I remember driving along through the countryside, one beautiful sunny day in May of 1988. I had just finished up my first year of graduate studies at Duke University, and somehow a lazy afternoon of drifting from one highway to the next had led me on up out of North Carolina, and into Virginia. My car radio was tuned to I don't know what station, and the news came on at the top of the hour.

One of the news items was that science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein had died.

I remember quite clearly the first Robert Heinlein book I read. I was in 7th grade. The book was Red Planet. I sat down one evening and, despite the fact that I had a splitting headache, I read that book through from cover to cover: I couldn't put it down. Over the years, I acquired and read most of the Heinlein corpus.

Until not too long ago, I would see and read Mrs. Heinlein's posts in the alt.fan.heinlein newsgroup. Now, sitting here in my study with a cup of coffee on a bright but bitterly cold January morning, I read that Virginia Heinlein has died.

I know, I just know, that this cold morning is going to remain engraved in my memory alongside a sunny May afternoon up in the hills of Virginia.

Apparently [Khrushchev] and his cohorts encountered much trouble in deciding just what the pravda should be about the U-2. They spent almost a week making up their minds. I was in Moscow at the time and there was no indication of any sort that anything unusual had happened on May 1... I was not dependent on an Intourist guide-interpreter... as my wife reads, writes, understands, and fluently speaks Russian. She's not of Russian descent. She learned it at a University of Colorado Extension night school, plus a private tutor and a lot of hard work...

We learned of it by being ordered-- not requested-- to report to the Alma Ata office of the Director of Intourist. There we were given a long, very stern, but fatherly lecture on the aggressive misbehavior of our government, a lecture that included a careful recital of the U-2 pravda.

Once I understood, I did something no American should ever do in the Soviet Union. I lost my temper completely. I out-shouted the director on the subject of American grievances against the Soviet Union. My red-headed wife most ably supported me by scorching him about Soviet slave labor camps, naming each one by name, pointing out their location to him on the big map of the Soviet Union which hung back of his desk, and telling him how many people had died in them-- including Americans.

We stomped out of his office, went to our room and gave way to the shakes.
--Robert Heinlein, "'PRAVDA' Means 'TRUTH'," in Expanded Universe

Ginnie Heinlein was a strong, take-no-crap woman who personified her late-husband's expectations for the human race and amplified them for all to see. Ginnie, if there is a GOD I hope it has blessed and kept you. Goodbye.

Well bother! Here she up and died and I didn't even know it. I always wanted to ask her why Heinlein wrote those wretched stories after 1960... the ones with all the gratuitous sex. Sigh. Guess I won't get to now. "if there is a God"? "it" will bless you? Hmmm, if I remember correctly Robert started life pretty religious.