Dear Cyndy,

You won't believe this, but my legal contest with Nantucket
is making me young again. It's now 8:48 a.m., and it wasn't
until 3:35, just five hours ago, that I shut off the computer.
Granted, yesterday morning I didn't wake up until 9:30,
obscenely late by your standards, but then, cogitating
non-stop for 18 hours is hardly to be expected of an about to
be octogenarian. My arthritis has forsaken me and from time
to time I feel a little bit light-headed, but that goes with
the manic phase of my existence. The last time I can remember
working so persistently and staying up so late into the
morning was thirty years ago when I was writing computer
programs and couldn't stop wrestling with the computer logic.

I'm not sure that it should be called work, this incessant
reveling in the echos of my own words, this narcissus-like
fascination with the expression of my own ideas, and this
shameless self-indulgence in the caresses of language, my
not so secret paramour, garrulous old man that I have become.
On the suspicion that the six judges who will be pontificating
the fate of my Nantucket toilet installations might be getting
bored with the colorless prose that is their bread and butter,
I thought I might snag their attention as etwas Besonderes
with an "Informal Introduction", which reads like this:

              Informal Introduction

     This case confronts the Appeals Court with a set
of legal anomalies: Each month, if not every week or
even every day, thousands of citizens of Massachusetts
engage in Do-It-Yourself plumbing.  More than 302 com-
mercial establishments encourage Do-It-Yourself
plumbers and shown them how.  The Board of State Exam-
iners of Plumbers and Pipefitters claims that all
plumbing is the prerogative of professionals, and that
Do-It-Yourself plumbing is unlawful.  The Attorney
General doesn't see it that way.  She thinks Do-It-
Yourself plumbing is o.k. and does nothing to stop
either the Do-It-Yourself plumbers or their enablers.
Not so the Nantucket Building Department which is out
to get even with the appellant Meyer.  Although Meyer
has done nothing different from thousands of his fel-
low citizens, Nantucket uses the threat of legal sanc-
tions to try to force him to hire a licensed plumber
at great cost to destroy and replace plumbing that he
has installed.  On Appeal, the Board doesn't take
Meyer seriously, brushes him off like a nuisance with-
out even a semblance of a fair hearing, but then
resorts to creative writing to try to make it appear
that a fair hearing had been held.  In trying to
conceal its contempt for Meyer, the Board reveals its
contempt for the law.  In upholding the Board, the
Superior Court made the error of relying on cases that
denied equal protection challenges on behalf of homo-
sexuals, imbeciles and schizophrenics, wholly inappo-
site to this controversy, because unlike the cases
cited, Meyer does not challenge the Legislature for
its enactment, but the Agency for its interpretation
of the statute.  The difference is critical.  Further-
more, the Superior Court was also in error when it
shrugged off issues of due process as a plumbing prob-
lem.  Due process is not a plumbing problem, and
plumbers don't have the tools or the know-how to fix
it.  The Superior Court was in error also when it
ignored its own records of this case.  The Cross-
Motion by Nantucket which the Superior Court endorsed,
had no legal substance because Nantucket had never
exercised its right to intervene in this action, and
was not a party to it.  Nor could the phantom Cross-
Motion be joined by the Attorney General representing
the Board, because by failing to plead in Opposition,
the Attorney General and the Board had already con-
ceded.

====================================

Thank you for having taken the time to read my Brief
and for your sympathetic comments. I too look forward
to your visit in only a little over three weeks. I
very much hope you won't be disappointed. We mustn't
forget that we have lived very different lives, that
we have very different personalities, and that
notwithstanding the almost unbridled reciprocal
literary effusions, we are not, strictly speaking
on speaking terms with each other. Prepare yourself
for your visit as if on your way to an abandoned zoo
whose only two remaining denizens were a pair of
somewhat exotic moribund creatures, perhaps interesting
to look at and to listen to, but only for a limited
period of time, and not necessarily congenial companions,
in whose presence you would always want to keep the door
labeled EXIT clearly in view.

That says it all, or almost all. I'm always interested
in reading what you write. Please send me your essay about
the farm when you happen to come across it, but don't go
out of your way looking for it, unless you have nothing
better to do.  Now to get back to admiring my prose.
In half an hour from now comes my only patient of the day,
an old lady even slightly more addled than myself.

Stay well, don't fall, and be nice to Ned.

Jochen