https://shadowlanestore.com/blogs/news/a-message-from-eve-howard-june-2020
One terrible day in March 2020 as I drove home from the hospital where my mom was being treated for late-stage pancreatic cancer, my phone rang with the horrible news that the wonderful, irreplaceable Tony Elka was ill, dying, likely very soon. The friend who told me said it was the final days, that from what she’d heard he was really already gone. We talked, mostly about Eve, both heartsick for her, making sure she had what comfort and support there was to be had in the face of such sadness, thinking about how the pandemic made even a funeral impossible. I don’t remember the rest of our call, nor how I managed to navigate home.
Paul was as shocked as me. Individually, both of us had known Tony (and Shadow Lane) for years — for me since 19971Actually, it was earlier. Telling our origin stories, Tony and I had figured out our paths had nearly crossed a number of times, including in the 1980s when I was an undergraduate at UCLA and didn’t *quite* make it to any of the spanking gatherings at the Sportsman’s Lodge. when I first delurked on alt.sex.spanking. Finding out I was in Southern California, he’d gently urged me to come to a Shadow Lane party, over and over. He became a friend, someone who seemingly could always make any situation easier or better, whose unexpected humor I grew to expect.
Sitting on the sofa, not knowing what to do, I wanted so much to see him somehow, to say “goodbye,” for him to know how much, by touching it, he’d changed and shaped my life. Even in this, Tony managed to grant me a moment of what I can only call grace. After talking with Paul and not knowing what else to do, I sent Tony a text, figuring even if he never saw it, I could a least say a kind of “goodbye” there. The grace was two days of text exchanges where I got to say how much Paul and I loved him and read him saying how much he valued our friendship, that he loved us too. That he had the support of his family, and they didn’t need anything.
That was all. A few weeks later we heard that he was, finally, gone. It’s been over four years, and it’s still hard to imagine the world without Tony in it.
Rest in love and power, my friend.
https://shadowlanestore.com/blogs/news/a-message-from-eve-howard-june-2020
- 1Actually, it was earlier. Telling our origin stories, Tony and I had figured out our paths had nearly crossed a number of times, including in the 1980s when I was an undergraduate at UCLA and didn’t *quite* make it to any of the spanking gatherings at the Sportsman’s Lodge.
