Dear Benjamin,

Is it time for another letter? Some of the e-mail I've been
forwarding to you includes references to Nathanial's musical
ambitions, to the Moosilauke excursion, perhaps to other family
activities from which you might be feeling left out. Perhaps
not at all; perhaps it's only I who am projecting my feelings,
having spent much of my life wishing I wasn't being left behind.
I very much hope that my expressing these feelings to you is
inappropriate; that you, to the contrary, find yourself in the
midst of satisfying activities, relieved rather than chagrined 
that you are not being distracted by irrelevant extrinsic
demands. In this regard, my own life has straddled a paradox:
I've felt left out, and yet I wanted to be alone. I believe
I've told you more than once the story of how the US Army
decided they would have absolutely no use for me, when I told
them I thought I could manage very well in the Army if I had
a private room. Correspondingly in my college summer vacations
I looked for a job with the Forest Service, manning a lookout
tower, where I would spend days at a time, all by myself, 
scanning the slopes of the mountains and valleys for smoke
signs of forest fires. What could be lonelier. But the Forest
Service also didn't need me.

What I'm doing now, in my old age, is not so very different.
I sit at my computer on the third floor in this large room
with the many windows, - actually, believe it or not, at the
time of its construction this room was reserved for you. It
still has your name on it, which I've never removed. But as
they so often do, things turned out differently. I'm grateful
to you for letting me use your room nonetheless.  Although I 
look out the window from time to time, watching the squirrels
scurrying up and down the trunks of the trees which are still
without leaves, most of my gaze is turned inward, to my early
childhood in Germany, to the six crazy years in Konnarock, to
my Harvard follies and beyond. I change the names, invent a
few characters to fill in the empty places, and write it all
down, until my novel becomes a kind of castle, designed and
built by myself, as is my custom. I've long since moved in -
emotionally and intellectually - waiting with more impatience
than patience for the inevitable end. 

So here comes your grandmother to read over my shoulder. She
wants to know exactly what's on my mind and reads every word I
write, often even before the sentence has found its (.) period.
She says it's an interesting letter, "but I don't know whether
he'll understand it." But then if she'd gone to Dartmouth she
would know better. The fact is, however, that all there's to
understand is that I'm a garrulous old man, who wonders in what
ways your experiences resemble mine.  The only other thing which
is important and which I'm sure you understand, is that I mean
what I say, when I write:

Love
Yoyo