This is a long letter written in short spurts over three days.
Dart lists as his “recreational activities” for this evening as: study for tomorrow’s Spanish test, compose, type, and mail three short pieces for Miss Talmage’s prose class, and a “super-duper” book report for American Lit. Then he must begin on next week’s assignments.
Dot’s check will bring their savings account balance to just over $72.00. He’s pinching all his cash pretty tightly these days so that he’ll be able to pay for the honeymoon. He hopes to make a small deposit into their penny account soon.
He reports that the snowfall in Cleveland has set a record for the deepest snow in March. Then he bids Dot good night and ends the first section of the letter.
On March 26, he writes quite a lot about the phenomenal weather they’ve seen over the last 24 hours. Warm air with lots of rain, plummeting temperatures leading to icy streets, wind gusts high enough to overturn cars and topple power lines, blizzard-like snow, followed by sustained high winds for hours. The city is nearly paralyzed.
He feels like he flunked his Spanish test and he learned he got a low C on last week’s psych test. He feels beaten and ready to throw in the towel. He’s going to bed because he’s too tired to read his English assignment and remember any of it.
He’s back at it on March 27, with more tales of the recent weather. The winds were so strong that if they’d been on the east coast, they would have been called a hurricane. All public transportation came to a halt. Fortunately the snow forced a delay of his journalism mid-term when the professor got stuck at home.
Tonight in his prose workshop, Miss Talmage read two of Dart’s pieces aloud to the class. She likes his presentation of dialects and speech peculiarities. One of the pieces she selected to read was a character sketch of Mr. Schmidt, State Editor at the Plain Dealer. That same piece was also selected for publication in the Skyline. That must have been a nice example of his writing, making me wish a copy of that issue of the Skyline had survived with the letters. Dart is delighted that people with critical skills have finally recognized that he has a certain style of writing that has some merit. Miss Talmage told the class that “the writer’s personality shows in the piece and elevates it from an ordinary character sketch.” He finds it interesting that the Skyline staff wanted parts of his story rewritten – the very parts that his prose class liked the best. He shrugs it off as a difference in tastes.
His mother returned to work today after her bout with the flu. Naturally, with road conditions still poor, Dart wasn’t going to let her walk, so he brought the old jalopy out of storage. When he brought her home from work tonight, he decided to take the car out of a longer spin, and he missed Dot’s presence beside him with a physical ache.
Now he turns his attention to responding to her recent letters.
March 22: He likes to read about her buying things for their home, but he also feels funny that he’s had no role in it. He thanks Mrs. Vessy for the check and tells Dot that he’ll keep his focus on trying to get their penny account to the $100 mark. He thinks those large storage bags sound like a good investment and he trusts they’ll fit in the third floor closet reserved for all their extra gear. He wonders if El and Norman will be living on the third floor of the Chamberlain house after they’re married. (Could the housing shortage have hit Greenwich, too?)
March 23: He’s glad to hear that her monthly visitor was not as unpleasant as it has been. He tells her not to worry about what happens on June 20 in that regard. “No matter what condition you’re in, I’ll be looking forward to sleeping with you.”
He thanks her for the little love poem she wrote him when he was feeling so blue. It made him miss her even more than usual.
He drew a comical pencil sketch of himself with his recent growth of facial hair depicted as long fly-away wings drawn in red pencil. He looked a little like a crazed lumberjack before shaving it all off.
This 8-page letter was written on cheap news print, turned golden brown with age. Not only was it difficult to read the sections he’d written in pencil, but the paper had turned so brittle that we had to place them in plastic sleeves to keep all their bits together. How grateful I am that they had the foresight to write the vast majority of their letters on decent stationery!
Because this letter covered several days, I won’t be back here until March 28.