A DIGRESSION

I know I promised that this blog would be about the publishing process, but not much is happening there at the moment, so I want to talk about our daughter, Sarah. A beautiful young woman, Sarah left two weeks ago for Kyrgyzstan where she will serve for 27 months in the Peace Corps. This is certainly the hardest thing she's done in her young life and it isn't that easy for us, either, let me tell you. Adam, our son, moved, jobless and firendless to Chicago a few years ago to go to Second City Comedy School, and that nearly killed me. And he was IN THE COUNTRY, a phone call away, but jobless and friendless nonetheless and it was hard. So you can imagine how it is to send your child halfway around the world, to the middle of Asia, nestled cozily between Mongolia and Tajikistan. Her cell phone doesn't work there. We're using a communication system that's akin to "I'll tell two friends and you tell two friends and so on and so on." Anyway, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's also the hefty language barrier (they speak Russian, she speaks American), the food barrier, the outhouse barrier, the no air conditioning barrier and the walking everywhere barrier. But, and here's the great thing about Sarah, she's powering through. Blisters, sticky sweatiness, lonliness, hunger, homesickness, long hours studying a language where a "c" is an "s" and a "p" is an "r", and a rooster outside her window that wakes her at the crack of dawn will not sway her. At least not today. Needless to say, we're very proud of her. You can read her blog (few and far between, but fascinating), the link is at right.

And now, back to writing.