Dear Marion,

Thanks for your two letters, the first about the little car,
the second about the missing money. I didn't reply to the first,
because I didn't want to distract you from your awesome tasks
of clearing your apartment, moving, and preparing to leave
for France in only 10 days. Even now, please don't feel obliged
to reply; we can start talking on the 26th - little more than
3 weeks from now, when I fetch you from the Boston airport.

I have kept busy; nothing heroic. In consequence of your very
helpful suggestion, I submitted claims for the funds owed to
the Ernst J. Meyer who lives in Belmont, and the one supposedly
in Newton. The one I know in Belmont has no Doppelgaenger,
and I hypothesize that his double was inadvertently relocated
to Newton via a garbled ZIP code: 02178 misread as 02158.
I'll report to you on what happens.

My other accomplishment was to fell a 3" diameter pin oak tree
which had sprouted among the decorative bushes too close to the
house and which I had neglected for too many years. My shoulder-
arm assembly didn't have the power to start the balky chain saw;
but I improvised, using an electric handsaw whose cut was just 
deep enough to accomplish my purpose.

This morning I took our 2005 minivan, now 81000 miles down the
highway, for an oil change, due I thought after three roundtrips
to Detroit and one roundtrip to Konnarock. My diligence was 
rewarded with a cryptic note penned at the bottom of the $32.80
bill: "Front Rotors and Pads very soon" In response I retrieved
from my collection the CD of the Daimler-Chrysler 2005 Service
Manual, which I had bought when I acquired the car, and printed
out 35 pages of maintenance and repair instructions for the vehicle's
front disc brakes. In addition, I found on the Internet relevant
essays from periodicals and patent applications, on the basis of
which I'll cross-examine the manager of the repair shop about
the necessity of having this expensive work done on a wholly
asymptomatic and uncomplaining automobile before setting out for 
Virginia on Tuesday.

Jochen