Schtuff

I've let too much time go by without posting.

We're back home, missing snow.

I'm revising Starletta's Kitchen and planning to give a writing workshop at a major insurance company tomorrow for a dozen of its marketing folks.

And I'm keeping watch, via phone and email, on my half-sister back east who is close to death. Sylvia is who I write about at the beginning of the chapter in Pen on Fire called "Using the Ones You Love," the chapter that begins with: "Multiple marriages, remarriages and bigamy run in my family. My dad married my mother while he was still married to his first wife. My half-sister divorced her first husband, married her second husband, divorced him and remarried the first; and when he died, she remarried the second, who had been waiting for her for ten years."

After I sent Sylvia the book, she said she liked it, "especially the part about me."

Sylvia was from my father's first family. She was older than my mother, so you can imagine the jolt to her family when my father, a native Sicilian, left her mother and the family for my mother. Must have been a major drag for everyone involved.

So now Sylvia's in the hospital. I spoke to her the other day. She told me she hoped she would get into heaven.

"If you don't, Sylvia, none of us will."

"I don't know," she said, kinda slurry.

There were a lot of "I love you's" and she then she said, "I'll see you in heaven." So she must have decided she would get in after all. Yesterday a priest gave her Last Rites.