Dart’s short letter brings a bitter pill. He has his orders; he’s going to San Francisco for his advanced training. There is a fire control school in Connecticut, but he will be thousands of miles away. He says he’s always wanted to travel and see the world, but now all he wants to do is spend time with Dot.
He writes that his destination makes him even happier that he was able to see Dot on his leave. “I have you to work for and fight for. Work and fight harder than ever before.”
He expresses his concern about how he’ll get through the next couple of weeks with no letters from Dot or from his family. He’s already terribly homesick and misses mail after only a few days.
There is a poignancy in his final paragraph that expresses hope, but also an underlying fear and uncertainty. “Bu the time you get this I will be far away, but be a brave girl and don’t cry. It’s not so long before we can be together again. I don’t know when, but it can’t be another six or eight months. When the war is over, if we still feel the same way, we can be together forever.”
Dot has made it through the first half of a hot, tiring, busy two-day sale with the aid of two letters from her “one and only” that she read over her lunch break.
She’s pleased he had a comfortable return trip to Great Lakes. She’ll be happy to tell Cynthia that Dart’s cousin Marg remembers her after all. She’s interested to learn that Burke and Edith are going steady and says she hopes Burke has better taste in girls than his brother does. Then she adds that she’s grateful Dart’s taste is so bad or she would be out of luck. (Is there a hyphen in “self-esteem issues”?)
She claims that it’s so humid in Greenwich that when her kid brother Doug walked into the kitchen after falling into a river, their mother didn’t notice any difference between his appearance and that of everyone else’s!
She’s happy to hear he’s on his way to advanced training and says she go nuts until she learns where he’ll be stationed. She wants him as close as possible, but her first hope is that he goes where he most wants to be.
She asks if he enjoyed his Milwaukee liberty and if he met any cute “number” she should be jealous about. “I get jealous very easily, you know. Now, if I were smart, I wouldn’t have told you that, but I’m not smart, so I did.”
I find that previous statement very interesting. It belies the strength of the woman who would become my mother. When I was a teenager, I remember Mom telling me that there was no place for jealousy in real love. If you were sure of your love and that of your partner, why would you waste energy on jealousy? Conversely, if you were jealous, it spoke volumes about the feebleness of the love between you. I always liked the self-assuredness of that statement, and recognized its truth even as a young girl.
