I was going to be so proud, this year, to be getting my annual letter off quite early in the season: Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I was off the Vermont for three days, there to compose the letter (and even to getting the detail work on my 1989 tax return done!). The best laid plans...

Arriving back in Boston on a bus from Vermont, as I reached up to take my suitcase from the overhead rack, another departing passenger appropriated my shoulder bag - with it went my neatly-composed Christmass letter, all of my financial data for 1989, my address books, my journal, and all of those other items so essential to reconstructing a year. So, here comes a letter haphazardly reconstructed from memory (overwhelmingly happy) and sent to addressed culled from my mind's file (was it Lighthouse Drive in Horseshoe Florida, or Horseshoe Curve in Lighthouse Point, Florida?). I ask your indulgence if I've erred on more than a few of the gross of addresses I've attempted to reconstruct.

The theft put me into a blue funk, with its attendant rage, depression, anger, and self-criticism. Then, however, I thought back to my frequent admonitions to people depressed about a negative turn of events - "look for what opportunity this crisis might bring you; else, the disaster might overwhelm you." How true, after the mandatory report to the police, I was over to the jail, where I got into conversation with one of the residents recently interrupted in his attempt to spend Thanksgiving outside. As I began recounting my disaster, I found him consoling me, he whose attempted escape will add many more holidays behind bars versus me whose loss of pieces of paper provides opportunity for exercising memory and marvelling at the wonder of the brain's filing system.

The road not taken, the milk spilled: had I been on an ordinary Summer vacation, I might have been aboard the Prinzendam when she burned and sank off the coast of Alaska this Summer, rather than my actual trip abound Sumatra aboard her last Winter.

I hope the roads you choose in 1981 bring you opportunity for celebrating the birth of Jesus, for rejoicing at opportunities granted by your crises, and for telling me of your news, responding to my enclosed reconstruction:

As was the original of this year's letter, so last year's was written during a weekend visit to Vermont at Thanksgiving. Unlike this one, however, last year's wasn't lost, so I was able to get it off to you timely. It had been my custom to spend Thanksgiving weekend, after gorging myself with feasts at the Jail and with family, down at Newport, Rhode Island, where a friend was stationed as a Navy chaplain. As he was transferred South, however, I came up with the Vermont alternative, as a perfectly bucolic location to rest up in anticipation of the holiday season, and the attendant increase in crises at the Jail.

In anticipation of the holiday blues, a TV channel came into the jail to do a brief report on the work being done by my LIFELINE inmates to assist their fellow-detainees to cope with the increased tensions and awareness of aloneness which fly in with the first snows of Winter. Also did a live hour-long radio talk show on the holiday syndrome. Notable there was that people were able to phone the radio station - we had opportunity to share with people, how they were coping, and to learn from them methods for surviving the holidays they might suggest to other listeners. Especially rewarding was a call from one of the other corrections institutions: an alumnus of my jail called in to tell of how instrumental the LIFELINE members had been in helping him to survive his first several days with us, and of how gratifying his work with the program had been after he overcame his own frustrations.

You've got the standard pattern by now: into Jail on Christmass Eve, over to the parish for Midnight Mass, back to the Jail, departure from there for the airport. First stop last year was London, where I had Boxing Day with relatives, culminating with attendance at Royal Windsor Theatre with a pantomime traditional for the day after Christmass. The next day, opportunity with some of the English Samaritans about how the program is progressing there, with a chance to tell them of the great progress being made by the LIFELINE program. Then off to the new part of the year's world: up to Kathmandu in Nepal. So happy that an Australian had suggested that destination to me: though one would think the roof of the world, surrounded by the Himalaya and Anapurna ranges to be bleak and frightfully cold, the valleys were actually quite mild, Kathmandu itself never sees snow.

