What a lovely letter from Dart in response to Dot’s long one that she wrote on prom night. For a couple that have had so few dates together and created a meager handful of memories, they sure do get a lot of mileage out of memory lane.

Dart recalls the dried leaves the two of them kicked under a sofa in Dot’s house on one of their dates. Dot reported weeks later that they were still there. Today, Dart inquires if they remain even now. He remembers what fun they had dancing, even though he is a terrible dancer. He had fond thoughts of their ping pong game, despite the fact he didn’t even know the rules of the game they were playing.

Dot had mentioned that she used to have a dream boy in her mind that she felt was too perfect to ever find in reality. After getting to know Dart, she says her former dream boy looks silly because Dart far surpasses what she could have hoped for. In response, Dart cautions her to “wait until you see my off-guard moments and my habits before you say I’m better than your dreams.”

He thanks Dot for being so sweet and lovely and faithful. Then he asks her the essential question: Do you really think, as I think and sincerely hope, that ours is the proverbial ‘real thing’ and will last forever?

He then asks if she will allow him to call her darling yet, or if that must wait a while longer.

Dot finally had the time to write a long letter and she took great advantage of the situation. She began by sharing the news that she’d been invited to his folks’ house for dinner on Thursday. She suggested that he try to write his mother a cheerful letter, because she had sounded worried about how low he sounded in the last one.

Dot wished that he and his parents had been able to attend the beautiful Sing-out ceremony. She was deeply moved by the evening which made her even more reluctant to leave Andrews. The tea held after the ceremony was a grand affair, made even more so by the magnificent floral arrangement Dart had sent in honor of the occasion. How she’ll miss this school – both her fellow students and the faculty. She’s regretting her decision to return to Greenwich for her work experience. Even though she’s eager to see her family, she’s been away from her home town so long now, that most of the people she knows live in Ohio. He biggest regret is that she’ll be unable to see Dart before heading east.

She has received four letters asking her to come for an interview when she gets home. Two of the invitations are from small shops in Greenwich, and the other two are Bloomingdales and Saks Fifth Avenue in NYC. She’s on the fence about which would be a better experience.

She ends the letter by confiding that she has “oodles of big ideas” about the two of them, but she’s not the type to write them. She says it’ll have to wait until they are together, which she prays is soon.

Dart writes this letter at about the same time that Dot is heading home on an eastbound train.

The only news he can come up with from his end is the preparation for the weekly inspection of the wards. He launches into great detail about the flurry of activity that has patients and corpsmen alike scrubbing, swabbing, sweeping and polishing in order to impress the admiral. Then they wait. A blur of blue and gold finally buzz through – covering eight wards in 20 minutes. “All that work, all that worry, all that time wasted in waiting…, all that for what? Not a blessed thing… a time of utter confussion, ended by a great letdown.”

The final paragraph is just about the sweetest thing I can remember reading. It’s certainly worth a glance, but here is the gist of it:  “I wish we could live a thousand years so I could love you that long.”

Dot writes from the train that’s taking her farther from Dart. She was glad he called last night while she was at his parents’ house for dinner. She thanks him for sounding so cheerful and says his mother was quite relieved to hear that lilt in his voice. Once again she tells Dart how much she likes his family and how sad she is to be leaving Ohio.

The closer she gets to Greenwich, however, the more excited she is to see her own family. She is arriving two days earlier than expected, as a surprise. She says she was caught in a downpour as she ran to catch her train so her suit is wrinkled and her hair is flat. She only hopes her family is more surprised than scared when she shows up.

Dart had asked her if he could begin to call her darling every once in awhile. She answers that he can call her whatever he’d like, but anyone can write a mushy letter. She prefers the type of letters he writes – intelligent and witty. They have plenty of time to use the more passionate language, but she’ll be happy to hear from him, no matter what he writes.

It strikes me that at this moment in time, our two young lovers are at very different places in their lives. Dart is feeling bored, lonely and sad, with no idea when anything positive will happen to change his state. Dot is starting on a new adventure of moving home, finding a job and seeing where the future leads.

