Dart calls this letter “short and not so sweet.” He feels miserable with his cold, After spending the day in bed, he went to the Skyline meeting, but wasn’t able to stay the whole time. He thinks he’s been worrying too much and it’s wearing him down.

He bought a sweater coat today in blue and gray.

The house plans he sent her have got him thinking about the kind of home he wants. Maybe Dot even asked him a question that contributed to his thinking.  “I’ve always liked homey-looking homes, Dot. Although I don’t contribute much to neatness, I like a certain amount of it. I also like informality in a home, so I think we can get together. Places that are just too, too clean get on my nerves.”

He has to wonder about people who feel the need to “ride” people the way Gordon’s been riding her. He feels a psychiatrist might suggest they have deep feelings of insecurity.

Since he can’t even write a straight line, he must go to bed, sending her all his love, of course.

Dart’s cold has morphed into a very sore throat, keeping him home from work today, and probably tomorrow.

Because there was no mail for him today, he says he’ll dig into the pile of Dot’s  unanswered letters to try and get warmed up. “As if I needed any warming up to tell you how much I love you! I’m hot on that subject all the time.”  He was so lonesome for her today that when he was awake, he could barely live.

He’s been pondering the upstairs rooms that will eventually be their apartment. He can manage the filling cracks, sealing baseboards, and pulling down wallpaper, but he hesitates to do any decorating without Dot. He’d much prefer she have a say in paint and paper colors, and then they could do the work together.

He fears there’s some electrical work that should be done by a union electrician – probably at the cost he’d budgeted for doing the whole remodeling job. While he’s waiting for the wiring to be done, he can get started on the carpentry.

The only tools he’ll need to finish the job are a good saw and a miter box, and possibly a nice plane. The latter might  be dispensed with if he can figure out how to sharpen the blade in the old plane he owns.

He’s been lying in bed trying to figure out the best way to get the cabinets done. His mother has suggested that he investigate the possibility of finding some of them already built, but unfinished, in the lumber yards. That would save him some time and might not cost any more than buying all the lumber and parts separately. Even if it cost a bit more, it would save him headaches and time. He already has too much of the first, and not enough of the second.

He received his City Club membership in the mail today. He has no dues to pay until March.

In re-reading her older letters, he wonders if she still has to wear the post-operative girdle that was prescribed after her surgery. Is she feeling fully well and healed by now?

If the church publicity meetings are all going to be held on the nights he has classes, he’ll have to resign from the committee. It’s not worth missing class for them, especially if he misses many classes because of illness.

Regarding wedding plans, he hopes everything turns out alright in her selection of bridesmaids. He assumes that when he arrives the week of the wedding there will be time for them to discuss the flowers and look into buying a Bible for her to carry. (Who discusses flowers the week of the wedding?) Also time to rent the suit.

There is a possibility that Uncle Tom would let them borrow his car for the honeymoon, but Dart’s not too keen on asking him just yet. If he were able to do that, perhaps Tom Riley would help him drive it out there.

He’s happy that Dot will ask her beloved Uncle Ralph to walk her down the aisle. Her own father will be escorting Eleanor. Ralph is the uncle who has escorted his two older daughters at their weddings, but will never have the pleasure of doing the same for his youngest, Jane.

He asks her if “The Torch of Life” is the sort of book a young man could ask for in the library.

This is all he can do for now. He loves her and misses all that they’ve ever done together, and longs for all they will do in the future.

“Gee, I miss you.” After saying that, there’s little else to write about. He’s spent the whole day in his hot, sticky bed, except for an occasional trip downstairs to break the monotony. He brought the radio up to keep him company, and has been enjoying some beautiful music, including Beethoven’s 7th and some songs by James Melton.

His mother went to visit Pop today. He has gained some weight and is now up to 107 pounds! (At about 5’9″ or 5’10”!) He wasn’t feeling too well today, but mentioned that he got a big kick out of Dot’s recent letter.

Dart caught a little item in the paper that gave him an idea for his next prose assignment. The word suggestion for the assignment was “thrill” and he thinks he can get a pretty good piece out of a “thought-teaser about the a-bomb.”  While Dot was in Cleveland, he wishes he’d had her read a piece he’s been “aging.”  Like the a-bomb piece he’s considering,  it’s a peculiar style of fiction that has real possibilities.

Now his nose is sore from blowing it all day, his tailbone hurts from sitting on it, and he’s very tired. He wishes she were there to give him a back rub and crawl into bed with him. If she were to surprise him with a visit today. he’s sure he’d grab on to her and never let her go.

“Dot, will you be able to teach me anything you know that I don’t know about ‘us’ before we’re married? And will you teach me to dance with you? I don’t care if we never show our skill publicly, as long as we can dance together. Good night, my dearest sweetheart. You are the happiness in my life. I love you always.”

Today brought two letters from Dot, written last Wednesday and Thursday. “Boy, how nice it is to get letters from you that are in the same mood I’m in when I open them. That is, of course, unless both moods are’ grrrr’ which wasn’t the case today.”

