First, thanks for the photo. I’m so happy to see that you’ve become even more hideous with the passage of the years. And a Dad-and-boy photo, no less! Your son is beautiful. Of course, I’m disappointed that you didn’t sire a monster just like yourself, but no doubt you love him anyway.

Well, from the show, you know I’m considerably more decrepit but hanging on. Actually I’m astonished to find myself alive at middle age. Jerry Lewis always had me thinking I’d die as a sweet little child (which is odd, since I don’t think I ever was a sweet little child), but now I have long gray hairs in my braid. I don’t plan to dye them. It’s good to know that time is passing.

I spend my time with lawyers and community organizers and academics and suchlike, and it’s almost like the old Crip world—our own “old country”—never existed. I hold the world endurance record for telethon protesting, which you know about, but day in and day out I roam through the Norm world almost as if I belong in it. So much has changed! At least for me, and—now I know—for you too. I hope your computer genius has made you rich!

There was a girl at camp who wanted to be a programmer like you. Do you remember a CP girl named Jean, who joined our little clique in my final year? She told me she wanted to go to Chapel Hill and study computers, and I squelched her most firmly. Back then, I was so sure of everything and thought it my duty to set everyone straight. Well, I hope she didn’t listen to me (as I recall, she tended not to listen to me). I hope things worked out for her, but I don’t know.

She wrote to me—three or four very concise typed letters. However, I didn’t answer. I’d decided to “sever all ties” with cripplekind. Why? I don’t know. At the time, I was struggling through The Essential Lenin Reader and seized on any opportunity I could find to be ruthless. Ah, youth!

I do wonder sometimes what became of them all. In fact, sometimes I lie awake at night and worry that Jean is languishing at Butner or some other desolate place, waiting for deliverance. In the wee hours, I resolve to use the law to liberate Jean or Margie or even Dolly. (I thought of her when Johnny Carson retired! Did you?)

But then morning comes, and I wake up to so many distractions and prior commitments—and maybe a little cowardice—and I say, no, deliverance is not my job. I say, if they need a deliverer, which probably they don’t, a deliverer will come. Maybe some wild stuttering deliverer, like Moses, with a magic walking stick.