January 7, 2023

My niece Lily and her boyfriend Cody (and their 2 pups!) came to our house to work on a massive project - organizing John's comic books. We didn't know how many he had, and my estimates were way off. It turns out John has 60 long boxes of comic books, and each box holds about 200 comics. So he has about 12,000! They fill about 1/3 of a good sized bedroom. John always maintained that his comic books were all pretty new and weren't worth much. Turns out that might not be correct. Lily has mad organizing skills, and Cody knows a ton about comic books. He'd pick up a comic book and tell us that it was an important one because it was the first time Superman wore a black suit, or it was the first time a new character appeared. Between the 2 of them, we were able to accomplish a huge task. Before we knew how many books John had, we thought it would take 2 days. Well it took almost 4 full days. We mostly sorted the books by characters, and pulled out older comics for further research. I helped, and so did Jordan and her boyfriend Perry. Lily and Cody worked constantly for 4 days, and the rest of us jumped in between other obligations. By the end of it, all the comics were back in long boxes, labeled by character or topic. And now we know what's in that collection. The goal is to sell the comic books - heaven knows I don't want them! The money can be used to help pay for a litlle of John's care. We were very concerned that John would be upset when he discovered we were in his comic books. Initially we only worked on them while he was at EasterSeals. The second day I decided to see how John handled it. As it turned out, he didn't mind. He watched what was happening but was far more concerned about what the dogs were doing than what we were doing. He didn't understand and he wasn't worried that we were in his space. If we did this before he got sick, he would have been very pleased. We often talked about organizing all the comic books, but it was a daunting task so we never did it. Plus he would have loved to see what he had in all those boxes! And he would have loved to talk to Cody about it all.