Dear Mr. Garmel, 

Thank you, as always, for your interest and concern about my
litigation with Nantucket. When I told Judge Mcdonald at the
hearing that because of the delay, being 82 years old, I had
already lost the case, my statement was true only with respect
to my ability personally to install the insulation, tile the
floors, install the inside doors and cabinets, perform the
finish carpentry and do whatever else was necessary to make
the property rentable. Those tasks would have absorbed time
and energy which I have put to other uses. Instead of laboring
on Nantucket, I've spent the summers vacationing in the family
home in the Virginia mountains where I grew up, watching the
hummingbirds, cardinals, indigo buntings, chickadees ...
adding to a novel about, among other topics, life on an island,
and most important getting old gracefully and serenely with my
mental faculties reasonably intact.

The Nantucket litigation has turned into one of the most
exhilarating experiences in my life, comparable to climbing
the Presidentials in New Hampshire or hiking in the back-
country of the Canadian Rockies. I am fascinated by the spiritual
contest with Judge Mcdonald who is torn between his desire to
rule in favor of established authority and his wish not to be
overruled a second time by the Appeals Court. He procrastinates
in the hope that something will turn up to support a judgment
against me, but instead Mr. Ciarmataro complicates matters with
the contradictions that he has no choice but to condemn my
plumbing because of its inferior workmanship, but that he 
believes me to be a liar because I couldn't have installed
that plumbing without a plumber's help.

Perhaps I'm repeating myself with the anecdote from Leonard
Boudin, then a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, who
when arguing a case before the US Supreme Court and newly
appointed Justice Rehnquist declined to recuse himself for
having worked on the case as Solicitor General. Boudin's
comment, made forty years ago, has never stopped ringing in
my ears, "The Government Lies, the government always lies."

And so it is. The seminal case Olmstead v. U.S. 277 US 438.
In an oft quoted dissent Justice Brandeis wrote piously:

"Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government
officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct
that are commands to the citizen.  In a government of laws,
existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to
observe the law scrupulously.  Our government is the potent,
the omnipresent teacher.  For good or for ill, it teaches
the whole people by its example.  Crime is contagious.  If
the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for
law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it
invites anarchy."