One of my students at Wentworth, originally from Nepal, had had me bring over with me a pile of gifts for his family. Any difficulty the portage might hove incurred was more than compensated when I met his family: they treated me, not as a strange Western tourist , but as a sort of surrogate son. Their boy not having been home for over four years, they through me had their first live contact with him. Now done with the extra suitcase of gifts? Not a chance: the day before my departure for Thailand, the family showed up with a whole slew of gifts for me and Jessica. The great highlight of this contact was the opportunity to go to their home, there to eat with them a native Nepalese meal (lucky I had been schooled that the food keeps coming until you stop saying how good it is, a lesson I had forgotten until the fourth or fifth serving). They were quite stunned that I had been taught to eat as in Nepal, without implements. Thinking I'd do their son a favor, I asked each of the family members, including several brothers and sisters, time to give him a message on my tape recorder.. As they were speaking in Nepalese, it wasn't until I got back to the States that my initiative turned to chagrin: all they talked about on the tape was the kindness I showed in taking my valuable time to be with them. A relative of the family was going to arrange that I have a trip around Everest on one of the special flights the native airline arranges there. Before that came, news of another of those flights crashing into the mountain: suddenly, my schedule was too full for me to arrange a flight.

How about a little synergism: while in Kathmandu, went over to the U.S. Embassy, where I knew a Brown University classmate to be working, there to give him opportunity to give to our 2Oth Reunion gift. Too bad he wasn't in! Brown did note at our reunion this Summer, however, that I now hold the record for distance travelled to secure a pledge from a classmate, in person. Another dimension of the synergism: my visit to the family so encouraged them about the opportunity afforded by study at Wentworth, that another of their sons joined the Institute in September. Attestation to the quality of education in Nepal: this student, after starting the Freshman course here, was found to be advanced far beyond the level of high school graduates here, thus was able to take fewer than the normal number of courses, whereby being able to give increased attention to adjusting to life in this foreign culture.

What might have been the greatest disaster of the trip turned into a highlight: I was due to fly down to Polkhara, in the Anapurna range, there to spend some time in the shadow of Fishtail Mountain (for the initiate, also known as Macchupuchare). After a very early start in the morning and several hours' wait at the airport, learned that the flight had been cancelled by Mother Nature's unpredictable weather. (As an aside to anyone thinking to go to Nepal: always give yourself 24 hours' leeway on your gravel plans. as the weather changes at 10,000 feet make New England's climate seem dull.) Though the agent charged with getting me onto my flight disappeared, thereby getting himself fired when I reported to the agency the many similar tales other travellers told of the agent's evaporation in tandem with zero flight ceilings, the more customary warmth and hospitality of Nepal showed itself. I was given a guide, a car, and a driver for the six-hour, 200-mile trip to Polkhara. As there had been great rain the preceding evening, I wouldn't characterize the one link between east and west in Nepal as a road. Rather, it was a sort of 200-mile roller-coaster mud slide. Trusting that the driver valued his life as much as I, mine, after a few hours skirting the very edges of chasms as we climbed out of the Kathmandu valley, then back down to Polkhara, I stopped closing my eyes, to marvel at the vistas afforded by a view of the mountain ranges, like so many teeth biting at the clouds that swirled about them.

As Nepal is almost bereft of natural resources, and must rely upon foreign largesse to accomplish any civil works, the bridge fording the last river into Polkhara having washed out six years before was still down. Thus, through the river to town. A dam fording the headwaters of what becomes the Ganges river also being out, we crossed to the hotel by raft, there to find that my room reservation had been cancelled when the flight was. Again, great hospitality - the manager of the hotel vacated his cottage for my stay; further he hosted me at dinner with all the staff - so much more pleasant when travelling to be with residents of the visited place than with fellow-tourists. The return to Kathmandu was to be by plane. A three-hour delay at the airport at first angered me; Mother Nature provided the compensation here: arriving at the airport, we were totally socked in. In the course of the three hours, the clouds lifted as if the curtains on Nature's stage. to reveal the massive splendor of the Anapurna (all eight of the peaks) reaching up to Heaven before us. The sheer mass of the mountains made me the more aware of how tiny our one-propellor plane was as it waltzed between them on our return to Kathmandu.

Back at the Soaltee Hotel (it was like home to me, returning there after each of the several excursions throughout Nepal, we had many occasions for practicing New Year's revelry before the actual event: the electric power supply was as erratic as the weather. Each time the hotel plunged into darkness, the guests took it as a cue to swing into "Auld Lang Syne". Lest that become too hackneyed a greeting of the New Year, at midnight, legions of back-of-the-house staff came roaring from the kitchen, each banging the largest pot or kettle he could muster. And muster us out, they did! Next day, to the shrine of Dashin'kali, where each family sacrifices an animal to Kali, then picnics with the roasted remains of the sacrifice. On our way back into town, my guide imposed an arduous trek up a mountainside upon me. Now having witnessed, photographed, and taped Tibetan Buddhist monks at worship in their monastery (until they spotted me and drove me out rather forcefully), the trek was worthwhile.

