In 1992, Walt and I decided to take a vacation and spend a couple of weeks in Paris, a trip that included a road trip in Normandy and Brittany. CHM, as it turned out, was planning a trip to Paris at the same time. An elderly couple, old friends of his parents, had been living in his Paris apartment — again, rent-free, he told me — for nearly a decade. They were preparing to move to a retirement home. CHM wanted to inspect the apartment.
As a result, CHM needed to stay in a hotel for his time in Paris. He booked a room at the hotel where Walt and I were staying, near the Jardin du Luxembourg on the Left Bank. We spent time with him. He had met Walt in DC back in the 1980s, but they didn't know each other well. That 1992 trip to Paris was when CHM learned that Walt and I had been living together for ten years, first in DC and then in California. I was afraid he might be shocked, but he wasn't. I didn't yet know about his partner Frank, who had been living in Salton City for years.
At that time, CHM would fly out to California every year, and he and Frank would spend a week or so driving across the country to Washington DC. They would drive a different route every year and sight-see along the way. Frank was happy to escape the summertime desert heat (though the humid heat of Washington was not much better). He would spend the summer driving around to see relatives of his in places including Connecticut, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania, while CHM went back to work.
At the end of the summer, CHM and Frank would drive back to Salton City. Then CHM would fly back to DC and go back to work. Often, they would visit us and Frank's daughter in Silicon Valley. In 1995, Walt and I bought a house in San Francisco. Neither one of us wanted to live in Silicon Valley any more, even though we both continued working down there. CHM started flying to San Francisco every summer, staying with us for a few days and then flying down to Palm Springs to meet up with Frank and do their drive across the U.S.
The Paris apartment stayed empty from some point in the 1990s until the spring of 1999. We had stayed in touch with CHM all through the '90s. We had moved to Silicon Valley in 1992 and we saw CHM and Frank every summer during that time when they came to see Frank's daughter. We went to see CHM in southern California (Salton City) for the first time in 1997. I didn't know what to expect. Two old desert rats, you know. I didn't start taking a lot of photos until I got my first digital camera. It was a 1998 Christmas present from Walt and Charles-Henry.
To be continued...