of him sending some cuddly toy off to heaven at the '95 Eastercon, aided by a bunch of helium balloons. Naturally, I was also jealous of his hair. When I was writing, he managed to draw some of my characters without having more than a couple of slurred sentences to go on. I've missed him over the last few years, when he and Sarah had been absent from conventions -- as it turns out, due to illness.

Too many people I know have died recently. Wish they hadn't. Wish Dave wasn't one of them.

Comments

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

I know. I was aghast. I suppose it was the first person in fandom who's died whom I really knew as opposed to "had heard of and seen around" or "had read their fanzines": I'd been to their house a million times (they bought my then ex-es house in fact) , had dinner parties with them, hung out. Dave did the cover for TimeBytes back in 95; must find it for the Novacon tribute that's being planned. I was talking to Lesley ward and Brian Davies about it at the weekend: they were shocked too. All of us. I didn't know you knew Dave and Sarah so well; funny, we must have been on edges of some of the same groups, long before I knew you.