Now off to the major jaunt of my stay in Nepal: out to the airport to board a little roller-skate of a plane which lifted me out of the valley for transfer to a remote dirt strip in Meghauly. There, the ultimate attestation to the ingenuity of my travel agent back in Boston: as I got off the plane, a mahout approached and told me that my private elephant - Pawinkali - was ready to take me on the three-hour trip through the jungle, across the rivers, and around the savannah to Tiger Tops, a remote game preserve. Contrary to the opinion of the Sherpa guides at the camp, my solitary status atop the elephant did not reveal me to be a maharajah: rather, with three cameras and a tape recorder going, I could ill afford to be one of the four riders normally atop the elephant's platform. Further proof to them that I was special was our spotting during the daylight trek of four tigers - none had been seen before that season in daylight. With no electricity at the camp (even the refrigerators and slide projector got their power from kerosene), it might well seem to have been primitive. Though there were 40 other tourists at the camp, the Australian lady's introduction of me to the Sherpas who had been in her raft when it capsized a year before got me an entree to the staff's camp, there to be regaled by tales of the naturalists, guides, elephant drovers, and cooks. Try telling a joke to a person whose culture doesn't involve credit cards, electricity, draft protesters, or multi-party politics!

As rustic as Tiger Tops might seem, we had a trip further into the wild, out to the tented camp: Land Rover to elephant to canoe to portage to canoe to Land Rover to portage. Each stage of the trip got us further out of contact with the twentieth century. So far away from now did we go that it was with incredulity I heard the Sherpa tell us, upon arrival at the camp, that solar panels would provide sufficient heated water for our showers (though it would be the guest's liability to load the hot water into the tub atop the shower before diving in). Were I to list all of the creatures I saw and photographed at the camp and back at Tiger Tops, you'd think me to be quoting the passenger list for Noah's ark.

Leaving Kathmandu the next day, bound for Singapore, I was again delayed by Mother Nature. This did, however, enable me to spend an extra few hours at the airport with my student's family. As I was checking in for departure, a tug on my jacket indicated a little one behind me: one of the sisters there with a garland of red and orange flowers; another sister, with a bouquet of the same flowers. When I turned to see the whole family lined up, I had to deflect my face to wipe a tear from my eye; turning again, I saw all the family to be doing the same. A message there about the universality love; people barely into this era were sharing with a total stranger an \attestation to the nobler dimensions of our human condition. Would there were way to encapsule that dimension of my souvenirs.

We finally got off from Kathmandu, four hours late; after a further delay at Calcutta., reached Bangkok, obviously too late for my ongoing flight into Singapore. Thus, after hours delay at the airport, taken by the airline to a hotel which could be compared only with a drunk tank. Luxuriated with two hours' sleep there before getting off to a dawn flight into Singapore. At least there, had opportunity to meet again with the Samaritans, hearing that their center parallels what is happening here in Boston: an ever-increasing number of callers who hope to find a realistic alternative to the irreversible solution, suicide.

This Fall, I was using my tapes of the trip to reminisce about all of the minute details which contribute to the net happy memory; just as the tape came to my recording of a band ashore playing to us departing Singapore harbor on the M.S. Prinsendam for a week-long cruise around Sumatra, a news flash on the radio alerted me to the burning (and subsequent sinking) of the Prinsendam off the shore of Alaska. With some trepidation, I jogged my memory, recalling that two of the three other cruise ships I've been on have also gone down. Thinking to enter into a contract with Lloyds of London that, for a fee, I'll stay off any ships they insure. I hope the inhabitants of the depths of the Gulf of Alaska can find the self-indulgent pleasure swimming through the ship's skeleton that I found swimming in one of her pools, stuffing myself during the five daily meals, partying in her lounges, debarking from her daily for forays into primitive villages. Reviewing my notes, I found that the cruise (which was to have been the restful part of my trip) afforded me only three hours in the whole week for idle sunbathing.

