Dart hopes that with this long, single-spaced typed letter he will have finally answered all of his back letters from Dot. But first, he’ll get her caught up on what’s happening with him.

He wrote a letter to the secretary of Sigma Tau Delta today, informing her that he was accepting membership in the organization. (No mention of what the organization actually is.)

Last night was his model railroad club meeting at Larry Greasel’s home. After the group broke up, he sat around with Larry, Homer and Dick Robinson, chewing the fat until nearly 2:00 AM. That explains why he didn’t write to her last night.

His little green and red and black engine was the hit of the meeting. “I think it’s a fine looking little piece of machinery, and the gentlemen sort of backed me up in my opinion.  It looks almost like a three-dimensional Currier and Ives print.”

When he should have been doing  homework yesterday afternoon, he accepted an invitation to the home of Rand Manning, a member of the Skyline staff. Rand is a playwright for the Cleveland Playhouse and his stepfather is the musical director for the same place. The two of them share a very lush bachelors’ apartment, complete with a 70-year-old “Negro house-boy named Claude.” Two other members of the Skyline staff were also in attendance. The afternoon turned out to be more pleasant than Dart had anticipated.

“They have a Capehart radio-phonograph that is about the size of a pipe-organ, and more record albums than most good record stores. They have all sorts of music, but the stuff that is predominant is musical comedy stuff, French, German, and Russian popular songs,  American and Gypsy folk music, and a most complete selection of symphony records.

The apartment is most unusual for people to be living in. It looks more like a movie set than anything else. A gray woolly tufted carpet covers every room but the kitchen, wall to wall. A baby grand piano sits in one of the three living rooms, which were formerly living room, dining room, and sun room, but they’re all fixed up in the same style now. Some furniture is modern, some period. One large bookshelf is full of books, and several are filled with records.

Flowered drapes hang at the windows on little slides, like theater curtains. Paper in the living rooms is like a broad tweed effect, in gray. The walls of the two bedrooms are very dark blue! Rand’s room is full of books, records, and paintings. He has a small radio-phonograph in his room. Most of the paintings in the apartment were done by Rand.

There are two sleek, well-fed cats in the apartment, named Boswell and Johnson. (Mr. Boswell and Miss Johnson.) Boswell is an enormous creature. Johnson is small and black, and terribly shy.

We had a buffet-style supper, complete with drinks before, and demitasse afterward. Quite, quite, you know. Some joint. It jarred Dick and Jim and me considerably.

Now, to Dot’s letters. March 12 – “It sounds like the phone co. girls are faithful to their co-workers. You better stay on there. It might be a good way to furnish our house. Some brawl!” (Did she go to some kind of over-the-top bridal shower for a co-worker? Can’t really say for sure.)

He suggests they could build a shelf at above the head of their bed to hold a radio. He likes a nightly radio program in Cleveland called “This is Goodnight,” which plays instrumental versions of soft, popular songs. Sometimes an actor reads the lyrics while the music plays in the background. “When you’re not here, a pretty program like puts me in that ‘certain’ mood.  Just between us (and don’t think much could get between us if we listen to a radio as we lay in bed), if you were here, it would not take that program to put me in the mood. I think, though, that it’ll be fun just to experience these programs together.”

Jumping to a different topic, he says he hopes he doesn’t tip over the canoe like he nearly did the last time. “That would be too bad if the radio were in it. Dot, I want to go out in the canoe with you and I’m not worried that you’ll let any harm come to me. I don’t want to do anything which would cause it.” He suggests they go out often enough that he will eventually get comfortable with it. He hopes she recalls that he does okay when the water is shallow enough that he can stand up if he gets into trouble.

He wonders if her hair will still be very short in June so she doesn’t have to put it up every night. As he recalls, it was quite short when they met, and he thought it was very becoming.

March 9 letter: No, he’s not quite a senior yet, but he should be after this semester.

No, he has no idea why Fred and Bettie broke up. She was as peculiar in her own way as Fred, and they must have just decided they couldn’t stick it out any longer.

Today is the day that Betty and Gordon will be moving into their own house. Dart thinks it’s too  bad that Dot found reason to change her mind about her brother being a nearly perfect person. He fears that he and Gordon might get into a few sharp-word conversations if they were to spend much time together. Kidding is fine, as long as everyone knows when to stop, but when it’s used to bully or make others angry, it’s gone too far. He hopes Dot doesn’t take it too seriously when people say she’s just like her brother.

He makes a suggestion for their own future family. He proposes they never set one kid up as an example for the others, or compare their children when the children can hear them. All that seems to do is promote discord among siblings. He also suggests she make a list of her personality traits and then see which of her family members have all of those same traits. If she compares all of her family, he suspects she’ll see that each of them is as different from each other as she feels she is from all of them. Besides, why should she be just like her family. Isn’t it better to have her own personality?  Why should she be an exact duplicate of everyone, or anyone, in her family?

He asks her if the phone employees go on with their strike, will she have to quit her job? If so, why? He surely wouldn’t want her to work during the strike, even if she doesn’t believe in the cause, because that could lead to physical injury. Is there any way she could sit out the strike but still have her job back when the strike was over?

Pop called recently. He’s very homesick, and being an extreme introvert, he’s not doing too well living in a ward. Being with other people, especially strangers, makes him nervous. “I wish something could be done to help him, but things are not so optimistic when the illness is partly due to a mental attitude. I’ve been afraid that his attitude about meeting people or going away from home would force him to find a reason he couldn’t come to Greenwich in June. Not an excuse, but the reason, if any should surface, would be brought on by his mental outlook, and would be real.”

Dart goes on to explain that his father’s fear of meeting new people or facing new situations is a lot like his own fear of the water; purely baseless, half irrational, hard to avoid. People afflicted that way can either say “I can’t”, or just plunge in and try to make things work out. At his father’s age, a plunge would probably be futile, but at Dart’s age, it just might do some good, he thinks.

He discusses his growing worry that part of his father’s problem is watching his own sons get ahead in their lives in ways he would have loved to do, but was never able to. Pop was forced to quit high school to support his mother while his brother Guy was away at college.  He loves books and knowledge, and he’s proud to see his sons getting good educations, but he is so sensitive about his lack of education, that he may also resent his sons’ successes. Dart suspects that his father feels inadequate when it comes to conversing with strangers. He fears they will find him unworthy, and he already feels that way about himself. Dart says it all comes down to pride.

He thinks Dot’s idea of giving her tax refund to her parents is very fair.

March 3 – How he loved seeing those three rows of x’s, o’s, *’s and !’s. They reassure him that she is every bit as eager to share the real things those symbols represent as he is.

If this is not the longest letter he’s ever written (nearly 3,000 words) it is surely the longest letter he’s written today. He still has four letters and a poem to answer, but for now, he must earn a living, secure their future, eat a meal and mop the kitchen floor – not necessarily in that order.

In his own hand, he writes a good night message, saying he wishes he could come home to her tonight, and not have to sit on the edge of the couch when he kisses her good night.

In his PS, written after he gets home from work, he adds that he misses her terrible. Logically, he knows that June is not that far off, but every minute is an eternity.