203 Poage Farm Road

                                                                                                                     Cincinnati, Ohio 45215

                                                                                                                     12/€€/87

Dear €€€€€€€€€€€€€€,

 

Christmas report time:   our year's been eventful.  Lois' mother pulled up stakes from the Berkshires to move to a retirement home right down the hill from us here in Cincinnati.  The community is most supportive, and the move has done her worlds of good.  Then later this year, after a valiant but losing fight to recover from surgery, my father died at 91.  The irreverent sparkle never left his eye.

 

We've now got both  sets of family heirlooms gathered in our house (Lois and I are only children, as were both of my parents, so the accumulations are staggering).  We keep playing on our kid's sense of history to get them to absorb more, but their tastes don't seem to run to Victorian bric-a-brac.  We keep moving it about in the hopes that it will sort of settle in and/or go away;  but what, for instance, can you do with two  grand pianos?

 

Lois and I are well and keep busy at..........stuff.  I'm still in my skunk works at the soap works, experimenting with processes that might help groups address systemic problems.  I travel, mostly to Latin America, but not as much as I used to.   We must admit that we still very much miss Europe.

 

Sue's back on her own, her marriage of five years having spent itself.  The experience has helped her grow and she's altogether the healthier for it, painful as it was.  She's since become half of a small but entrepreneurial company in Chicago that rents medical equipment (now that she's discovered the advantages of owning one's own nights and weekends, nothing will entice her back into the restaurant managing business).

 

While Sue's on the countdown to the big three-o, Arthur's just turned 27 and is  occupied inventing good things to eat for P&G's Foods Division.  (See what a mechanical Engineering degree from MIT will do for you?)  That places him in Cincinnati, where he lived at home until September at which time he abandoned subururbia for life in the faster lane of Hyde Park.  Arthur continues to be fascinated by exotic modes of transportation.  His interest has over the years shifted from parachuting to power flight to gliding, then skiing and now scuba diving, with automobile racing in the interstices.  More about automobile racing when we get to Richard.

 

Arthur's roommate in the Hyde Park venture was his brother Richard, now 24, who'd been transferred up from Lexington Kentucky were he'd been doing brand work for P&G's soft-drink bottling company there.  This arrangement was ideal.....for about six weeks, at which time Richard was transferred to Germany to help sell Lenor.  Now Arthur's living alone, and Richard's living gemόtlichly.

 

Though Richard's return to Cincinnati proved to be merely a ricochet en route to Europe, he did while he was here manage with Arthur to enter three car races (he's been doing auto cross for some time now, and he and Arthur had gone to race driving school this summer).  Richard dented his car only slightly in the first race, Arthur bent it only a little in the second, and then Richard really pranged it proper in the third, at which point he headed East for his rendezvous with the Autobahnen.  We do  wish they'd stick to selling soap.

 

Peter, now 23, is doing software design for main frame computers at Carnegie Mellon, coming up with esoteric solutons to problems far beyond my ken.  The work excites him and he's totally immersed in it except when he's playing tennis, lacrosse, basketball, volleyball or going out with his current who's a double major in Industrial Management and the flute.

 

Lois just barely survived the crisis of our Labradog Merry gorging herself on the 17 year locusts that blossomed last summer, the protein infusion then shutting down the dog's innards.  Lois was distraught, but Merry doubtless thinks it was worth having been on I V's for ten days.  Her grin was really most blissful as she'd munch the revolting creatures, the odd wing dropping out of the side of her mouth.  We're told they taste like asparagus.   Both ladies are now fully restored.

 

We hope you're well and happy this Christmas season, and wish you a most satisfying and prosperous New Year.

 

                                                                                                                     Dick Neergaard, & Co.