Dear Cyndy,

My sympathy for your illness and my very best wishes for your recovery.
I wish I could be your physician, but that's not in the cards.

I temporarily abandoned Charlotte when she appointed herself as mistress
of ceremonies of a vocal contest (Saengerfest) of classical love songs
performed by her three ambivalent (non-)admirers, Mengs, Joachim and
Moritz Schwiegel. I hope within a few days I may find out to whom she
awarded the prize.

I've been distracted by an estate planning excursion centered on two issues:
a) how much should Margaret disclaim in the event I predecease her.  This, it
turns out, is a King Lear conundrum in sheep's clothes. Nathaniel who stopped
in last night to borrow the car to drive to New Haven to retrieve his Bulgarian
international relations girl friend Radina, reported himself profoundly impressed
having attended two performances of King Lear.

Suddenly I understood about Shakespeare what had escaped me before: that
all the plays with which I am familiar, Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, the Tempest,
the Winters Tale are caricature-like exaggerations of very familiar "everyday"
experiences which facilitate our understanding of a world from which we
cannot escape.

b) In struggling how to minimize the appalling income tax consequences of
retirement plan liquidation at death, I discovered to much relief that not only IRAs
but other retirement plans as as well, may be "rolled over" tax-free into "inherited IRAs",
all this subject to tax regulations of such abysmal obscurity as to be incomprehensible
and hence subject only to arbitrary interpretation, - just like the plumbing code.

I must get back to work. I hope you recover - soon!

Jochen