Ah, this is the sort of thing that the owlet might share: I am lately advised that my elder brother's wife, an erudite and amusing (if slightly high-maintenance) individual, has been diagnosed with "non-Hodgkins lymphoma" (preferable, apparently, to the Hodgkins flavor) and is facing a summer of chemo. So far, so bad. News of this reached me via my seldom-used gmail account last month, and I took a week off in the borrowed mountain cabin of a kind friend—no phone, no internet, barely enough hot water—before returning to an irate email from Der Alte, as I call the surviving parental unit (one who had already achieved a pretty good approximation of an old man's irascibility by the time he was forty, and who has perfected the act since) reproaching me for my "contemptible" lack of support for the brother und frau. Sheesh. I wrote back immediately, explaining that I'd already written the bro (I'd actually checked gmail upon my return), and added, perhaps unwisely, that I did not appreciate his assuming the worst of my conduct. This generated a reaming telephone call hours later during the course of which I was spoken to as a 16 year-old (grating in 1968-69, the last time it was appropriate; extremely grating in CE 2006) and repeatedly threatened with disinheritance (yawn). "You've been baiting me for decades!" he snarled. Well, who knows? I think I've been treating him with enormous circumspection for years, and that if there's been any baiting done in our common history it has been on his side.

This said, it was enlightening to learn how effectively the old man is still able to jab my buttons. The whole episode rather cast a pall on last night, but I find that equanimity is returning—obviously not entirely—today.

The S-i-L's illness is, of course, another matter entirely. I'm assembling a wonderful pirate media package for her convalescence.

cordially,