Dear Cyndy,

Thanks for your advice about thawing a frozen lock with
a match-heated key. If the Nantucket lock is again iced up,
that's exactly what I will try.

I hope your sense of humor sufficed for the video of my 
grandchildren in Harvard Square in Salvation-Army mode.
Not only is it but a single step from the sublime to the 
ridiculous. The boundary between refinement and vulgarity 
also is elusive. A sense of humor and irony, it seems to me,
is the sine qua non of survival.  

Helmut, about whom you asked, has an apartment in Hamburg,
Germany; flew from there to Newark on December 5; spent
a week in New York (with his girl friend Susanna) conferring
with colleagues regarding literary publications; about what 
I didn't ask, and he didn't tell. Our literary tastes are
jointly rooted in German "classical" literature, - Goethe
Schiller, Kleist, Lessing, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, - but they
diverge dramatically with Faulkner - whom Helmut admires and
translates into German, - Updike, Guenter Grass, and other
contemporary German and American authors for whom I don't
have time. On December 13, Helmut flew to Boston. The 14th
he spent at our house, on the 15th we took him to Nantucket.
On the 16th he flew back to New York, and on the 17th he
returned to Hamburg. Just now I received an e-mail confirming
his safe arrival. Helmut is anglophile and will spend January
in East Sussex.

There's nothing new to report that wasn't touched on in my
letter of two days ago, except, finally, my mind seems to be 
thawing into another manic phase in which I will try hard to
make substantial additions to my novel.

As the days pass, I contemplate my Appeals Court encounter
with more and more optimism, - not of ultimate "success", -
whatever that might be, but of constructive - and edifying -
engagement with the bureaucracy. I infer that the local
plumbing inspector is now on the defensive. His word is 
no longer, as it has been in the past, a legal pronouncement
subject to no review, but will, if it is unfavorable to me,
be the topic of (very) critical examination ultimately by
the Appeals Court, for me an encouraging prospect, since
drafting a legal memorandum is much more to my liking than
rather than gluing PVC pipe fittings.  I'll keep you posted.

I do have one specific question to which you probably know the
answer. (I hope I haven't asked it before.) A few weeks ago,
when I was working so diligently on the Estate Tax return which it
now appears, if I hurry up and die in the next 24 months, Klemens
won't have to file after all, I was reminded of what the Germans
call ein Sterbekleid, a burial garment, which especially old maids
whose lives have slipped away unfulfilled, embroider to celebrate
their demise, as the dress in which their bodies are to be buried.
I began to think that in the anticipatory completion of IRS Form 706,
I also was fashioning in my own way mein Sterbekleid, albeit not of
velvet, silk and brocade, but of the least expensive computer paper
that Staples would sell me. I looked for translations into English
of the term Sterbekleid, and found none, nor any references to an
analogous English custom.  Yet the interpretation of death and dying
reflected in the preparation of ein Sterbekleid seemed to me so
compatible with the Victorian spirit - or am I wrong? - that I
thought there might be something I had overlooked. Will you tell me?

My father, in bestowing Christmas greetings, eschewed the term
"Merry" which he replaced with "Blessed", a word which seems at once
too presumptuous, too intrusive and to stilted for my taste.
I'll content myself, therefore, with writing that I hope you
and Ned are well and happy, now and in the New Year.

Jochen