Dear Judy Chambliss,

Please excuse the immediate reply, which is intended not to foment an
overheated correspondence, but to merely to assist my fading memory 
to keep track of my epistolary obligations.

Nathaniel's future seems uncertain. I don't know what his plans are,
but I wish him well and will do whatever I can to help him.

You ask about the pronunciation of Jochen. Two syllables: Jo - chen.
"Jo-" is pronounced like "yo" in yoyo; indeed "Yoyo" is the nickname
which my daughter-in-law gave me some 30 years ago, and by which all
of my four grandchildren know me. "chen" begins with the rough ch which 
English speakers find awkward. "en" is pronounced simply like the letter "n".
If you want to practice you can try saying "Yo-ken", with a muted "k"
and just before you articulate the "k", imagine trying to loosen a fleck
of peanut butter from your soft palate by gargling. If your computer
has a speaker or earphones, you can hear an authentic pronunciation
when you paste into your browser's address space:
http://www.namepedia.org/de/firstname/Jochen/
hit "Enter", then on the right margin click on "Aussprache", (Pronunciation)
then click on "Diesen Namen hören" (Hear this name)
then in the box that opens, click on "Deutsch" (German),
and you should hear an authentic pronunciation.
I doubt that all this is worth the trouble.

My summer has been solitary but not lonely. A few days spent helping my
son install the last of 24 replacement casement windows, which seem
to bring the sun-drenched outdoors much closer. I also made two short
trips to Minneapolis to help with the rehabilitation of my very ill
cousin's very much cluttered apartment. For the rest, I've spent many
hours reading and meditating on the voluminous correspondence between
my wife-to-be and myself in the three years of our courtship, 1949-1951.
I've been reading a wide spectrum of literature, from the odes of John
Keats to the uplifting discourses (opbyggelige Taler) of Søren Kierkegaard,
I've been working sporadically on the 9th chapter of the eighth volume of 
my novels, and experimenting with an elegy in unrhymend iambic pentameter 
in German; and above all, I've been practicing being very old.

I wish you a satisfactory trip to Florida, and a bright and sunny prelude
to autumn in Vermont.

Jochen Meyer