FRED AND CLARA-LOUISE RIGGS

3920 Lurline Drive, Honolulu, Hawaii 96816

808-732-5308; fredr@hawaii.edu; www2.hawaii.edu/~fredr

SEASON'S GREETINGS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR

December 2001

In the wake of Sept. 11, everything is different and yet, as our Holiday Season approaches, we turn to family and friends with a sense of joyful gratitude and loving hope for personal happiness and brighter tomorrows. We write to send you all our best wishes for the coming year and prayers for peace and justice in our troubled world.

Ciel and I, despite the normal travails of growing old, have kept up our daily routines and enjoy having Wendy and her companion, Bruce, living at home with us. They have completely re-done their downstairs quarters and they are now delightfully renovated. They have a splendid view of the Pacific and Diamond Head through the trees and over the beautifully flowered garden. Wendy has resumed hula lessons and they bring her great pleasure - we are looking forward to their annual Christmas party when she and her group will dance for us. She continues to work for Kathy Inkinen as a "head hunter." She made a business trip to Guam and Saipan in July which was fruitful. Her step-daughter, Lisa Swain, is a member of the San Diego water polo team and came to Hawaii for a tournament at the University of Hawaii - we greatly enjoyed her visit and watching the games. She is engaged to John Wright whose father is a retired local surgeon - he operated on me when I needed my heart surgery and a pace maker in 1990.

As for Bruce, he has an excellent job as an engineer that keeps him very busy, but in his spare time, he rides and works on his Ducati cycle, and he bought a Suzuki SUV which enhances the family mobility. He is also a dedicated computer buff and often finds and prints out items of special interest for Ciel.

She is delighted with the renovations in our household where we converted our sun deck into her office with a deep walk-in closet built into the former side-sun-deck. Decorating and working in it have given her much pleasure and permitted me to convert our bedroom into my own office. My books and papers are much more accessible, but a great deal more work is needed to cope with the chaos of many years of accumulated things - looks like a never-ending challenge.

As for myself, I continue to write and anyone curious to see some of the results can find my papers and projects on my home page, at the address given above. My biggest travel adventure was a trip to England to attend a conference at Oxford which had been scheduled for mid-September. I was on a London street when the WTC was struck and could not believe the giant headlines. I spent my time until the scheduled return date making some useful contacts and doing e-mail in a cyber café where I was able to keep in touch with family and friends as they, also, reeled from the after-effects of the attack. While in Oxford, lodging at Magdalen College, I had a wonderful reunion with old friends, Michael and Jane Brittain.

Earlier in the year, I went to Chicago for the International Studies conference in February, and to San Francisco for the American Political Science convention over Labor Day. While there, I had a wonderful visit with my nephew, Samir Barakat, and his lovely wife, Claudia, and their daughter, Mira. Between SF and London, I stopped off in Minoqua, Wisconsin for several wonderfully refreshing days with my sister, Edith, and her husband, Farouk, at their lakeside summer retreat. We also made a side-trip to visit their daughter, Susan, and her friend, Brian. The Globalization Research Center at UH honored me with a "Certificate of Appreciation" for my role in sparking the birth of this important new activity from which I expect great results. See its great home page at: http://www.globalhawaii.org/home.html.

We have enjoyed visits with some old friends who came to Hawaii: Mims Butterworth, a Chaffee classmate of Ciel from West Hartford, and her daughter, Kate; Art and Margaret Harris from Saskatoon; and Barry and Dong-sook Gills from Newcastle. We have also delighted in many Sunday afternoons of symphony and opera, plus an infrequent movie, most recently the fantastic Harry Potter, but spend much of our time glued to the TV following the unfolding chain of world events. At mid-stream, this story will continue - we look forward, however, to celebrating the holidays with Cathy and Tim and other friends in Hawaii. We think of far-away loved ones and old companions.

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Posted 18 December 2001