May 9, 2011

Dear Cyndy,

Good morning! It's a bright sunny morning. The sun has risen over the ridge of Mt. Rogers. The blue sky is only slightly hazy; not a cloud to be seen. When I checked the surveillance system a few moments ago, all fours images showed a dense haze, as if the cameras were covered with dew.  That should burn off in an hour or two. Our bird feeder has become very birdular with a surprisingly varied guest list, blue jays, chickadees, indigo buntings and cardinals for color contrast, and grosbeaks. The mourning doves pick up the seeds on the ground, and phoebes flit around catching insects.

Yesterday I had an unexpected e-mail from a German physician perhaps half my age, who stumbled over the brass "stumbling stones" that the authorities have embedded in the sidewalk in front of the lower class apartment house (Hildebrandstrasse 44) where I was born, and in which he also grew up. He wants to correspond with me. He has an exotic name, Caner Cetinkaya, of inapparent provenance. His German is ordinary and pedestrian; I doubt that he will find my style congenial. I'm sorry, but not in the mood for epistolary slumming.

Two days ago I finished Chapter 45, at least temporarily. I haven't reread it, but set my mind to Chapter 46, Joachim's dream. Last night, curiously, the prototype visited me - in my sleep. A courtroom scene, presumably about unpermitted plumbing, a hearing which disintegrated into chatty irrelevant conversations among jurors about their favorite recepies and left the far from fatal decision as it were to the roll of the dice. 

Judge Macdonald whom you mentioned, was ready at the last hearing to dismiss the case, sending it back on another 3 year odyssey to Nantucket, to the Board of State Examiners and Plumbers and to a new round of Superior Court and Appeals Court proceedings.  He's far from sympathetic to me. I don't fit into his social order.  Rather than plumbing my house, he thinks I should be riding around on a golf course or sipping cocktails at the Harvard Club. It was Footnote 13 that set him straight; but how far that footnote will carry me, remains to be seen.

At the June 16th hearing, I plan to make a request, unlikely to be denied, for the opportunity to make a formal rebuttal of the Nantucket report. With that rebuttal, I will try to redefine the issues to be decided: beyond the correctness of my plumbing, the fairness and integrity of the proceedings, viz. the extensive tampering with potential witnesses, the systematic reinterpretation of the state plumbing code into an informal canon of "how we do things on Nantucket", the very effectives plumbers' boycott against me, the unconditional dependence for his livelihood of any plumber who works or testifies for me on the favor of an unalterably hostile inspector. All these are issues for Judge Macdonald to mull over as he decides the case, and maybe even the stuff for another 15 page Appeals Court opinion of 9 month's gestation.  My hope: that I live long enough to know the outcome.  My surmise: It's the case that will be keeping me alive.

Stay well and give my best to Ned.

Jochen

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