Post toasty

THERE is a lot to be said for writing letters of protest. I have a friend who is such a red-hot letter writer he would even write angry letters to the weather announcer if he didn't like the forecast. In the beginning he wrote letters to anyone he disagreed with, senators, TV newscasters, even Julia Child. But of late he spends all his letter-writing energy on writing to the President.

Selecting President Reagan as the sole object of all his ire, I presume, stems from the fact that whatever is going wrong he concludes is the President's fault.

Mostly it is something like the national debt, or tax reform, that sets him off, but he also holds forth on the price of fish in the local market. President Reagan's selection of a justice for the Supreme Court sent him around the bend, and that letter was eight pages long.

Another complaint was that President Reagan spends too much time on a horse. This I thought was a bit much, since there were no actual statistics available and he evidently based his knowledge on TV news shots which I'm sure were repeated on different networks.

He felt strongly about this, that riding a horse was frittering away a lot of time that should have been spent dealing with the Russians.

There was one occasion when he wrote five letters in six days.

This began to worry me. I began to consider the possibility that one irascible letter writer, through sheer volume, might gain the President's ear and single-handedly control the policy of the government. Although vehement, he did write with a certain convincing logic.

With this in mind, I approached his wife one day. ``How many letters of complaint does he write in a month?''

His wife, a complacent, uncommitted type of person, who I am sure thought the Gorbachev summit was a mountain in the Himalayas, answered me with little concern. ``Oh, let's see, maybe 20 or so.''

``Good heavens,'' I said. ``Writing all those letters must run into a pretty penny for postage!''

``Oh, no. He doesn't mail them,'' his wife said.

``He's too good a Republican for that!''