I have an extra something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving Day. I’m going to meet the older sister I never knew I had.

How could this be? I thought I was the oldest kid in the family with two younger brothers. My mother never told me otherwise. Our father disappeared before (I entered elementary school and no one else in the family ever offered a clue that another sibling existed.

But this past Spring, my brother submitted a DNA sample to a genealogy company. To his surprise, the results came back with “you have a sister match.”

It seems that our mother and father got pregnant when she was fifteen. I suspect there was family pressure on the father’s side to put the baby up for adoption. And so, the child was parented by a loving couple in eastern Washington. My mother never said anything about this to her subsequent sons.

Her name is Judee and by the sound of her voice in recent Zoom calls, she’s quite a pleasant person. My nieces say she looks a lot like their grandmother, who passed away years ago. Admittedly, I’m a bit bewildered by this sibling surprise, but I’m boarding a plane with my Benicia family on thanksgiving morning and by evening, I’ll have a face to face meeting with my long lost sister and a hug that has been waiting to happen for many, many years.

Add this to so many other things I am grateful for and this holiday is proving to be quite memorable.

May you have all the joy and blessings that thanksgiving can bring and let’s each do our best to help others enjoy the holiday.

Tio Stib aka Uncle Steve

It’s my birthday and somehow, someway, I’ve managed to make it to 77

77 years of living on Planet Earth.

Unbelievable. I’m stupefied. How could I have survived so many reckless adventures, moments of farcical stupidity, when countless smarter, more practical people have perished?

Somehow I’ve beaten the odds, but it defies logic.

Oh, make no mistake, I very much appreciate my continued existence. I drink in mouthfuls of fresh air on my morning walks along the seashore. I savor the explosion of tastes biting into Chico’s super burrito. I lie in bed before sunrise thanking whatever gods are watching over me for the blessings that keep on filling my days.

but 77. That’s a big number, a lot bigger number than I ever dreamed of saying out loud on my birthday. And, strangely, I don’t feel what part of me thinks 77 should be feeling. Yes, blindness has kept me from noticing the aging signs in the bathroom mirror so all I can measure aging by is what the body can still do without much help.

Most everything thank you, with no accompanying creaks and groans. that said, I do admit to frequent nighttime trips to the loo which were not necessary in younger years.

Here’s hoping I won’t hyperventilate trying to blow out all those candles.

Best wishes to all for a joyful Thanksgiving holiday

Yours to count on,

Tio Stib aka Uncle Steve