September 1, 2021

Dear Donald,

Thank you for your letter of August 24, 2021, about humor, and when I reply that I've spent the past week, keeping your message in the back of my mind, to think about, to meditate on - and perhaps even to pray over your thoughts, an obvious rejoinder to my confession would be: "That isn't funny!"

By way of introduction, I should explain that I suspect the humorless software in my computer took offense at your letter - as I did not - and truncated what I infer was a catalogue of images to a single picture of a mother - or teacher holding a book and instructing a much smaller and obviously helpless child: "It's called reading. It's how people install new software into their brains." Below this cartoon was a couplet: "Your mind is a garden, your thoughts are the seeds./ You can grow flowers or you can grow weeds." If there was something more that I missed, please resend it as a .pdf or .jpg file attached to your e-mail.

The e-mail that I received, tempts me to try to regale you with a discussion of my experience as an amateur computer programmer, when I learned the "C" computer Language to compose the software with which I kept medical records on all my patiemts continuously from 1982 until about 10 years ago, at which time I retired from medical practice. Your e-mail tempts me also to tell you my thoughts about the difference between software and literature, and about the difficulty I have in distinguishing the weeds from the flowers, if any, that might grow in the garden of my mind.   

Instead of succumbing to these temptations with discourses which might annoy you, I close, simply wishing you comfort and health, and all the best, for the future.

Jochen