What a wonderful letter from Dart. It reels out at a leisurely pace, stopping at intervals to chat about the weather, answer a bit of an old letter from Dot, and lingering over house plans. There’s a touch of sweetness, a dose of nostalgia, a snippet of humor. Dot will eat this one up.
First, he explains that he received a letter from Dot today, although there was no mail delivered to the ship. The letter, dated March 10, was somehow misplaced and had been languishing in the mail room for nearly two months. The postal officer found it today while bundling up letters for men who had been transferred off the ship. Dart was delighted to receive it, but is still eagerly awaiting her letter from April 10th. More on that later.
“I liked your description of Spring from the 3rd floor windows of Franklin Simon. Boy, how I’d like to see a nice Spring in Greenwich, or (if you’ll pardon me) better still, in Ohio. There is no Spring season in the tropics, you know. It is so foreign, yet so like July and August all the time, that we forget there are such things as delicate filmy greens of new leaves after a Spring rain; or the soft, white quietness of a Winter snowfall; or the rich, crisp, comfortable-looking colors of an Autumn countryside.”
He describes the fierce, quick rainstorms of the tropics – popping up in an instant and leaving without a trace. He describes seeing steam rise off the decks of the ships after a rain shower – a similar effect to the steam he once saw rising from the fresh hot asphalt of a new Cleveland street.
Her letter also answered a mystery he’d been puzzling over for a while. He remembered that she said she’d sold her bike, but then she described all her efforts to restore her bike. He was curious if she’d repossessed her old one for lack of payment, or stolen a bike from some poor little girl who had sold shoe strings to earn the money to buy her own. Today’s letter informed him that Mrs. Miller had given her an old bike as a graduation gift.
He wishes she could be in on some of the house planning discussions. They not only talk about materials and design, but the ease of cleaning and maintaining the structure. He has one buddy who is sure the first floor could be completely wired for between $75 and $100 dollars. At last, he has included some exterior elevations of the house and a small floor plan in the body of the letter so we can have some idea of the pictures in his head. I can assure you, there is not much similarity between this house and the one Mom and Dad eventually had built when we were young children.
Changing the subject, he writes, “We learned, of course, of the surrender of Germany. I greeted the news, I guess, just about as other people did: with a broad grin, a sense of relief, and a continuation of work. It’s nice to know that there’ll be more attention paid to the Pacific war from now on.”
Before wrapping up this edition of “Spot and Arrow,” let’s return to his desire to receive Dot’s April 10th letter – the one written after her interview with the WAVEs. “But the letter I’m really interested in is the one dated 10 April. You know why. I can’t say why because I’m already in enough of a jam over it. That’s probably another letter which will be delayed awhile in reaching me.” The back story to this passage is that Dart received a serious dressing down from a high-ranking officer over his letter to Dot about the WAVEs. In the first place, the officer reminded Dart of the court-martial-able offense of trying to discourage enlistment in a time of war. In the second place, he informed Dart that despite the young sailor’s harsh assessment of the women in the WAVEs, this particular officer was particularly proud of his wife, an officer in that much maligned organization! Dart was in deep trouble, but I suspect he would not have gotten off quite so easily as a tongue lashing, had Dot written to say that, because of his letter, she had decided not to join up. That’s probably why Dart suspected that letter would be delayed in reaching him – while the officers took a first look at it and determined his fate.
“The lights are going out now, one at a time, so I think it’s time I took the rest of the night off for some bit of sleep, and perhaps, (I hope) a spot of sweet dreams of you. You’re just about getting up to greet this very day which I’m closing. Isn’t it a pretty morning? It was when it left here, anyway.”
