Dart is an an expansive mood again tonight, with plenty on his mind. Let’s take a look.

The guys around him are rowdy again, but he feels like writing, so he’s going to make a stab at it. Apparently he succeeded, because this letter runs 12 pages long.

Last night, he had a solo liberty. One of his accomplishments was to have some photos taken of himself. “Do you read Popeye? Remember Alice the Goon? Look again at the pictures.” Funny boy. I think these pictures are lost to time, because I’ve never found any of him that resemble either an Alice or a Goon.

His main purpose for going into town was to make a little record to send to Dot. He’d pre-written what he wanted to say, and there were some minor technical difficulties in the making of the thing, but the record got made. He hopes she likes it. (Is there any doubt?) He wonders what the girls in her house will say when they hear his “important little speech.”

He’s still thrilled when he thinks about that 12-pge letter she wrote. It was a doozey and she really out did herself. The more I hear about this letter, the more I wish I had it to read right now. I guess I’ll never know what it contained or what happened to it. How can I feel cheated when 12 pages are lost from these thousands of pages? But I do.

The “thing” that she copied for him, which he hopes to complete someday was some sort of travelogue about his adventures at sea. He can’t recall if he’s included the story about the Haggad’s encounter with a submarine, but he thanks her for sending him the final paragraphs.

He rhapsodizes for a couple of pages about “Rhapsody in Blue,” a movie about Ira Gershwin that he and Hal saw a few nights ago. He loved the music, of course, but he was impressed by the depiction of Ira’s family life and his professional struggles. “As Gershwin became older and more serious, his music became an indicator of his prevailing personality. The early tunes were light. The later ones showed more thought, more philosophy, more insight into the minds of the people he was writing for.”

Responding to Dot’s “scolding” about his neglecting to place the stamp upside down on a recent letter, he writes, “I must have put the upside down stamp on the wrong letter one night, ’cause Mom asked me the meaning of it again. Sorry I treat you so badly.”

Perhaps it was the thoughts of Gershwins beautiful and romantic music that put Dart in a sentimental mood. “How I long to have you in my arms, and to hold you close so I can feel your heart throbbing and can feel the rhythym of your breathing; so I can hear you sigh; so we can talk to each other in whispers so low we couldn’t hear them if our heads weren’t so tight together. When we’re so close in body and in spirit, it seems that we talk as much with our hands and arms, our eyebrows and our faces, as we do with our words. There’s such a deep longing within me when I think of you, that it seems as though the months until we are married will be unbearable.”

He asks her if she ever thinks about how they’ll handle their finances or where they’ll live until they can build their dream home.  Shall they plan to do a lot of the work on their home? He like’s the idea of putting something of themselves into it.

He’s pleased she was fascinated by that little bunch of gears he sent her. He launches into one of his techno-geek lectures as he describes the mechanical marvels of differential gears. They reside inside computers and can calculate all manner of things useful to man and beast. It is from them that we get differential equations. “You didn’t know you were playing with a mechanical brain, did you?”

In the same vein, he asks Dot about her physical science class, recalling fondly a number of cool demonstrations that his science teachers of yore have used in class to impress their students. “They’re all fun to watch. Physical science can be very fun, can’t it?” Hmmm, I wonder if Dot shares his enthusiasm for the subject.

Somebody just asked Dart if he was writing to his “old lady” again. Dart informed him that he would never refer to the woman he loved in such disrespectful terms.

He gives her kudos to her response to his recent paragraph about getting married two years ago. They were “exceedingly well-put. You may not write as many words as I, but your words surely count a great deal.”

He envies her ability to leave a crowded space when she’s feeling lonely in that crowd. Barracks life offers no such luxury. Wherever he goes, there are too many people making too much noise.

He has letters from his folks, Burke and Miss Palmer to answer, so he must quit, but he feels a little like he’s been talking with her while he wrote this. He bids her a loving “goodnight.”