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Dec. 19, 1981 Dear Jack -

  Another year finds us still here and doing much the same things.  Zena paints instead of writing.   I am the writer, but nothing you would approve:  a book on tribology which I am trying to flog to whatever publisher will have it.  It's hard going:  600 page technical books are very expensive to produce these days.
   We have an old friend from Missouri who is spending the winter here in one of the cut-rate off-season cottages on the Gulf.   He is from the Lake of the Ozarks region ...the kind whose one leg is shorter than the other so he can stand upright on the side of a hill without special effort.   We do a fair amount of reminiscing about things that happened forty years ago . . . a sure sign of advancing age but the only one that bothers me; the few bodily creaks and groans I have adjusted to as inevitable.