I was fortunate, our first day at sea, to meet an Australian family aboard. The son, having been born and grown up in Sumatra, spoke the native languages and had acquaintances in each or our ports. Thus, the excursions to the villages we visited were not with the typical busload of passengers (that negative being exacerbated on this voyage, as half of the passengers were Honda salesmen from Germany who had won the trip as a sales premium, and who from all evidence had never before voyaged outside their hometowns), but rather with a carefree Aussie and his old friends from the villages. our first landfall was the island of Penang, off the coast of Malaysia, where I had chance for brief telephone meeting with the Samaritans functioning in that remote outpost, doing the same befriending that characterizes their colleagues in Boston.

Our first stop in Sumatra itself would have validated the whole trip: profiting from local contacts, I was able to enter, photo, and record the drugged singing (though not to participate) in an opium den at Belawan. As there, so at Sabang, Sibogla, and the island of Nias, tourists had been a rarity in Sumatra until 1974, when the Prinsendam was specially built with an extremely shallow draft, enabling her to navigate the coastal waters. At Nias, 500 tribesmen entertained us with war dances and chanting. To facilitate their raids on other villages, the tribesmen had perfected the sport of high-jumping. However, the jump was not over a light pole; rather, the failed jump penalized the hurtling body with a solid stone wall. Rather strong incentive for the 100% success rate we witnessed. Were the nightly buffet not enough cause to keep me up past midnight our final day at sea, the overpowering majesty of Krakatoa volcano as we sailed past her in the moonlight would have been. The next day, following a tour of Djakarta (more than enough time for that most unglamorous city), flew down to Denpassar at the southern end of Java for a few days on Bali Beach.

Last foreign stop of the trip, the Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong, was a welcome contrast with the self-administered showers of Tiger Tops. Had opportunity to get over to the Samaritans; somehow our talk got around to the LIFELINE program back in Boston. Return to reality via a few days in San Francisco, where I was able to compare the Samaritan approach of client-controlled contact with the SFO agency's policy that they will intervene without the client's permission if they feel the client to be at risk of suicide. That policy seems unrealistic: who is going to call and bare their most unpleasant feelings, if they know their risk having a police ambulance show up at their door? My luggage wasn't as ready as I to get home: for the first time in my travels, it left me in New York, detouring to Dallas before rejoining me in Boston (almost intact) two days later.
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Though I talked often of the LIFELINE program while on vacation, the harsh reality of prison suicide had left my consciousness for a month. Arriving back home at midnight, was called into the Jail an hour later to process a suicide which had just occurred there. All the feelings prompted by such an invasion of ugliness - anger, sadness, pity, guilt - welled up as I drove over to the Jail. Given that nobody who had been in contact with the inmate prior to his death had the slightest inkling that he was having trouble coping, the death was a reminder that no program, no precaution, no diligence, can totally anticipate the changes in human spirit. Given that this was but the 3rd suicide in the Jail to occur since LIFELINE began three years before (versus the 7 deaths per year that the statistics say an institution of our size should experience), we feel the program has had an impact. Live bodies can't be counted, however: it would be hard to tell just how many inmates have been deterred from that final step by the care-full attention of one of their brother-inmates, or of a caring staff-member.

In February began frequent trips to the Barnstable County Jail on Cape Cod, there to work with the staff; the inmates, and representatives of the Cape Samaritans on developing an adaptation of LIFELINE for that institution. Once the preparation and initial training were done, I declined to go to any of the normal meetings there, feeling that if the program was to be viable, it would have to go on its own. My judgment and confidence have been vindicated: now several months old, the Barnstable LIFELINE program is flourishing. The staff person who was selected to be the Director of the program at Barnstable had indicated, during one of the orientation sessions, that he had been doing the befriending of which the Samaritans speak all of his many years at the jail; the implementation of the LIFELINE program gave him confidence, he has reported, that he is not alone in his reaching out. He now sees that the attempt to help an inmate cope is a human effort in which staff, inmates, and outside volunteers can cooperate.