He is so sick of being in bed that  he ‘s nearly decided to never lie down in a bed again, except he remembered what a crimp that would put in their lives together. Except for his brief foray to the Skyline meeting on Friday night, today was his fourth straight day in the sack. His stuffy nose and sore throat seem to have moved on to his chest and sinuses, and he is miserable!

Naturally, he skipped school today, which he hates doing in these early days of the term. It’s bad enough that he missed psych, but he guesses he can make that up. It’s Spanish that gives him the biggest scare. He fears that missing one class will put him irrevocably behind.

Right now, Victor Borge and B. Goodman are on the radio. Reminds me of nights at Sunapee. Benny Goodman’s sextet is playing ‘St. Louis Blues.’  A little too polished to be real jazz, but it’s close enough to be pretty good. Remember Victor Borge trying to teach Lana Turner to sing? That was one of the funniest radio sequences I’ve ever heard.

He asks Dot if she knows that their wedding day is the longest day of the year. That means a late sunset, so if they get an early enough start out of Greenwich after the reception, they should get to where they’re going before it gets dark.

With thoughts on the honeymoon, he wonders if they will climb both Mt. Sunapee and Mt. Kearsarge. “How about swimming at night? Are we going to do some of that? Do you know when June’s full moon is? It’ll be a long time before we see a harvest moon up there like the one we saw last September. How’s the water by mid-June? Will it still be chilly?” (Silly boy, the water in Lake Sunapee is still chilly in late August, until it turns downright cold in September!)

He asks if she’s heard the “Anniversary Song,” which he thinks is quite pretty. He tells her that the song “Open the Door, Richard” has still eluded him, and he wonders if that’s good or bad.

Unable to get through a whole letter without mentioning his model trains, he tells Dot that if he had plenty of that nice metal  he’s been casting into parts for his engines and cars, he’d consider starting a small business of manufacturing  some items for the model railroad trade. He thinks it could be quite profitable, but he’ll put the idea into a mental cubbyhole for future development.

In response to Dot’s letter, he says that the ring Norm gave Eleanor must be a pretty one. (Norman is a jeweler.) He asks her to give them his best regards and he expresses hope that their engagement party was a good one. He likes the idea of having something engraved inside their wedding rings.

“Now we come to the section of your letter that made me nearly wild with longing for you. It came just when I was getting very tired of going to bed alone. Honey, the days are getting awfully long. Tonight, as I wrote the first page of this, I dreamed of what we’d feel like when the door closes on us, alone for the first time when we need not untangle our arms and legs for the whole night. It thrilled me so much, just thinking about our first embrace. I can hear the click of the latch, then see your face as we move toward each other. I could feel the pressure of our bodies, the great sighs of contentment, the grip of our arms. Oh Darling, if our first night can be as beautiful as our dreams, it’ll be dangerously close to Heaven. They say that there’s no sex in Heaven, so we’ll have to get all of ours here, Dot.”

He tells her that today, he fell asleep with a heating pad on his chest and when he awoke, he thought for an instant that she was there. But the warmth on his chest wasn’t hugging him back, so it really wasn’t much like her at all. Oh, how familiar that feeling of loving her, wanting her, needing her, has become.

Although he felt considerably better today, Dart remained in bed. He was able to do lots of class reading and even a little typing with the typewriter on his lap.

The big news of the day is that the Hobby House called to tell him the headlight he’s been waiting for has arrived. It’s all he needs to finally finish the little engine he’s been working on for such a long time.

He knows he should go to sleep, but he misses Dot too much to stop writing now. The letter he got from her today filled him with a mixture of joy and loneliness. He recalls that night just one month ago during Dot’s surprise visit when he came home very late from work and they shared some sweet intimacies. Most of the rest of this letter is so tender and intimate that I’ll not detail it here. I will say, however, that he believes they have built the kind of relationship that prepares them for the giving and receiving of “the biggest gift.”

“Oh, Dot, our love is beautiful. Thank you a million times for being my Dot. I thank God for all we are and were and hope to be.”

Dot’s nice letter came today, but he can’t reference it now because it’s upstairs and he is downstairs. That’s a little clue for Dot that he got out of bed today. He even made it to school.

For some reason, he feels compelled to list the names of three guys he knows who have just become fathers. I get the sense that Dart feels like he’s being left behind as the leading edge of the Baby Boom is all around him and he can only wait.

He heard from Hal Martin today, saying that he was unable to be in their wedding because of a scheduling conflict. Dart will write to him and let him know of the date change and try to persuade him to change his mind. Meanwhile, in response to Hal’s comment that he may stop by at Sunapee during their honeymoon, Dart retorts that if he stops by during the first three or four days, “Ve vill keel heem.”

The last page tells a comical story. “No sooner do I get out of bed from a cold then I go and get myself a nasty fall on the ice. I ran for a bus tonight, slipped, fell, and skittered along like a sea-lion on a skating rink. The back of my lap is one huge, swollen bruise, and various other points of contact got filled with chips of dirty ice, which melted, leaving the dirt under the skin. Ain’t I awful?”

“I have to go to bed now, Dot. Are you ready? Yes? Well, come on then!”

