This is a long and thoughtful letter from Dart, revealing in equal parts a gloomy, frustrated sailor and a positive, cultured young man.
He is seriously out of sorts today. Camp Shoemaker – never a pleasant place – is starting to wear him down. He’s angry that he’s wasting three, four, five weeks here doing nothing of value, waiting for what comes next and unable to make any plans. Why did the Navy give them such short leaves after their advanced training school just so they could rot in this God forsaken hole?
Every day is filled with endless queuing up. There are lines for the toilets, lines for chow, lines for dirty dishes, lines for showers, lines for liberty passes, lines for bowling and theaters, lines for buses, and lines for finding out what line to stand in. There’s never an opportunity to sit while in line, unless one wants to sit on sharp gravel or muddy muck.
He was able to score a single ticket to the San Francisco orchestra concert last night – a full program of Russian music. He was enchanted by the “Francesca Da Rimini” piece by Tschaikowsky and amused by a humorous collection of four short pieces called the “Suite Diabolique” by Prokofeiff.
Quite the critic for a non-musician, he deems the SF orchestra inferior to Cleveland’s. To his ear, the brass sounded “tinny” and the string section lacked the full, rich, harmonious tone of his home town’s orchestra. Still, he was happy to have been able to attend the concert.
While crossing the Bay Bridge yesterday, he saw the hull of a huge new battleship looming out of the fog. As he got nearer, he saw that it was the USS Missouri, in town for a check-up after her shake-down cruise. He was so impressed with her size and the number of guns on deck. She was moored next to a tiny destroyer, fondly known by sailors as a “tin can.” Dart expressed a keen interest in being assigned to a giant battleship rather than a flimsy little destroyer. He believes all that massive steel and the mighty guns would feel much safer to him. No doubt.
The new battalion commander at Shoemaker brought a larger support staff with him, so Dart has lost his cushy office assignments to the regular staff. I guess now he’ll take his turn on the work crews again.
He’s happy to have mailed all his Christmas cards and hopes they and his packages all arrive in time. He’s mailed several things to Dot; some are Christmas gifts and others are ideas he’s had for awhile that he’s only recently had time to buy.
The final paragraph is sweet. “Well, it’s time to crawl back into my shell for the night. So I’ll kiss you goodnight in the doorway and hold you close for so long that we almost lose our balance (and our minds.)”
The big news from Greenwich concerns El and Don. Eleanor has been worried about Don because she hadn’t heard from him since his leave ended. Then she got a call from his mother saying she would be bringing El’s Christmas gift because Don is in quarantine. The gift is a beautiful, sparkling diamond ring. Although they’ve been engaged for awhile, El has been wearing Don’s high school ring this whole time. She is so enchanted with her ring that tonight at dinner, she was dazzled to the point that she put mounds of salt in her coffee!
Dot’s father has been down for the count the last couple of days. It’s the first time he’s been too sick to go into his shop in years. When Dot asked him this morning how he was feeling, he replied, “Well, I’m not feeling fine, but I’m feeling a lot less worse.” See what a Yale education will do for one’s grammar?
Ruth Chamberlain has been holding the shop together during Arthur’s illness, in addition to her work at the library. There’s no taking it easy for her, even though she just got out of her sick bed the day before her husband fell ill. Dot explains “My cold meant so much to me that I simply had to share it with my whole family.” It seems like the entire eastern seaboard is under the weather.
With six more shopping days until Christmas, Dot’s beginning to doubt she’ll survive. She’s exhausted.