Became married to the telephone again in March, as we had aimed for our 20th Reunion at Brown to get $260,000 pledged by our classmates: the previous class had achieved $100,000. The diligent work of the volunteer fund-raisers, coupled with the superb support of development office staff people, paid off: at our reunion in June, we were able to report that the class had committed over $900,000 to alma mater. It's fortunate that so many of our classmates are aware of the vital role Brown played in preparing them for the successes they are now apparently enjoying.

The American Medical Association has been working to upgrade the quality of medical care in corrections institutions. Its Massachusetts affiliate has begun certifying the individual jails and prisons as conforming to the minimum standards of the .EMA. Having heard of the suicide program at Charles Street, MMS sponsored a day-long program on suicide behind the walls, to which 100 were invited. The universality of the problem was attested to by the 140 attendees who showed up. The sheriff's department of Suffolk County, New York, presented a videotape they had prepared to make corrections officers aware of their responsibility for the care, custody, and control of the inmates: however one might feel personally about a specific inmate, he has been committed to an institution's care, custody, and control. For those officers so jaded by years of abuse from their inmates, for those with temperaments not oriented to caring, for those who forget -the humanity they share with people in their care, a reminder to these classes of officers of their legal liability for paying attention to suicidal impulses or signs has proven a workable - if undesirable - alternative to spontaneous caring. Partially as a result of the conference, the Samaritans and I have had several subsequent opportunities to present the working of LIFELINE to prisons, jails, state hospital for the criminally insane, and juvenile detention facilities.

At the end of May, was invited to a conference at Williamsburg, Virginia; fortunately, I went down a day early, got a chance to tour the colonial reconstruction before the conference, as there would have been no chance for touring once we started. Three 20-hour days of talking with financial aid and data processing people from colleges all over the country were stimulating and enlightening, but also exhausting. An ironic result of the conference: hearing the tales of woe and problems of those schools that have automated their financial aid operation, I'm rather more tolerant than before of Wentworth having a totally manual system. With the tremendous increase in volume of financial aid matters, we will eventually have to go automated; the conference forewarned me or several of the problems I can anticipate.

Right from the conference to twentieth-reunion festivities at Brown. It's interesting how much younger the alumni look to me now than they did when, as an undergraduate, I was disconcerted by their juvenile behavior. An unique feature of the reunion: ours and another class took over a steamship which gave us a day-long trip to Newport and back, pausing in Newport long enough to befuddle the locals. One of my classmates later in the Summer gave me an unique opportunity: he and his fiancee wanting to marry, they leased the SS Calliope; she steamed into Boston Harbor and anchored opposite 'Old Ironsides', where I joined them in holy wedlock. As the bride's family was from Mexico, we did her half of the ceremony in Spanish. The ship's skipper claimed this to be the first wedding in the harbor of which he was aware; the town clerk was unwilling to register the marriage until we provided assurance that the marriage had indeed taken place within the city limits and not on the open sea (where the captain would have had to officiate).

The financial aid office at Wentworth has continued to grow, the growth being manifested this year in our move to larger offices and in the tripling of the work-study students helping us out. Another sign: last year little over 1,000 students had been notified of their aid offer before the beginning of the year; this year my associates expended Herculean efforts: over 3,000 notifications went out before registration.,. Good this is so, as costs in academia - like everywhere else - are escalating faster than are family resources. In fact, I located only 6 students who apparently had no need for financial assistance. this is one area I hope the Jarvis fever doesn't reach: what better an investment in the future than financial support for today's students? Given that my assistant is leaving the school at the end of the term to return to school full-time, I'll have the crisis of returning from vacation to the obligation of breaking in a new right hand. Oh well, another crisis which can be an opportunity: my present assistant having been with me during the difficult period of getting the office organized for tremendously increased volume with all of the initiative and aggressiveness which such organizational work required, I'll now have a chance to bring aboard a new person into a well-organized, smoothly-running operation.

