As usual. I'm starting this note altogether too late. with but days till departure for annual vacation and a month's worth of things to get done before then. However. I'll give it my best shot.

For openers. if ,you don't want to plow through the following verbiage: A Merry Christmass and Joyful New Year to you and yours! Here's a brief summary of what follows: finished last year as a stripper in the Bahamas and risked being commandeered aboard a sin piloted by a British Merchant Marine during the Gulf crisis: my case against the Sheriff finally concluded to my great satisfaction (at the end of which I rewarded myself with a 486-33. >30 meg. hard drive. 16 meg. RAM, a 16" Nanao monitor [for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about. that's a screamer or a computer!]); now debt-free for the first - me since college: I've gotten a permanent position with .MIT: the Parish of the .Advent continues faithful: my Co-op has survived some real struggles this year to reinforce my happy home: Jessica flourishes (and copes with an immense workload) in her last year at Mass. General Institute (and is now an RN specializing in critical care nursing); reunions with High School and Brown classmates have revitalized links with my origins; expert witness work on jail suicides is accelerating; my green bean window box produced an iguana; and. finally as a tease, I'm soon off to Christmass Mass in Warsaw, followed by Boxing Day and New Year's with Bubbles in Jaipur -- now that should incite you to read on.

Let's go back now to the end of last year: had my customary high with the Solemn Mass of Christmass at my parish of the Advent on Christmass Eve. Stared vacation with friends who had for the last few years ended my trip in Miami but now, winners of the Florida Lottery, had relocated to Sarasota. So glad to have met this new location, as unlike Miami as Boston is different from Des Moines. A special treat in Sarasota was reunion with the mother of my host. No contact in 27 years with this dear friend who had been Parish secretary in Simsbury CT when I landed them after seminary. A fun but too brief time with her and her husband.

Quick flight down to Nassau. over to my 23rd Club Med, this one on Paradise Isle. A highlight there was a most incredible New Year's Eve which had begun early in the CM village. revelry nonstop, the Reveillon at table with officials of Nassau's Ministry of Tourism. then with some members over to Nassau. where the natives put on a New Orleans-style parade starting at l:00 am and going on tin midday: somehow got back to C-M in time for breakfast. As used as I was to participating in the Club's weekly GM (member) review, was delighted to work with the premiere of a new CM routine: a male strip show. Out or deference to the modest among us. the lights went out before we lifted our last stitch.

One noon at lunch, was greeted with a boisterous. "Bonjour, David de Boston!" from the chef de patisserie: he had been a kitchen boy during my visit at CM Djerba la Douce in Tunisia 12 years before. Such are the delights of repeated Club Med visits.

After a final luncheon (I'll never get over C-M's luncheon buffet with 200+ choices before reaching the dessert tables ), brief flight up to Freeport for rendezvous with MV Amazing Grace. A freighter supplying the five sail ships of the Windjammer fleet, the Grace was potentially a comedown from those majestic ladies. Not at all: before Windjammer, the Grace had served as a lighthouse tender in the North Sea when she wasn't hosting the Royal Family on weekend retreats. Such a freighter mahogany, teak and brass fittings throughout, the gameroom formerly the Royal sitting room, staterooms done up for nobility and people in waiting. One difference from the sail ships: average age of the passengers seemed to be about 75, most retiring with their seasick patches right after dinner.

How lucky I was to connect with Canada's two Audrey's (one of Welsh origin): they had met while traveling in Greece; were as enamored as I of exploring new places. We three were something of a scandal to our more sedate shipmates.

The Grace spent a leisurely two weeks meandering down from Freeport to Grenada with a new landfall all but two days. At five ports, we would come upon one or another of Windjammer's sailships, there to stock them up for the following four weeks. As I had now sailed on each of them, our meetings were a special reunion for me, greeting crew and passengers I had met during the previous three years. Happily Windjammer has bought another bottom, is refitting her to join the fleet next year, so that I'll be able to repeat the sailing joy without violating my canon against ever duplicating a Winter trip.

Now, about our potentially being commandeered: at dinnertime one evening at our weekly costume party, the Captain came into the Mess to announce that it had just been broadcast that the invasion of Kuwait had begun. We immediately forgot about the costume party; all passengers and hands (the latter with their costumes already on) gathered topside, huddled around the FM receivers a few of us had brought along. A star-lit and moon-bright evening, it was a weird tableau: every retired military person aboard received an immediate field promotion to 5-star general or commander (so one would assume, that is, if you listened to their proposed handling of the Gulf conflict). About 1:00 am, we realized that the desert commanders weren't going to listen to us. so off to bed we went - only after our Captain noted that during a previous tour aboard a freighter, his ship was commandeered and he commissioned during the Falkland crisis: might we become part of the armada guarding the Caribbean?

