Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter with its questions. I'm up early
this morning, - for once I'm on your schedule - , at 6:28 a.m.,
having awoken half an hour ago with the thought that last night
I didn't set the garbage out on the sidewalk. The embarrassment
banished sleep; the black 32 gallon barrel is now on the curb;
and I'm taking the opportunity to attend to my correspondence
before I fall asleep again, whether in the chair or on the
bed remains to be seen.

What troubles me about the Memorial Meeting, - answering now
your first question, - and about all religious ceremony,
is the confusion of public and private, of outward and inward,
of objective and subjective, the presumption that it was the
same Margrit with whom all of us mourners were familiar; while
just the opposite obtained. The other participants were there
exulting in memories of a person who had been so generous to
them with her time, with her affection and with her wealth;
whereas I was there to remember and to mourn a sister, the last
remaining member of my childhood family who had given away to
others the affection, the care, and indeed the wealth which I
thought she owed to me. Of course I would have known that I was
wrong: that she was not in fact my debtor, that families are by
nature centrifugal, that she had every right to a life of her own,
and that I was resentful of my inability to keep her imprisoned
in the confines of a childhood which I have admittedly never
outgrown. But the humiliation of being surrounded by all the
adversaries who had triumphed over me would have hurt nonetheless.

Your second question: the resort to the first person singular
in referring to the travels ahead was mere stylistic license
or sloppiness. Margaret and I will go together. I wouldn't want
to leave her and she wouldn't want to be left. More echoes of
childhood.

As for your third topic: I again checked the docket sheet on the
Internet just now; as I mentioned, it's accessible also by you:
http://www.ma-appellatecourts.org/search_number.php?dno=2009-P-1613&get=Search
and found no change. The case is in lawyer's lingo: "under advisement".
That's a good sign, so far as they seem at least to be thinking about
it; a bad sign, insofar as it's ominous that they evidently need to
deliberate about what's obvious. That need to deliberate makes 
obvious to me that it's all a sham: Nantucket lied and keeps on lying,
The august Board of State Examiners of Plumbers and Gasfitters lied
and keeps on lying, the Attorney General who has the power to ruin
any of us with an indictment, justified or otherwise, is a clown who
attests the truth of fraudulent documents, and His Honor, the Superior
Court judge, who is by logic incapable of lying because he has the 
authority to define the truth, His Honor, as one says in polite legalese,
"failed to notice" his records. So what's the Appeals Court supposed to
do? They're supposed to make me the scapegoat on whom they pin the blame
for everything else, in order to make everything else appear pure and holy.
I've made it difficult for them to blame me. If you want to see how,
look at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~jochenmeyer/litigation/litig_index.html

So they won't punish me outright.  They'll punish me by sending the case
back to the lower court, and the lower court will punish me by sending
the case back to the Board of State Examiners of Plumbers and Gasfitters,
and that Board will punish me by directing William Ciarmataro the plumbing
inspector to inspect my plumbing, of which I never said that it was ready
for inspection, and Mr. Ciarmataro will find that the plumbing which wasn't
ready for inspection doesn't pass inspection, and the Plumbing Board will
say We told you so, and the Superior Court judge will say, I was right
after all, and the Appeals Court will say you have no case, you shouldn't
have bothered us. More years will have gone by, the house won't be
finished. I'll be dead, or too crazy to function. Klemens won't be
able to finish it himself and will sell it to someone who is on the
best of terms with the Board of Selectmen and will buy it for a song.

So that's the story; enough for one day; a story that gets told perhaps
only when I forget to put out the garbage: here it is.

Give my best to Ned and stay well.

Jochen