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Dear Peter:
Recently my thoughts about you have often circled
back to early days at 5321 Baynton St. When I lie
awake as I did early this morning I remembered
sitting in your room beside your bed reading
aloud from ODIE FINDS A FRIEND!  Do you remember it?
The text was not up to Beatrix Potter 's standards,
nor the illustrations, but they were fairly simple
black and white line drawings, the colors quite
suitable to a tale of a little skunk trying to find
a companion. He was lonely. evidently an only child.
I seem to remember a good many tentative overtures
and emphatic rejections from other small critters:
perhaps rabbits, squirrels, birds.  In the end
I recall his plaintive appeal, finally answered.
"Who will be my friend?"  "I will!" And the friend
is identified as HUGH. "Hugh Who?"  "Hugh Skunk!"
The jerky punning text is deeply engraved in memory,
by frequent repetition.....     Love, Margaret.

     When I woke up this morning, I realized how sad, if not
tragic, a story this was, relating as it does the biography
of a person who is permanently isolated in the world, who can
never have any friends because his very name is an insult,
and who might have supplemented his answer to the question
"What is your name?" with the ritual incantation: "Selig ist
der sich nicht aergert an mir."  (Blessed is he who is not
offended by me.) So the name is holy, and its holiness
derives from the spirit of its bearer. The ultimate holiness
of the name is epitomized in the circumstance that the name
of God is unutterable; that is not necessarily so much a
prohibition as an insight; with the corollary that no name
which is spoken can be the name of God; and that whoever
purports to speak that name is not so much a sinner as he
is a fool, a liar or a fraud.

                          * * * * *
Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
