Dear Cyndy, 

Happy New Year, and thank you for your letter. I celebrated
the end of the old one by completing yesterday, 4 1/2 hours before the 
artificial deadline, my brief in an appeal that has not even been docketed.
You can read my "work product", satisfaction NOT guaranteed, at
http://home.earthlink.net/~ej4meyer/All05.pdf
if you're curious.

The muses are cross at me. They scold me because, so they say, I had no
business interrupting with legal palaver our discourse about my recently 
deceased saintly wife; emphatically pointing out that I had irrationally 
idealized her in an effort to drink myself to sleep with grief; 
that she was neither Mary nor Aphrodite nor Athena. Perhaps Euridice, 
and then they spat it in my face: "And don't for a moment think that 
you're Orpheus, Shakespeare or even Rilke."

They left me in a huff, and punished me with a commission to write sonnets 
about Salem witches or Guantanamo detainees, about Nantucket lawyers or harpies
dressed up like female Superior Court justices. And I will, I will try to do
their bidding, the Muses' I mean, not the harpies'. I'll write to you again
soon and wish you and Ned a healthy and peaceful New Year.

Jochen