We finally reached Grenada and the last of the sail ships we were to provision; so sad to see it end. Had a few days in and about Grenada, the pleasure being redoubled when I was surprised to be greeted at the gangway by a friend from Boston touring Grenada with a companion. Their advance reconnoitering of the island prior to my arrival expedited my touring. As anyone who was traveling during the Gulf crisis will recall, the airport security at every stop on my way back to Boston was more severe than I had ever seen it to be; well and good, though - better to be delayed while on the ground than made a hostage while in the sky!

Happy news upon my return to Boston: Superior Court having decided my now two-year-old case for the Sheriff, I had taken it to the Court of Appeals. I now learned that the Court had decided in my favor. This was followed by a bizarre experience: the Sheriff having appealed that decision to the full bench of Appeals, we had still another hearing. While the Sheriff's lawyer was going on and on, the judge interrupted him with. "Thank you, counselor, I've heard enough." When the lawyer continued. the Judge repeated his comment, vigorously. After the Sheriff and his counsel retreated from the courtroom the Judge called my attorney to sidebar and noted. "He is being either frivolous or contemptuous or both; you'll have my decision shortly." The written decision (normally taking several months) arrived in 2 days, again unequivocally in my favor. Of course. the Sheriff appealed that decision to the Supreme Judicial Court. Months later. the reply came from this august body on a post-card, marked simply "Appeal Denied.''

That should be the end: oh. no - hearings before the Sheriff, before the City Council, charges filed by me against the Sheriff and the City Councilors, the Sheriff suing me in still another court. Well, we had all had enough, decided that we'd abandon the Judicial process and agree that I'd retire effective April 1991. Other dimensions of our agreement are private; I can, however, say I'm delighted with the final issue of the matter, in better circumstance than I would have been had I not endured the 3-year process.

Am I sorry to be out of the Jail? You can't do something for 23 years without becoming rather attached to it. However. only after I left the jail and saw its workings as an outsider, particularly in the course of my legal action, did I realize how profoundly true is a saying I had been sent when I started in the Jail in 1968, to the effect that prison is a dehumanizing phenomenon, dehumanizing both the kept and (probably to a greater extent) the keepers. The newfound luxury of 40+ extra free hours every week took a few days to get used to. My new computer, so personalized by me as to have a name (like all workstations at MIT, mine there being Athanasius): Rufus [a private joke, that].

Further, I've seen an acceleration in frequency of my calls as an expert witness in jail suicide cases; one in June was unique in that I had been scheduled to go out to Schenectady NY in late June to do an on-site inspection of the jail involved in the case. Suddenly in early June the attorney who had engaged me called panic-stricken: the very jail I was to inspect was in process of being renovated; I had to go out immediately to see and evaluate it in the condition it had when the detainee had committed suicide. Well, off I went on a Saturday morning for my four-hour inspection; the lawyer dropped me back at the airport in mid-afternoon and left before I discovered that his secretary had dutifully changed my outgoing reservation but not my return. No way to get to Boston? Sure there was: grabbed a flight to Detroit. there connected with one back to Boston. Was I upset? Hardly: my meter was running throughout the 6-hour detour.

In the course of the Summer. the Board of the Co-op where I'm living decided to order a coat of paint for the atrium which divides the top three floors of our building. Well, you'd think they had decided to abscond with the Co-op's loved ones: several petitions circulated calling for the impeachment of the Board (including yours truly, its Clerk). As parliamentarian of the group was able to referee a meeting between the Board and the members, the best-attended in our history: turns out that the membership's indifference and benign neglect of all decisions made by the board during the past several years stopped short of allowing someone else to dictate what color their atrium would be. Saw to the appointment of several ad-hoc committees, with all of the protesters in key roles. As one might expect, the initial enthusiasm to rid themselves of us dictators promptly dissipated when the rebels realized how much work they would have to do, were we ousted. The event did, however, raise the membership's awareness of how different our home, a cooperative owned by the members, is from an apartment building with absentee landlords.

Now, in September. having planted string bean seeds on the balcony outside the patio door of a third-floor front room which functions as my office in Symphony Road (string beans provide verdant foliage and profuse little red flowers), I found that the string beans were growing at a furious pace, had to pick them a few times a week. Well, there I am one Saturday morning, having picked a half dozen string beans, reaching for a brownish foot-long one, obviously dead. It wouldn't come loose in spite of several vigorous tugs. I looked up to the railing to see where the bean was attached to the vine: it wasn't! Rather, it was the tail of what (given the series on PBS just concluded) had to be a man-eating swamp-green dinosaur, with its serrated spine, its forked tongue, its child-killing clawed feet, and a mouth obviously capable of chopping off a person's arm without effort.

