Dear Max,

Blame the intensity of the reaction, if you must, on the sort of critters drawn to this particular watering hole. Once a radical, always a radical. Best not rile some varmints.

Personally, I have decided to consider the episode instructive. It was a pretty fair "air-raid drill." Pete M. has a point. The Mudcat really *should* have plans for damage control in the event of hostile action.

And maybe it's time to consider that you have created something so fine and unique that, like Galatea, it has taken on a life of its own. Why not enable your beloved "baby" to "outlive" you, by planning for its future in the event of the loss of its "parent?" What loving and responsible "parent" would do otherwise?

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Once, in my callow youth, I did something disgraceful on April Fool's Day. In a monumentally adolescent lapse of judgement, I plotted with a schoolmate that he should pretend to have a diabetic crisis, and I should "inform" our teacher. We anticipated the pleasure of greeting our plump and prissy English instructor, on her red-faced return from a marathon run to the cafeteria for orange juice, with the cry of "April Fools!" We expected her to be annoyed, non-plussed, and embarrassed; she was all those things, and more, but not until much later.

At the time, she simply sat down and wept with relief that one of her pupils was not really dying. We were too young to anticipate how deeply such a thing would affect her. We didn't know this silly old biddy had feelings, she was just a *teacher* after all, and a relentlessly strict and demanding one at that. But the revelation that she had any sort of human emotion was not the shocker. It was that she loved us with all her antimacassared old heart.

It can be fearful to glimpse the truth. And burdensome. It is unwise to think of automotive fatality statistics while driving. And who would marry or procreate these days, going by the odds? To know that one is sincerely and greatly loved is, indeed, fearful and burdensome -- and highly unsettling. It changes things, makes us painfully self-conscious. Which is why the grown-ups so rarely let us see how much we mean to them.

You have discovered, quite unintentionally, how much *you* mean to a goodly number of folk whom you have only known here in what you believed was a small way. We will get over our dismay -- most already have. The question remaining is: will you be able to forgive us for betraying the depth of our affection?

Fondly,

Shula