Caren Kelman Edwards: Photos

An amazing woman.  And what a life!  Educated on the East Coast, migrated to the West.  Met me through an advertisement for a roommate.  Married in 1984, children in 1988 and 1991.  After sailing charters in French Polynesia, Fiji, Greece and Turkey, we purchased a 53 foot catamaran in the Caribbean, Caren sailed it to San Francisco, supervised its extensive upgrades, and sailed with her family in the South Pacific for 5 1/2 years.  Dismasted on the final leg of the voyage, but managed to return safely.  On a subsequent voyage she was stuck in the San Blas islands for a year because of the covid pandemic, then sailed on to Mexico and California via the Panama Canal.  Certified to captain vessels up to 100 tons.  And she never gets seasick.

I met Caren through a curious coincidence.  I had been living in France, just outside of Paris, with Nicole Cholvy, after several years of travel with her in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East.  I was working for Yann Cordelle, a good friend who had earlier worked for me at Hewlett Packard in Cupertino.  My French visa was about to run out, and it was difficult to renew, and certainly not possible while I was in France.  So I flew back to California and applied for a visa at the French Consulate in San Francisco.  But the only type of visa available was a "visa pour mariage", which would require me to marry a French citizen after six months.  

While I was waiting for my visa I filled my time by giving slideshows of my travels to friends and their friends, in return for meals and some socializing.  I gave one slideshow at the apartment of Caren and her boyfriend Michael: "friends of a friend".  Shortly thereafter my "visa pour mariage" came through, and I returned to France.  

I continued to live and work in France, but as the required marriage date approached, Nicole and I decided a marriage was not in the cards, and so I left her and returned to California, lonely and despondent.  But where to live?  I decided I did not want to live alone, nor did I want to live with male roommates.  So I began to answer rental ads by females looking for female roommates.  Surprise!  Once I described my situation, I had no trouble finding females willing to try me out as a roommate (my professed lack of romantic interest might have done the trick).  Anyway, lots of offers, including one by five stewardesses!). But the clincher was a woman who, we discovered, had met me before: Caren!  Perfect.  I moved into her spare room the next day.  Not only that: she worked at HP for Fred Gibbons, who was about to quit HP and form his own company, Software Publishing Corporation.  Caren told him about me and Boom! he hired me.

Photos