This letter was handwritten on two sheets of onionskin-ish paper.<\/p>\r\n
A later annotation at the top of this letter, in what I think is Helen\u2019s handwriting, says that the Kristi who this is addressed to was:<\/p>\r\n
\r\nDaughter of Helen\u2019s father\u2019s sister Karen who lived in Canada (no. of Montana; so we visited the family there. Helen remembers them serving us coffee + sweets in the a.m. in<\/u> bed<\/u>!<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
I\u2019m not sure why Kristi sent a gift to us. (The next letter indicates that the gift consisted of a Canadian $5 bill.)<\/p>\r\n
This thank-you note\u2019s envelope was addressed to \u201cMiss Kristi Uglene,\u201d in Barnaby, BC, Canada. I\u2019m not sure how it ended up in Helen\u2019s possession.<\/p>\r\n
\r\n2 August, 1970<\/p>\r\n
Dear Cousin Kristi<\/p>\r\n
We were delighted to hear from you & thank you so much for your gift. (We both think that Canadian money is a much more suitable gift than U.S., as it\u2019s prettier<\/u> \u2013 a present of itself, aside from what it will buy.) Enclosed is a picture of Joaquin \u2013 haven\u2019t any recent ones of him or Jed at the moment, but they both grow more beautiful each day. Joaquin can crawl now (sideways, anyway \u2013 his grandparents missed that, alas) and Jed grows more and more independent & sophisticated every moment.<\/p>\r\n
We met Hans & Joyce Later annotation in margin, from Helen: \u201cKristi + Hans were siblings\u201d<\/span> when we were in Seattle-Tacoma about two years ago, for Peter\u2019s brother Paul \u2013 & Linda\u2019s \u2013 wedding, & were sorry not to have time to know them better.<\/p>\r\n
Of course we give thanks too for the great abundance we share and for the magnificent privilege of being able to raise two children to revere & respect the great Creative Principle we call God\u2026\u2026 A very wise man, Khalil Gilbran, tells us in The Prophet<\/u> that \u201cYour children are not your children. They are the product of Life\u2019s longing for itself\u2026\u201d and that a most useful way to think of them growing, in relationship with their parents, is \u201cas arrows shot from a bow\u201d\u2026\u2026<\/p>\r\n
A most interesting book we have been reading tells of the original Gospel of John, that has been lost and\/or suppressed in various ways for many centuries, in which he tells of the natural healing (in accord with Nature, as well as miraculous) done by the man we know as Jesus of Nazareth, of his doctrine of reverence for Nature & love of animals (possibly this aspect of the Teaching was suppressed by the Emperor Constantine & the Council of Nicea in the 3rd century, as Constantine was agreeable to becoming a Christian, only if he did not have to give up meat-eating & debauchery, & every kind of mistreatment of his body)<\/p>\r\n
We found, thus, that Jesus was fully aware of our human<\/u> bodies, how to cleanse them & keep them pure \u2013 that he was more at<\/u> one<\/u> with Nature of the world around him than available literature might indicate\u2026<\/p>\r\n
\u2026 Alas for good intentions \u2013 this letter was started on the 2nd<\/u>! of August, and it\u2019s now the 17th \u2013 a sore thumb intervened to keep from even doing dishes, let alone writing or typing. So again, belatedly, we thank you, & look forward to meeting you some time.<\/p>\r\n
Sincerely,<\/p>\r\n
Peter, Marcy, Jedediah & Joaquin<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
\u2026I don\u2019t know why Marcy felt the need to proselytize to Kristi about the whole Gospel-of-John thing. It\u2019s possible that this was in response to something religious that Kristi had said when she sent the gift, or it\u2019s possible that it was just something that was on Marcy\u2019s mind and so she added it to the letter. Dunno.<\/p>\r\n
For much more about these (unfounded) theories about the history of Christianity, see Peter\u2019s letter from December 29, 1969<\/a> in which he wrote about reading From Christ To Chrishna<\/cite>, by Raymond Bernard.<\/p>\r\n
\u2026Marcy misspelled Khalil Gibran\u2019s name in this letter. One might think, given the quote here, that we had The Prophet<\/cite> around the house when I was a kid, but in fact I never heard of Gibran or the book until probably the late \u201980s, when I first heard a friend\u2019s college-a-cappella-group rendition of the Sweet Honey in the Rock song \u201cOn Children<\/a>,\u201d based on that Gibran passage. Which is why that song has been running through my head for the past few days as I prepared this letter for posting.<\/p>\r\n
The \u201csore thumb\u201d was apparently a lot worse than this letter makes it sound; for details, see next letter.<\/p>\r\n
\u2026There\u2019s one more annotation on this from Helen: on the envelope, probably at some point in the \u201990s or early 2000s, she wrote: \u201cThis should be duplicated for Jed[,] thinks Helen.\u201d I\u2019m guessing that that was because of the \u201cJed grows more and more independent & sophisticated every moment\u201d line. I hope that I have continued to grow more sophisticated every moment; by now, that presumably makes me extremely sophisticated. Unless I started out as extremely unsophisticated. Which I guess I did, given that I was a baby originally. Hmm.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In which Marcy thanks a cousin of Helen\u2019s for a gift of Canadian money. And then tells her the lost-Gospel-of-John story. \u201cWe both think that Canadian money is a much more suitable gift than U.S., as it\u2019s prettier<\/u>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-marcy","category-uc-berkeley"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions\/397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}