Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter. I'm relieved that your silence
was attributable to a cinema hangover. Please remember that
I'm never offended not to have a letter from you, though
sometimes a bit worried.

As you may infer from the e-mails I forwarded to you, the 
court mandated appeal to the plumbing board seems to be
coming to fruition. After three weeks of silence, there is 
coy and cryptic promise from Executive Director Peluso
that he would put "the letters" which he had just signed
into the mail today (May 10), without divulging what these
letters might contain. I'll have to wait until I get a
telephone call from Klemens or Laura who are emptying the
mail box for me from day to day.

I reflect with some curiosity on my own reactions, initially that
since he hadn't negotiated my 86.00 dollar check and has failed
to divulge the date of the hearing, - which was the specific
information I had requested, that maybe there was to be no hearing,
that maybe the Plumbing Board had thrown in the towel and decided
they couldn't face to be shown what they were doing, not only on
Nantucket but in fact all over the state. Then I sobered up to the
realization that I was indulging in wishful thinking, that I had
no reason to assume that the Board, or for that matter, the courts
had any intention of contemplating "the truth" or of complying with
"the law", what every they might be, that the charade was not yet
over, and that I must expect to be informed that the hearing will
take place on May 30, or June 6, or June 27.

On second thought, I understand that I must be careful in what I
wish for, because if ever I "win", I shall have to pack up myself,
and more awkwardly, Margaret, to head for the unheated unfurnished
house on Nantucket, there to install the insulation, the floors,
the spiral stairs, the inside doors, the finish carpentry, while
my right hip and my sciatic nerve are emphatically protesting the
indignities to which they are being subjected. In return, I should
have to forfeit my seat on this wonderful glassed-in porch, where
straight ahead are the hummingbirds fighting for feeder supremacy,
the maples with their fresh green leaves nodding against a background
of brilliant white cumulus clouds  sailing across a bright blue sky,
and to my right, looming through a gap in the out of control hemlock
hedge, the sharp outline of the summit of Mount Rogers, the highest
in the state. All this with, in front of me, the text of "Die Andere"
on the computer screen where I make sure that Ä Ü Ö ü ä ö and ß are
properly placed to as to reassure the hypothetical reader of my
unstinting allegiance to conventional spelling, while the text itself
serves as the pool in which an admiring Narcissus sees the reflection
of his spirit.

Thank you for your defintition of "normal frictional resistance to
flow".