I love this exuberant letter from Dart, in response to Dot’s long missive she wrote over several days in mid-December. What joy! What gratitude! What love! And man, could that guy turn a phrase! One of my favorite lines is “I’m afraid that if I pinched you to see if you are real, I’d be horribly disappointed to find you gone in a puff of sweet-smelling vapor, to the tune of soft chimes and the distant singing of birds.” Sigh!
Here’s a little aside: Decades after this letter was written, Dart was living in a long-term care facility in a retirement village where he and Dot had lived for several years. He was in the late stages of dementia. He didn’t walk anymore and he rarely spoke. Still, he looked forward to Dot’s twice-daily visits. On one such occasion, an orderly had wheeled Dart to the front door to watch for Dot’s arrival. When he saw her approaching, Dart’s face lit up and he sat taller in his chair. According to the orderly, he spoke as clear as could be and said, with a satisfied grin, “I’ve loved that woman my entire life.” That’s the devotion I was blessed to witness from the time I was born. That’s the love that comes through every page of these letters.
Back to 1943. Dart reported that he received a package from Dot the same day as her priceless letter. The package contained he lovely senior portrait (he liked it, of course) and a double batch of her hand made fudge. The latter was good enough to impress the young sailor with her culinary skills, but it was truly the photo that added sweetness to his day.
He was so delighted that she liked the corsage he had sent her for the school dance, but sorry it had caused her to cry. He requested copies of the photos Mr. Hibschman had taken of the occasion.
His less-than-great news was that several long-term patients on his ward were being released back to active duty, but he would be staying indefinitely. His cyst was still bothering him too much for the rigors of boot camp and combat.
He reluctantly closed his long letter so he could write to his folks amid his daydreams of Dottie. In his PS, he resurrected his plea for a translation of that code she had once used in her letter; B.B.S.O.C.Y.K. Will we ever know what it means?
Another great letter from Dot. It’s a light, somewhat sarcastic account of her day. From nearly removing her arm with a washing machine, to helping her brother Doug haul the 10-foot Christmas tree outside, and hemming her new winter coat, the industrious Dot kept busy. She also was tricked into an appointment with her dentist.
She reported that she’ll be ringing in the New Year tomorrow by babysitting. She tells Dart she turned down a date with someone who held no interest for her, saying “I told him I had a ‘friend’ who wasn’t going to have much fun and it didn’t make me feel like having much fun either.”
After announcing she’d have to sign off because her last toothpick broke from the weight of her eyelids closing, she proceeded to add a New Year’s poem. A really terrible New Year’s poem. It’s hard to envision from this particular sample that Dot would become a kind of poetic legend among family and friends in later years. These days, there’s hardly any occasion she doesn’t mark with clever and well-crafted verse!
