Dear Cyndy,

Your concerns for the demise of our correspondence are unfounded.
I blame the tardiness of my responses to your letters on my memory.
To avoid an over-heated epistolary exchange, I intended to delay my
replies for two or three days. The sad truth is that at times I
mistakenly assume that I have replied, and wait for a response to
a letter that I never wrote. Hence your surmise that the end is at
hand. It isn't. A computer count of my writing since 1983, yields
the astonishing and alarming number of 112442656 characters, some
of which are admittedly copies or duplicates. At 6.5 characters
per word, there are 17298870 words, and at 400 words per page,
43247 pages, which at 350 pages per volume would yield 123 books.
I am appalled, and so are you, while at the same time complaining
that I don't write enough.

To staunch the flow of words, I've been "working with my hands,"
taking the advice of 1949 from Elliot Perkins, the unsympathetic
master of Lowell House who was concerned that I might go too far
in the academic world too soon. He needn't have worried. With my
hands, and to a lesser degree with my brain, I've been busy trying
to create in this house some measure of order out of chaos, which
according to non-Darwinian cosmology is the manner in which the
world came into being. I have finished the touch-up painting on
the second floor. For each of the rooms I applied to the hardware
store (Lowe's) for an exact match of color to obviate the need for
repainting the walls in their entirety.  For one room, the effort
was unsuccessful. As I proceeded, I assumed that when the paint was
finally dry, the slight differences in color between the old and
the new would disappear. I was wrong. The painted walls now display
incongruous streaks of different shades of a grayish blue. Initially
the discrepancies are disturbing. One becomes accustomed to them.
They begin to be familiar. Soon one finds them engaging and would be
distressed if they were replaced with the intended uniform surface.
As the responsible artist, I will place my initials in the lower
right hand corner where the light of the window strikes the wall
and they will not be overlooked.

A matter of considerable concern to me is the disposition of my
sister's virtual estate, where various parties have received
conflicting promises of non-existent assets. It's a subject much on
my mind, which I am reluctant to discuss because at this stage of
our relationship, I wish least of all to be critical of my sister.
I must decide which, if any, of her bequests I should subsidize
with funds of my own, as an expression as it were of my affection
for her, where after Margrit's death, the prospective recipients
have avoided contact with me but would without doubt accept the
largess.

The laying down of the Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) in 
Braunschweig, about which I wrote you, and which was finally
accomplished on June 2, has been a disconcerting event which
fortunately it was impractical for Margaret and myself to attend.
The ceremony has spawned a limited amount of correspondence
with Renate Haertle, the middle school teacher responsible for
the project and with a family of Margrit's friends who travelled
from Berlin to Braunschweig to attend the festivities. As you
can imagine, even the thought of such celebrations makes me
uncomfortable, and I'm relieved that they too have become history.
The attached images should suffice to tell the story.

On or about June 22, Margaret and I intend to return to Belmont,
where with the fast Internet connection it will be more feasible
than from here, for me to replenish my sparse familiarity with
Henoch-Schoenlein purpura. By that time, I hope, you will be much
improved, and my comments will be incongruously out of date. As
for your next letter, my plan is an immediate reply before my
memory has a chance to play its tricks.

Please give my best to Ned.

Jochen