A DeForest Kelley Memory Popped up in My Facebook Feed Today.

This one:

 

Jeez. That issue was published nine years go. It seems more than a lifetime ago, now that I’ve completely upooted myself and boldly gone where few fans have gone before — completely out of my native land forever and ever, amen!!

 

If I didn’t have all the De books and a few pieces of memorabilia (plus an extended audio of voicemail messages) of the years I spent in Carolyn and DeForest Kelley’s orbit, I’d have a hard time believing it all really happened.

 

But it did.

 

And because it did, across the decades that ensued  I slowly developed the courage and tenacity to make other dreams come true, too: a full-time writing career (for as long as it lasted between 2007 and AI a couple years ago), including eighteen (!!!) books under my own name and numerous additional titles under other people’s names (I was a ghostwriter, too), coming out as trans, and getting the hell outta Dodge (er, the US.) while it was still do-able — which I fear it won’t be for very much longer unless someone gets a restraining order against the horrible fascist regime that has been taking a wrecking ball to it since mid-January and even long before! (January 6th, anybody?!).

 

In case I haven’t made this abundantly clear, the best self-esteem and career-booster that ever happened to me was meeting DeForest Kelley in 1968. I was a troubled, insecure, closeted teenager back then, feeling I was pretty much a waste of oxygen because I was such an alien. I had an inferiority complex a mile wide and ten miles high except as an aspiring wannabe writer — and even then, it took DE to launch my writing career: I didn’t have enough self-confidence in my ability to actually make it as a writer until he got THE REAL McCOY published for me in January 1969:

 

 

 

 

 

How ’bout that?!

 

*sigh*

 

It’s was nice to be thrust back into memories today.  Although it seems now like it was all a wonderful extended dream, it was very, very real.  And I’m grateful beyond words.

 

DeForest Kelley was the best.

 

I miss him every time he crosses my mind.

 

But these days I smile more often than I cry when I think about him.

 

He’d like that…