Well, I let out a scream, slammed the slider glass door shut, ran from the room, finally shut its door, locked the door (and window) of my bedroom into which I had escaped, and let out another primordial scream. Some time later, when my shaking had subsided and my mind took over from my visceral reaction, I knew (or hoped) the monster couldn't break through the patio-door glass, peeked into the office and saw an l8" (2/3 tail) lizard happily basking in the sun. After taking several pictures of the monster through the window (who would believe me?) found a neighbor who carne up and (ho-hum) said it was probably an iguana.

When I got to the office that Monday, as the monster was still happily ensconced in my string-bean patch (where I had put out peanut butter and crackers and a rag to serve as a blanket against the 40¡ nights, found a colleague somewhat up on monsters. He agreed to come to my place with a terrarium (and thick rubber gloves - who knows what kind of venomous creature I had discovered?) to transport the beast to MIT. When we got back to the office, a former pet-shop worker confirmed his identity as a 6-month old iguana. He was promptly christened Iggy S.B. [for String Bean] Iguana, and has become the mascot of the Distributed Computing and Network Services group of Information Systems, into which I had previously been hired when Project Athena ended.

Iggy now has his own employee ID card, frequently tours around the office, having in several offices particular plants he favors for grazing. He prefers lettuce-type greens, occasionally chowing down on broccoli and sundry other vegetables. Growing vigorously, he now has a larger house; we haven't yet addressed the issue of what we'll do with him when he attains his adult size of six feet!

Apart from its continuing witness to the faith of our fathers, my Parish of the Advent has increased my involvement in its horizontal ministry, adding the hosting of parish dinners to my presiding over the sherry table at our weekly coffee hours. So happy to be part of the parish family's life!

Now, how do Warsaw for Christmass Mass and Jaipur for Boxing Day come about? Well. in the course of the Summer, I was at a dinner party with friends recounting how a fellow-alumnus of my seminary had invited me to his villa on the Spanish Riviera for year-end vacation, and how I was a bit concerned about that destination, as the weather in that part of the world is as chancy as Bermuda's at year-end. Another guest noted that he was going to be at a New Year's bash being thrown by Bubbles: why don't I come along? Bubbles? Who's that? Turns out that he, a collateral relative of my dinner host, is none other than the Maharajah of Jaipur. Having been in Jaipur fourteen years ago, and having toured the Raj's Amber Palace, was sore tempted to accept. However. this might violate my prohibition against duplicating trips.

Leave it to my travel agent to fix that one: when I called him to inquire about getting me to India he replied that he could get me there via British Air; would I, however - and David, I wouldn't suggest this to anyone else - consider going by way of Warsaw? Warsaw? Turns out that LOT Polish Airline has a super fare JFK-Warsaw-Delhi, not much more than I had paid to the Caribbean the year before. On top of that, as our Tuesday afternoon departure out of New York gets into Warsaw at 6:00 Christmass morning, there leaving me for 14 hours till my onward connection takes off for Delhi that night. Lot is giving me a hotel room Christmass day, right next door to the Cathedral in downtown Warsaw. Okay, I'm hooked. On top of that, for a small additional collection, Lot is putting me in the front cabin, still otherwise vacant at this writing even though tourist is full.

Looks like the itinerary will be (roughly) arrival in Delhi on Thursday morning, being met at the plane by one of the Raj's people (who will thereby save me from being bothered with the Indians' exceptionally bureaucratic customs and immigration formalities), whisked off to Jaipur in time for a St. Stephen's/Boxing day feast that night - not sure set whether it will be at the Amber Palace or the Rambagh Palace. If I'm not comatose by then, shall certainly have detached myself completely from the reality I left behind in Boston. Off to visit other relatives at various island and mountain-top "bungalows," large 3-day party in Bombay, finally to Goa for the New Year celebration itself.

Hopefully shall have survived all that. On my return via Warsaw, stopping there for a time. so that I can take a trip down to Cracow before returning to this reality. And what a reality it is: the Jail matter now behind me and a computer culture before me all day at MIT, followed by my home system all night [going from a lent primitive computer- all of six years old - to a state-of-the-art, very powerful PC, I'm as a neophyte learning how fully to use all the power before met.

To those of you who gave moral (and, in some cases, material) support during the 3-year nightmare: I couldn't have made it into my new life without you. Having come through this large test by the Boss, I'm a bit apprehensive about what His next test will be, all the same confident that He knows best.

I know that every person's pain and grief are their own: however. one of my debts (now that the green ones are gone) that I wish never to discharge is to be ever alert to the private hurts of others. I certainly wasn't given this three-year course in dealing with adversity for my private, selfish gain. Given that, I hope the reminder of the Christ's Nativity and the New Year bring you and yours all warmth, love and good!