This is a stack of mail that arrived here yesterday. Unfortunately apparently it had been held for an over-long amount of time at the publisher..I suppose it ended up on a shelf someplace and people forgot about it..because most of these letters are dated early December, and the package is a Christmas gift. I have sent a letter of thanks and an apology for the delay to the man who sent the gift....he found a copy of a book I had loved as a small child* and he had heard me mention in a speech! Such a nice thing to do.

But sadly there are a lot of people who wondered why I didn't reply. And now I am leaving Friday morning for a trip to Milwaukee, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, and I will be gone for 10 days. I'll try to get some of these answered before I go. But I am also still preparing speeches for those cities so time is short.

Isn't that the story of all our lives? Not enough time; not enough time! I feel like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. I'm late! I'm late!

* The book, published in 1934, is Humphrey. I was very young when I learned to read, because my sister, three years older, began first grade and came home and "played school"..teaching me what she had learned. The reason I remember Humphrey was because, studying it by myself at ages 3 and 4, I first became aware of the oddities of the English language....the fact that I knew how Humphrey was pronounced, because my mother had read the book to me; but now, learning to read it by myself, I could see that the "ph" was a phonetic anomaly. I just absorbed that bit of information and probably applied it whenever I saw a "ph" after that. Probably there was a telephone book in our home...perhaps I saw it there, and noticed that it didn't say "telefone.". What I do remember is the awareness of it, and the feeling that I had discovered a mysterious and interesting fact.

So it is nice to have Humphrey...who is not Humfrey!...with me again, and I'm sorry that my thank you note is late.