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1986: From a Christmas Letter

On a business trip last month which included meetings in Philadelphia and in North Carolina, I visited with Vic and Debbie in Germantown and with Elizabeth and Jesse (and even more fun, Rebecca and Jay) on their farm on the Virginia border. It felt good. So you all should visit Karen and me in the San Francisco region (maybe not all at the same time) and be as welcomed as I was with my relatives and be as "at home" as anywhere; we have a couple of spare bedrooms and a few couches for overflow. The fireplace works in the wintertime, the larder usually has a bottle of rare brandy for storytelling catalyst, there is lots of room for staging trips to the ocean or forays to the Sierra Madre, and we can fix most anything from flat tires to outboard engines to broken radios and sometimes crying babies. So distribute these communications aids to those near and far, and have a Merry Christmas and a fine 1987!

In the tradition of good pilotage and cartography (sort of like when the map turns into dotted lines and you find an illuminated annotation that "There be dragons here"), I would caution all visitors to Vic and Debbie to beware: when Vic suggests that you walk the dogs with him to settle a good meal and he offers one of two leashes, be sure to take the larger dog (I repeat, the LARGER dog), or else you will face a constant canine pull of some 120 exuberant foot-pounds and be required to cant yourself rearwards at 40 degrees while continuing to walk forward in ungainly motion; you will be feigning rational discourse while being distracted in this fashion and most likely will develop a private sheen of prickly sweat proportional to the effort and will recall little of the peripatetic discourse. This circumstance will last at least f our sides of a city block (and may be compounded by recent disturbance of circadian rhythm and lengthy air travel). Be not guiled by the logic of size! The guest bed at the top of the stairs, once the Boss' and Madre's, is indeed worth fighting over.

When you visit Elizabeth and Jesse, be sure to wear good boots because they talk in terms of hundreds of acres and, "Look! See that far ridge (other side of valley, shrouded by haze), that's where we will build the fence line. Let's check it out ... " Until 1990, bring teddy bears and wildlife books. Refresh yourself on the John Deere manual, especially the section on "Implements and Attachements", if you wish to be particularly productive. And if you are lucky, you will be blindfolded and driven for more than half an hour through rolling country backroads to an unmarked restaurant (said to have burned down three times, each time rising again to even greater fare) with TRUE southern cooking and the best fried chicken and hush puppies in the entire universe.