I don't know what alarming stuff Mother has been feeding you but your implied chastisements are really rather amusing. And old-hat! This is a spiritual place but also a hard-working place, and my colleagues are not outmoded flower-children and drug-dazed losers as you sweetly put it but well-educated and highly integrated men and women trying to create here an alternative life-style for so-called Homo sapiens, based on our higher instead of our baser attributes. We are not the first and won't be the last to beat against the tide of consumeristic materialistic capitalistic garbage, but the effort is at least as worth making as your life which as far as I can tell is spent sucking up to the Venezuelans who are getting rich sucking the oil out of poor helpless Lake Maracaibo. I don't judge you, and when you made the South American move it was I, at that time Mommy's good little girl, the typical doctor's wife tending the garden of her typical lovely North Shore home, who stuck up for Kid Brother and suggested, albeit timidly since Mother was still in her fearsome prime, that approaching thirty maybe you had a right to your own life. You're welcome, though I don't recall getting any thanks.

The person you should be writing sly advisements to is our dear madre. Never, really, the most acute manageress of her affairs, family or otherwise, she is flipping her lid down there, in my opinion-acting and dressing like a seventy-year-old beach bimbo (she watches with inane delight something called "Golden Girls" on television), going out on disgusting dinner "dates" (I think at that age the thrill is mostly in just the eating, but God knows) with some octogenarian former admiral she's lured into her sun porch, and doing unspeakable things with what little of Daddy's money she hasn't already wasted. She's fallen in with some smooth young broker who's got her to believe she's the Hetty Green of South Florida-by the time the two of them get done "adjusting" her portfolio there won't be so much as a treasury bond left. There is a whole tribe of people in Florida-brokers, podiatrists, chiropractors, faith healers, home helpers, seductive practical nurses-who prey on the old and senile, and one of my. fears as Mother gets battier is she'll give all the silver away as a tip to the boy who trims the palm trees in her patio.

You're just a little blue water away from her, and all of your fancy hidalgo friends have fail-safe apartments in Miami in case the Sandinistas take over-couldn't you go visit her and see what's going on? My intuition is she's being taken terrible advantage of by men. She always was man-crazy, let's face it-all those nights dragging poor Daddy off to some party or other so she could flirt and flash her boobs while all he wanted was to sit home marinating in his old books and having yet anotKer whiskey, leaving us in the care of some evangelical monster like Mrs. Van Liew or that girl from Needham whose boyfriends tried to keep us quiet with tokes of pot. Think of it if she gets married again-Daddy's ashes whirling in their grave, and all those lovely Perkins and Price and Peabody antiques distributed among our step-siblings,-of whom I'm sure the admiral will supply a greedy passel. I'd go myself but I'm very tied up here-I've become rather important in running the place, funnily enough.

Happy Independence Day, if you remember what that is, and devocidn mucbo to Esmeralda and the six little ones from their loving tfa and bermana politico. The Latin element you see in the Southwest isn't as classy as your set in Monte Avila. Actually, Jere, you'd like it here-lots of after-hours action, and more opportunities for wheeling and dealing than you might imagine.

Fondly in spite of all wrongs past and present,

Sis

[tape]

Oh my goodness, dear Midge, what a time we've been having! Loved hearing all your news, it brought me back to the real world. How awful that Irving 's framing shop was robbed! Well, as you say, it should strengthen his non-attachment. Thank God he never has any real works of art in there. And how sad about Donna's husband! They really had no warning? It's hard to believe we're all getting to that age, when the wheel of karma takes us for another spin. Of course, he was ten years older than she, and Donna a bit elderly herself. I used to worry about her noisy breathing during the Sun Salutations-it was rather distracting, to be frank. As to Ducky Bradford, I'm not surprised. There was always something not quite right there, even when he and I were closest and I suppose you could say I was in love with him. I wouldn't have admitted that four months ago, but needless to say I've shed some inhibitions. Tell Gloria being left for a gay is no worse than being left for another woman, in fact it's better, since it shows you were fighting a losing game all along. Foolish is what she must feel, mostly-men do make you feel foolish, unless you watch your step with them every inch. What a woman has to realize is that as far as she's concerned she's number one, too, just like a man. I don't mean number one-two, I mean number one also. You know-we're conditioned to think of ourselves as number two, like Eve and Avis.

Where was I when we left off? I can't believe I was still in love with Vikshipta and bumping around on a backhoe. I'm living now with two other women-one other woman, really, since the third woman, Nitya, has had a kind of nervous breakdown or overdose of something and is in the infirmary here. She was the head accountant and juggled all the finances-you have no idea, Midge; they have investments everywhere, and Kali Club discos in places like West Germany and Israel, and meditation-and-massage centers, and of course bookstores and video outlets in a lot of malls and downtowns now across the entire U.S., around the world in fact-there's a very important bookstore, in the Bahamas, on one of the outer islands where you wouldn't think people would read much, but apparently they must, or maybe it's mostly mail-order business. The way it seems to function, the publishing end of it, including all the tapes of the Arhat like the one I sent to Irving-evidently free of charge since I haven't received any check from you yet-and the therapy and yoga lessons you can take from video cassettes, all this end of it does its accounts through this one store because banking in the Bahamas is somehow easier, I guess because, being so tiny, it doesn't have all the usual oppressive regulations and wants to encourage dollars. As a businessman, the Arhat is wonderfully open and permissive-whenever a group of sannyasins start up a car-wash business or a restaurant or an escort service, he lets them use his name and picture and the sunset colors. I guess anybody could put on a purple jumpsuit and a mala and perform the same services, but people like to see the Arhat's name on the front door or up in lights or wherever, because it signifies that the people-the people operating the businesses-are always so serene and cheerful and don't drink or do street drugs, and of course, because work for us is worship instead of slave-wage labor, we can charge a little less. It's a beautiful philosophy, as you can see from the fact that it works. I mean, it works in the world as well as here. Anyway, poor dear little Nitya, who used to be a stock analyst in Seattle before she saw the Arhat being interviewed on "Donahue," has been under the weather mentally, and the various medications that Ma Prapti-she's the head of the clinic here, and a very impressive woman, absolutely dedicated and the direct opposite of all Charles's money-hungry pretentious colleagues at MGH-the different pills and injections she was giving Nitya to keep her on an even keel began to work at cross-purposes, and my friend Alinga, I think I mentioned her briefly before, is training me to take over. You know I used to be good at numbers, I used to do all of Charles's billings and insurance-claim forms, before he got a secretary to take over, that slut Marce-lene Rabinowitz as it turned out. Well, I'm all over that now, and beyond anger, really, of any sort, or any emotion except love and acceptance. Charles now just seems impossibly small, like one of those bugs you see crawling across a piece of paper or a bathroom tile and though it looks like a mere dot you know if it was magnified enough would show fangs and hairy legs and long pokey things, but who wants to bother? He's been rather quiet since he went to spy on Pearl -I bet she told him off. Do tell me if he approaches you again, and don't not be rude to him for my sake. You can be as rude as you want.