Dear B****
and M****,
December,
1995
It's
Christmas, family news update time......
Sue's wedding to Jan
Willem van der Werff was the family's Event of the Year, bringing the
lot of us
to Holland in April and returning, now, in December.
For Lois and me, life
remains as busy as it is for all our retired friends.
At-home leisure activities - tennis, gardening, a gentle pursuit
of genealogy, workshop projects for me, quilt design and making for
Lois -
inevitably become squeezed into the interstices between trips, making
the
notion of leisure seem an ever-receding Quixotic dream.
The convergence of
the family in Holland in April for Sue's wedding was preceded by ten
days in
Burgundy and Champagne, with Lois, Arthur, Peter and I pursuing the
serious but
not solemn task of gathering wines for the celebration.
Sue and Jan Willem's
wedding was arranged by them; Lois
and I were just guests (how delightful!).
And it was a heck of a party to be guests at:
a midday champagne reception followed by a ceremony at the
palace (now a museum) of the local marquis, presided over by a
magistrate in
full medieval regalia. Afterwards
there was a high tea (in honor of Lois) for "intimates";
then a public reception for the
couple's hundred or two friends and acquaintances;
and finally, a Provençal banquet running into the wee
hours.
Next day, the
honeymoon entourage - newlyweds plus two of Sue's friends and her
brother
Arthur - set off for Frederique Westhoff's old fortified farmhouse near
Avignon. And Lois, Peter and I
headed in the opposite direction for a week of vacation in Prague. What
a jewel
of a city! with an astounding number of concerts, ballets, operas,
theaters and
sadly, tourists. It's a great
vacation spot - easy to get around in, inexpensive, blessed with an
unassuming
cuisine focused on your four basic food groups: sausage,
cheese, ice cream and beer.
We had,
in June, a day's worth of business
to accomplish regarding our house in the Berkshires, so decided -
leisure does
put in an appearance, sometimes - to make a three-week New England trip
of it,
visiting various of our Down-East friends. We
came away again reassured that the beauty of that part of
the world is not just a trick of selective memory.
Even the MacDonalds' there serve lobster.
Arthur is charged
with developing for P&G use, a new type of converting machine,
requiring
that he spend significant time with the vendor's engineers in the UK,
with the
vendor's assembly plant is in Belgium, at the prototype's
site in Switzerland,
and at P&G's client plant in Argentina. You
can imagine how heartbroken he is at having to leave
Cincinnati for all that foreign travel.
Richard has
always had a dream of owning his
own business. When P&G
proposed to reassign him from Egypt, where he's been Marketing
Manager, to
Germany, he realized his moment of decision for his vision had arrived,
took a
deep breath........ and resigned.
The decision was made a bit easier by the fact that he truly
enjoys
living in Cairo, and Ishraq, his wife, continues to be excited by her
career
there as her company's Director of Marketing.
Richard, having recently become national wind-surfing
champion of Egypt, is now so busy evaluating the many business
opportunities he
sees around him that he tells us he hasn't been out to the beach
in weeks. Poor fellow.
Peter, has not had a
"sea change". Thank goodness.
All is tranquil in Pittsburgh, where he
continues to have enormous fun cajoling computers at Carnegie-Mellon
into doing
the astounding things they do.
They're all four of
them, plus Ishraq and Jan Willem, home again this year for Christmas. Bless 'em
Merry Christmas to you from all the Neergaard family, and may
<>Travel
Wedding
Trip - France, Al, Holland, Prague (5 basic food groups)
New
England
Holland
in December
India
Activities
Tennis,
gardening (aubergine), quilting, workshop
Theater
& opera subscriptions
CGT
visit
Jury
Duty
Sue
Wedding
Orphanage
Furniture
Arthur
Wine
cellar
Fireworks,
river, rocket
Engineering,
ski boat
Richard
Benckiser
Other
offer
Peter
Opera
New
girlfriend
Windows
95, NT
Interim
Midyear
Letter 1996
It's August here as
elsewhere, and we're fully engaged in the
business of
sweltering survival. We do tennis
mornings, plodding blobs in
slow motion, and then
before the midday sauna becomes unbearable, I potter
around in the garden,
spending more time than strictly necessary watering,
holding the hose such
that just the right amount of spume coolly mists through
my personal
space. Mad dogs, Englishmen, and
gardening tennis players in
August in Cincinnati.
The Eggplant in the
Iron Mask. Or actually, in a
transparent plastic mold of a silly shrunken head, into which a veggie
bud is
inserted. This glorious notion had
been
patented by a friend
of Arthur's, and of course I allowed myself to be
persuaded to give it
a try. The contorted vegetable has
now filled the mold
with a purple,
straining face, proving, as if Monty Python hadn't already done
so, that it's
possible simultaneously to be mindlessly silly and disgustingly
grotesque.
Our evenings are
balmy and not without compensation.
The Cincinnati
Conservatory of Music
(probably the best part of UC) Hot Summer Nights is as
delightfully
frivolous as ever. What the
players lack in skill (which isn't much), they more than make up for in
enthusiasm. Altogether a most pleasant way
to spend
an evening..
We've told you that
Sue and her husband Jan Willem have bought an orphanage
(sans orphans) on an
island off the Dutch coast.
Charming it's not; Sue's
word is
"majestic", but I'm afraid that's giving it the best of it. I'd
go along with
Ponderously Institutional.