When I was invited to address one of the youth detention facilities' staff - both custodial and counseling, I thought I'd be seeing a place with so much more hope for habilitative work than we have at adult jails. Not a chance! The staff there made me aware that, by the time a 10- to 16-year-old is committed to that facility by the court, he has been through so many years and experiences of dealing in an unsatisfactory way with the system that there is little hope he will be reached. To see that in an adult is depressing enough; but to see a little kid from whose life a lust for the future has already passed is truly a judgment on our system. The staff was courteous, but many of them appeared to think I was alarmist, talking about suicide being the second highest killer of teen-agers, and about the suicide rate behind bars being ten times as high as the rate in the general population. Would that I had not had the duty, two months later, to return to the facility to befriend the staff following the attempted hanging of a l4-vear-old. Some good came of the event, however: when I told the kid that his attempt had caused the staff to be more attentive to the pains of their charges, he saw that, in some way, his life meant something to someone. Further, the staff formerly would not ask new arrivals about their suicidal history or thinking (not wanting to put the idea into the innocent heads). Had they asked this kid, there would have learned that he had made 3 serious efforts to kill himself previously - now they will ask.

Down to the family home in Cheshire, Connecticut, this Fall for the wedding of a cousin, my first return there in about 20 years. So good the family reunion was a wedding rather than a funeral. There were over 40 relatives there; a real delight to witness and hear of many roads they had all travelled in the intervening years. As my effective family in Boston has become the people at the Jail, it was good to remind myself of the richness and variety of my own kin.

Speaking of family: Jessica is now a Senior at MacDuffie, filling out college applications and becoming her own person in a most gratifying fashion. Though she was offered a vacation with her cousins in Belgium this Summer, she sees the tremendous financial burden that higher education has become, instead opted to work in the kitchen of a college for the Summer. I'm delighted she has a substantial consolation to look forward to: she'll soon be leaving for three weeks With her maternal family in Brussels, there to spend the, Christmass-New.Year festivities with them. Though I'm quite excited that Brown is one of the colleges she is applying for (what a match: the outstanding Senior I know and the best college I know!), she and I well realize that the competition for a place there is the hardest of that at any U.S. college. Whatever college she attends, I trust it will be as right for her as Brown was for me.

We all have our special enthusiasms and interests; it happens mine is suicide in prison. So gratifying has it been to witness the development of LIFELINE at my Jail - and its successful replication at another facility - that it's been with great enthusiasm that I've answered requests to talk about it. Now, juxtaposing that enthusiasm with the increase in crises that occurs at Christmass/New Year, I've had renewed chances to talk - both on TV, on the radio, and in print - about the heroic, quiet listening the Samaritans do, which work their barred colleagues in LIFELINE parallel. A caveat: though I am genuinely proud of the life enriching the inmate members of LIFELINE perform, I speak nothing of their status in the justice delivery system. We are not concerned with how an inmate's case should or has come out; were we, we might ourselves be candidates for Samaritan befriending. Rather, let us continue in our efforts to find alternatives to suicide. The verdict of death by suicide cannot be reversed; and the sentence to permanent silence of the heart cannot be reduced. We'll continue working to enliven the heart, to reverse the despair.

A special bonus of Christmass Eve in jail this year will be that, falling on the night of our weekly meeting of the Samaritan volunteers with the LIFELINE inmates, it will be the occasion for special sharing of love. The Sam's and LL'ers are convinced that, if we can all provide each other with an extra fortification of love and caring, we'll be the better able to help others with whom we come in contact to break through their alone-ness and see some of the hope which the advent of our Christ and the dawning of His New Year should bring.

To think that, this year, I'll be there. Annual vacation this year finds me flying on Christmass afternoon to the Holy Land. After checking out all of the places which have been credal realities, but not actual earth till now, I'll trust that the truce on the west Bank will hold long enough for me to view Israel from Moses' vantage on Mount Nebo, then down to Petra in southern Jordan, on to a week at the Club Med in the Nile River (actually, an island castle) at Cairo, an overnight train to Aswan - may Allah's air-conditioning be functioning, up to Luxor. Again, I'm trying to design some rest into the trip (by now, should recognize this to be a vain attempt): up to a week at the Club Med in Djerba la Douce off the coast of Tunisia (just what can prevent rest on an island off the Mediterranean coast of Africa?)> Trip climaxes with a few days with family, friends, and more Samaritans in London.

Last year, a recipient complained that that year's (shorter than this) was too long. If I could quantify the net balance of contentment and joy, the finding and exploiting of opportunities, the witnessing of people helping people, the world-wide network of caring, that this year has brought me, this letter would be without end, as are my affectionate best wishes to you. Thank you for being occasion for me to write this recapitulation of a year which I thought at first a thief had captured in my shoulder bag.