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.