Sue and Jan Willem,
back in their workaday world at GE, decided it *
was better to buy a
house than to rent. Continuing in
this practical
vein, they purchased
a 100-year-old orphanage ("Needs Work") with
seven bedrooms,
12-foot ceilings, and three 10-foot windows per room.
It's still an OK
commute from GE, and it was cheap (relative to what houses
cost - arghhhh - in
Europe) primarily because the culture of the community
it's in is dominated
by a conservative religious sect.
Which means there
ain't nuthin'
happnin' around there, baby.
Sue and Jan Willem are however
convinced a slow but
steady influx of yuppies (like, eg, them) will eventually
liven things up,
increasing property values and leaving them sitting pretty.
After the rehab, that
is.
The building is 100
years old, and roomy. Like seven
bedrooms. All the rooms
have 12' ceilings,
each has three 10' windows - most painted shut (one more
item on a long list
of restoration necessities; like
digging out the basement
which was filled in
with rubble and locked after an old woman fell down the
steps, died, and came
back to haunt). So Lois' and my
Mission for the past
month or so has been
to help them furnish their castle.
We wanted to take advantage of GE's having spare room in the
sea-van of
someone else they were sending to Holland, and set out to fill it, glad
of the
opportunity to reduce our inventory of white elephants (oops! - I meant
fine
old family heirlooms).
As refinishing and allied
activities progressed, the project developed impetus,
then claimed top priority. Finally, with the deadline (ship
sailing) fast
approaching, it took
on an urgent life of its own as Madam and I worked ourselves
into wall-to-wall 14-hour
days (less my time on jury duty, compensated for by
the forsaking of
tennis).
Finally, late the
night before I had to set out with my U-Drive-It moving van
to the staging area
in a suburb West of Chicago, we finished
constructing the
crates for the fragile larger pieces (eg, china cabinet) and
the skeletal
reinforcements for the packing boxes for the fragile smaller
pieces (eg lamp
globes, cut crystal). Our moving
company contact had
inspired me by
describing quite graphically the rearing and plunging of a freighter
riding up
and down the waves of the North Atlantic in winter.
It as at last with Arthur's help that we managed to get all
the stuff
packed and loaded.
Then came jury duty, a
royal pain: a malpractice suit
that should never have been
brought, defended by
two of the most boringly repetitive lawyers imaginable.
it was a
day-and-a-half case that took seven days.
When at last we got the
case, it tool us all
of about 90 seconds to "deliberate" . A
woman whose
breast cancer had
gone undetected for several years sued two doctors claiming
that if they'd
diagnosed it earlier, she could have had a lumpectomy instead of a
mastectomy.
The actual pathology report however
showed the cancer to have
been undiagnosable
(micro growths, not yet coalesced) except with luck by a
biopsy which at the
time there had been no grounds to perform. But
the
plaintiff was full of
hate, too bitter to listen.
Further, she lied (as
evidenced by internal
contradictions in her testimony) about what symptoms
she'd reported to the
doctors at various visits. I've
heard tell that nothing
pisses off a jury as
much as being lied to. Right.
But a close second is
having to devote a
week of time I couldn't afford as a casualty of her
irrational
anger. I did however learn more
about the human mammary gland than
I ever expected - or
wanted - to know. Truth to tell,
the heavy-hitting experts brought in from all over the country by the
defense
provided for us, the jury, a fascinating week-long cram course in the
detection
and treatment of breast cancer.
That part of the interlude was indeed quite memorable
Arthur is charged
with developing for P&G use, a new *
type of converting
machine, requiring that he spend
significant time with
the vendor's engineers in the UK, his *
assembly plant in
Belgium, at the site of a
prototype in
Switzerland, and at
P&G's client plant in Argentina.
You can imagine how heartbroken he is at having to leave
Cincinnati for
all this foreign travel.
It didn't take long
for Richard, after leaving P&G at the end of last year to explore
starting
up his own business in Egypt, to realize that there was an enormous gap
between
the romantic dream of solitary entrepreneurship, and the slogging
reality. He
soon accepted an offer from Benckiser, a fast-growing German-based
multinational consumer-products company - sort of a miniature P&G -
where
he now gets all the entrepreneurship he could possibly want.
So Richard and Ishraq
have moved from Cairo a world away to Wiesbaden, where Richard is
charged with
developing new markets for Benckiser in areas of the world in which the
company
is not yet represented, primarily Russia, Israel and the Mid-East. It's proven to be quite a challenge to
move from the prudent atmosphere of P&G to that of the fast-moving
Benckiser,
and Richard's been earning his spurs.
Ishraq had to stay
for a time in Cairo to supervise finishing of their apartment there,
but is now
exploring structuring her life in Germany.
Peter has been
responsible for installing Windows '95 and its industrial-strength
cousin
Windows NT, on the Carnegie Mellon computing network.
The associated problems are far too esoteric for me to
comprehend, let alone the brilliance of his solutions, which he
nevertheless
patiently keeps trying to explain to me.
He finds relaxation in
a variety of action sports (tennis, basketball, scuba-diving,
white-water
rafting), and in participation in the Pittsburgh Opera as a Supernumery
("spear-carrier"). But
this too has health benefits. He's
been twice cast as an executioner, clothed in Tosca, but sporting only
a mask
and G-string in Turandot, inspiring him to lose 20 pounds (his
girl-friend was
bringing her girl-friends to watch!).