This was a rather inconsequential reporting of an inconsequential day at Great Lakes Naval Hospital. Dart had no mail to answer, hadn’t gone to church and didn’t feel like doing the washing and mending that awaited him. Instead, he gives Dot a detailed accounting of a long, chilly stroll he and a fellow patient took all over the sprawling campus. He reports seeing some attractive Waves, which is proof of how hard up the Navy is for women. In the past, they only had ugly Waves, according to Dart – the kind that made dogs howl and children run, screaming to their mothers.  The two men watched streams of visitors arrive, sauntered past the golf course, stood on a high bluff overlooking the boathouse and watched cats chase some squirrels.

He broke off writing, saying that, although he loves her, he also loves chow and it was nearly time for dinner. Because both breakfast and lunch had been especially fine today, he was not holding out much hope for dinner, but he was hungry, nonetheless. His P. S. confirmed that dinner was nothing to brag about.

Dot writes her first letter from home – and a chatty one it is. She tells about walking unannounced into the livingroom late Friday night to find her mother writing a poem. Ruth just stared at her daughter, too surprised to speak. They spent two hours catching up on a semester’s worth of news and waiting for her father to return from the circus at Madison Square Garden. (Spectator, not performer!) Not able to stay awake, Dot went upstairs to bed. A little while later, she heard her father’s car pull up, so she hurried downstairs and climbed into bed with her mother. When her father came in, she popped up and scolded him about the late hour. He too was struck dumb by her surprise arrival.

The following day, Dot met her sister Eleanor’s unofficial fiance Don. He’s not very good-looking, but not ugly, either. He’s 6’6″ and finishing pre-med at school.

Dot spent some time cleaning house and planning to redecorate her room. She’s terribly homesick for the folks back at school and has already decided she prefers the Ohio personality to the Connecticut type. She announces she’ll live in Ohio after graduation. I can vouch for the fact that she was a woman of her word, because from then on, she was never a permanent resident of any other place but Ohio, to this very day.

She tells Dart that even though he is 1100 miles away, he is near to her heart. She dreams that sometime this summer, he’ll pay her a surprise visit like she did her parents.

This is an amusing letter from Dart, complete with his stream-of-conscious self-editing of all his grammatical and handwriting errors. After several expressed corrections, he refers to his old-maidish traits, like a school teacher. That made me smile because it reminded me of how Dad used to chide “spinster high school English teachers for their fixation on enforcing archaic, petty,  or passe rules of grammar. For example,  Me:  Dad, is it true you’re not supposed to begin a sentence with the words “and” or “but?”  Dad:  That’s a spinster English teacher kind of rule. If it makes a better sentence, do it.

He writes about is folks’ review of their second evening with Dot. The verdict? They like her even more than before. They like her as much as Dart does, “and that’s saying quite a lot.” He is happy they all stayed at home together rather than going to a movie – “more chummy and friendly.”

Dart decides to agree with Dot about eschewing passionate phrases and endearments for now. He sees the wisdom of keeping their feet planted closer to the ground, even if their heads are in the clouds.

Responding to her surprise for her parents by arriving a day early, Dart imagines how she must have felt when she walked in the front door of her house. As he describes the physical symptoms of such joy – heart throbbing in your neck, walking like you weigh a few ounces, the shout caught in your restricted throat – I realized he was describing his feelings when he received the first couple of letters from Dot. How sweet this guy is!

There’s some other chat about the broken record player at his parents’ house and his “shocking” attempts to fix it, the washing and mending that are still not done, his need to write letters to his family. Then he closes with this: “Almost everything I do all day long is with you in mind. When I work or walk alone, you are beside me.”

It’s letters like this one from Dot that remind me I come from a double line of writers. Although her style is different from Dart’s, she can certainly fill the pages with funny, interesting and well-expressed thoughts.

She talks about her first full day at home by reciting all the household chores she accomplished while the rest of the family were at work or school. Laundry, kitchen clean-up, ironing, cooking and letter-writing. A note from her “little sis” at Andrews caused a wave of homesickness for her school and friends.