Dart is heartsick that he missed Dot’s call by 15 minutes. He needed to hear her voice tonight.

How he wishes they had thrown practical considerations to the wind last September, and married then. He is bereft without her by his side, and it’s still 17 weeks until the wedding!

I think we see a theme emerging in these letters – a theme which may continue until he leaves for Greenwich in June. His words are so incredibly passionate that they cannot be shared here.

The final paragraph was quite an eye-opener for me: “I just read that birth-control is illegal in Connecticut. That means I’ll have to ‘arm’ myself before I leave here. What do you know about that – the law, I mean. Also the birth control.”

As Dart begins the letter, it is already after 2:00 AM. Homer just left, having come by to see Dart’s little engine. They went to their model railroader’s club tonight, left early out of boredom, and tried to find a bowling alley. Failing that, they settled for burgers and shakes.

He just realized that four months from yesterday is the wedding, and four months from today, if they don’t get sidetracked or lost, they’ll be spending their first night alone together at the lake! How he  loves the sound of that!

One of the lumber yards ran an ad today featuring ready-to-assemble shelves and cabinets. The prices seemed reasonable and he’s encouraged to think they might be able to finish the third floor with little fuss. He’ll check out the stock tomorrow.

The radio just ran a story about folks along the east coast having to dig out of their homes. He guesses they’ve had even more snow than Cleveland.

He writes about his plans for the money he’ll earn between now and their wedding day, and he talks about opening “our” joint account. “Oh, I love that ‘our,’ and all because you’re the other half of it.”

He hates to repeat himself, but he loves her and misses her.

The next two days provide no letters, but Dart returns briefly on the 24th.

Dart types all but the last paragraph of this brief letter. He just has time for a quick one before wolfing down some dinner and heading off for an evening class.

This morning he received Dot’s letter telling him about her evening with the girls. He’ll comment a little more about that later on.

He found out that his boss submitted his time sheet for the two days of work that he missed last week. All he has to do is tip the guy who covered for him $4.50, and the rest is his to keep.

He drove the old green dragon out to visit Pop yesterday and found that his dad continues to improve. Because someone else on his floor was in much worse shape, they moved Pop out of his private room and back onto the ward so the sicker guy could benefit from the peace and quiet of a private room.

His mother helped him study for Spanish last night, but as much as he appreciates her assistance, he couldn’t help but wish all the while that it was Dot who was helping him instead of his mother.

Although he hates the thought, he knows he’ll have to take advantage of of their agreement not to write if doing so would interfere with his school work. He’s calculated that he has just 13 more weeks of classes, and what letters there are will probably be short.

He notes that today marks the first anniversary of his discharge from the Navy. His memories of that time are fading into a dim dream, while his thoughts of the wedding and married life are a beautiful dream from which he hopes he’ll never awaken.

He’s happy to hear of her love for lemon pie. “You can have mine almost every time we have it. That will mean that none of the stuff will go to waste, or to an unappreciative stomach, which is almost the same thing.”

As for her outing with the girls, he writes, “Aw, stop this stuff. Maybe the girls did enjoy looking at my pictures, but you (or they) didn’t have to pile it on so thick.”

He promises he’ll try to honor her request that he take better care of himself. He doesn’t like the idea of frequent colds, either. The last one seems to be mostly gone now.

He writes the last paragraph by hand because he wants to tell her he loves her, and it feels more like he’s whispering it in her ear if he abandons the typewriter. “I wonder if I’ll have a chance to tell you that sometime during the ceremony. I’d like to!”

No letter tomorrow.

Dart misses Dot so much more when he doesn’t write that he sometimes thinks it’s not worth it to skip a day. He ends up missing as much sleep feeling badly that he neglected her as he would have missed if he’d just taken the time to write to her.

He says he had a test in “Gringo Lingo” today and he’s kicking himself that he forgot a word he’d studied. As usual, I suspect he did better than he thinks he did on that test.

Dot’s latest letter contained a clipping about the telephone company and how it works. He feels like he knows much more about her job now, and he thinks it sounds interesting.

She wrote him some good news about wedding pictures, but I’m not sure what she wrote. Dart seems relieved to have that problem solved because he really wants lots of good photos of this big event to share with his Cleveland relatives who won’t be at the wedding.

It’s no wonder they felt so close to each other last Sunday night; they were both listening to Beethoven’s 7th on the radio at the same time. They had a shared experience in different places.

“Surely you must be learning something about me that I don’t know. Sometimes I find that my ideas and practices are a bit hard for me to change. I hope we can learn from each other, and about each other, and I can keep my head if I need to change anything.”

After a little more chit chat in response to her letter, Dart writes, “Gee, I get more and more thrilled every day, for it’s just one day closer to that wonderful day we’re looking forward to so much. Of course I knew what that paragraph about our first night alone would do. I’m looking forward to a long, long series of nights alone, Dot. I’m looking forward to greeting you in the morning, and to eating with you, and to working with you in our rooms, and to dancing with you, and to going to concerts with you, and to making a home with you. I can hardly believe that it’s less than 16 weeks until we’ll be a family. Oh, I’ll be so proud to have you as a wife!”