Dear Cyndy,

Your letter has been very much on my mind. Nonetheless
I pursued my continuing medical education to its assigned
conclusion, with 5 hours of mandatory "risk management"
in which I learned how the lawyers and the judges work
together to assure that justice is done. I was taught all
about legal procedure and how to behave when giving a
deposition. I now have the 40 Category 1 credits required
for the renewal of my license next year; I also have
enough credits to support an application to reinstate my 
Virginia license. I found documentation for no fewer than
176 credits for prior years; only 60 are required.
Nonetheless, I'm not certain that I shall proceed with the
Virginia application, since I would probably never use the
license and because all encounters with the bureaucracy
are fraught with the uncertainty of unanticipated
side-effects.

If my assumption that your left eye is recovering from its
encounter with surgery is correct, then, since most instances
of endophthalmitis manifest themselves within 48 hours, the
major hazard of this procedure is behind you.  Having had one
injection, you now know what it entails. The question that
confronts you is whether you want to take another chance on
the benefits to be derived from the injection, where "what is
to be lost" is the relatively small degree of inconvenience
and discomfort of an uncomplicated procedure and the 1:1000
risk of an ophthamic catastrophe. You should be open-minded
and make your decisions "as way opens." You won't be offended
if I write that I think of you as in a medical casino, where
the physician croupiers are forever urging you to place another
bet, neither to quit while you are ahead, nor to give up so
long as you are behind and there is hope of your catching up.
I urge you, as before, to substitute your own judgment,
whatever it might be, for the urgings of the croupier, and to
to do or to have done to you what after appropriate meditation
you deem best for yourself.


I'm sad to hear about Jane's dilemma. I wish it were practical
for me to buy the farm from her, making her eligible for whatever
benefits she might be entitled to, and then for the rest of her
life, to let her use the farm as if it were still her own. Such 
an arrangement, however, would be feasible only in the context
of a feeling of trust and affection such as has not developed
between us, and would be precluded by the adversary relationship
that customarily arises between parties to real estate 
transactions, each of whom is concerned not to be taken advantage
of by the other.

My cousin Marion has come back from a visit to a childhood
friend in Truro on Cape Cod. She arrived last evening at 9 p.m.
on the fast ferry from Provincetown, and I drove to the
old Commonwealth Wharf, now grandiosely rechristened as 
World Trade Center, to meet her. As usual I was early, and
I spent half an hour on the dock, admiring the brightly
lit skyline of Boston harbor, watching planes take off and
land at the airport across the water, and letting my eyes 
(or rather my eye) follow the boats of differing sizes as
they moved silently through the black water of the night,
all the while letting the brisk cool breeze from the ocean
disperse the last traces of an oppressively hot summer day.
To my astonishment, the wharf was entirely deserted. The
adjacent warehouse, converted into an office building by
Fidelity Investments, was lavishly fenestrated with large
picture windows, behind which I could see brightly
illuminated, as if energy conservation were not an issue,
large offices, vacant except for a single lonely cleaning
woman, rows of modular cubicles stretching as far as the
eye could see, an occasional coat draped across the back
of a chair or suspended from a hanger on the wall, the
only vestige of the frantic human activities which
transpired here during the day. Turning again to the
blackness of the harbor and the glittering Boston skyline
beyond, I thought that if I were standing at the waterfront
of an unfamiliar foreign city, I could not be more
intoxicated by the mystery and majesty of the scene in
which I was implicated. The fast ferry from Provincetown
arrived fifteen minutes late. Marion was among the last to
debark, and together, Marion insisting on pulling the wheeled
suitcase by herself, we trudged up the wharf, across
Northern Avenue, - now renamed Seaboard Boulevard - into
the parking lot where I had left the car.

Please excuse the length of this letter. It's my literary
exercise for the day, I haven't yet gotten started on the
novel, but I will. Please give my regards to Ned.
Jochen