She fulfilled Dart’s request for a travel guide of Greenwich. She began by saying how awkward she felt trying to “sell” him on the place when she herself was sold on Ohio. Greenwich is a beautiful old town with great wealth. She loves it because it’s home, but aside from her family, she doesn’t feel the average Greenwich resident cares much about other people. Her home is very near Long Island Sound and most of her family members love being in or near the water at every opportunity. (“I’m in hot water most of the time,” she quips.)

She has an interview tomorrow at a shop in Greenwich. She’s decided she’d rather work locally than commute into the City. She will not start college this coming September because it would break up the year too much when she had to return to Ohio for her formal graduation after the second semester of college was underway. By delaying a year, she will also have more of her own money saved for tuition.

Her final Andrews report card arrived and was the best she’d ever received. She’s glad her parents have proof that they didn’t waste their money on her education.

She says she needs to get to bed so she’ll look awake and beautiful for her interview. Her secret to looking happy, she has discovered, is to simply think of a certain young sailor in Ward 83 South and she has a radiant glow.

She tells Dart that she’ll never be able to express her feelings for him as beautifully as he does, but the feelings are real, nonetheless. She is grateful he is is where he is, rather than where her brother Gordon is right now. (Somewhere in the Pacific.)

Dart seems to be in fairly good spirits today. He is most complimentary of the letter Dot had written from Greenwich, saying it had all the elements that make a letter good.

He explains that he didn’t write yesterday because he was too tired. He’d wrangled a pass to visit the small stores across the huge campus. He took a long walk there to exchange some uniforms that were too small for him.

Dart tells an embarrassing story about going through the breakfast line yesterday. He loaded his tray with Rice Krispies cereal and milk, eggs, bacon, fruit, toast and coffee. As he headed to the table, his left foot got in the way of his right one, and he found that he and his breakfast were sprawling flat out on the floor!

He appreciates the way she surprised her folks when she got home. He tells her that he’d love to surprise her the same way, but he knows that if the day ever comes when he is actually on his way to see her, he’d be too excited to keep it a secret. He’d probably send her a telegram, followed by a phone call.

He’s been thinking about her comment on how small her family is getting. (Harriet married and out of the house, Gordon fighting the war, Eleanor away at school or at work…) He says that it’s given him an idea which he will tell her about sometime, if things go as well as he’s hoping. There he goes with that cryptic thing again. I suspect his thoughts run something like her family may someday start getting larger again, when he joins it as Dot’s husband!

Having never been much farther from home than other parts of the Midwest, except for a brief visit to the New York World’s Fair, he cannot comment on the regional personalities of people. He seems to like the Ohio people he knows, and he’s gratified that she does, too. He likes the idea of her living in Ohio after graduation so that if he ever gets a leave, he can spend time with both her and his family.

He ends the letter by saying he’s sorry a meager letter is the only way to bridge the 1100 miles between them. He also asks for her phone number in Connecticut.

Dot begins her letter in a rare low mood. She misses Dart and the kids from school terribly and is finding it hard to adjust to being at home. She thinks about packing up and going back to Ohio, but she’s strapped for cash and is stuck in Greenwich. She assumes things will get easier once she’s working and keeping her mind busy.

Feeling better after getting that off her chest in her little “chat” with Dart, she moves on to responding to his recent letter. She’d like a copy of the photo that was taken of Dart for a Navy publication. She’s glad he didn’t go over the wall when he was feeling so down. As much as she’d like to see him, she’d rather it not be behind bars. There was some brief discussion about whether Chicago and Greenwich are in the same time zone. And she was interested to see the map he’d drawn of the hospital campus. She’d noticed that his ward was very near the recreation center and she asks him if he goes there often.

While his walk with a friend all over the hospital grounds sounds charming, Dot says she prefers bicycling, and hopes to do quite a lot of it this summer. She’s impressed with the domestic skills he has brought out into the light and suggests he’d make a decent housewife for someone.

She tells Dart that she and her mother are going into NYC in the morning to try to find a job for her. She doesn’t hold out a lot of hope, but it’s worth a try.