Dot’s very brief letter serves to let Dart know she was thinking of him as he turned 21. She reminded him that this is a very special year in his life; it’s the year when he can inherit his millions and spend them as he pleases and the year he can finally cast a vote. She hopes she can work on his political perspective before he has a chance to exercise that right.

She hopes he’ll be back home to celebrate his next birthday. She has his gift for this year but didn’t feel it was safe to mail it until he had a more permanent address. She has purchased him a nice Parker fountain pen.

Also included with this letter were three greeting cards. First, of course, a birthday card, followed by a “thinking of you” card from Tonsillectomy and a Valentine card. I’ll post the cards on some of the upcoming days this month when neither party wrote a letter.

Tomorrow, we hear from Dart again.

Today’s post, as promised earlier, are two birthday cards Dot mailed to Dart. I think they’re fun examples of the cards from that era. I guess that makes them truly “vintage.” I hope you enjoy seeing them.

In her short note, Dot tells of meeting Carter Ford’s father when she went to babysit last night. He was home on a short leave from the Navy before leaving for Texas. When he and Dot talked about Dart, Lt. Ford said that Fire Control training was the toughest school in the service. Dot’s not surprised Dart was selected for it.

She’s overwhelmed by the thought that she’s going to Ohio for her graduation in just three weeks. Between thinking about that and Dart, she is not getting much sleep. She tries to recall all their special moments together while she’s drifting off to sleep, but then she never gets to sleep. “You make a very poor sedative,” she tells Dart.

There’s nothing else to write because she’s received nothing in the mail. She says it’s a wonder she hasn’t completely lost her sanity from the lack of news from him. All that’s left to say is that she loves him “loads and loads.”

More word from Dart tomorrow.

Now it’s Dot’s turn to write two letters in a single day. The first was actually written just after midnight, reporting on the events of the day just ended. The main news was to tell him that she’d had an especially enjoyable evening, considering that he wasn’t with her. She and four other girls went bowling and she scored the highest of all of them on every game. She tells Dart that her mother used to be the champion female bowler in Greenwich with an average far higher than Dot’s highest score. “I guess I didn’t inherit her skill for knockin’ ’em down.”

She’s missing him and his letters something fierce! Today at the bowling alley, there was a sailor with his girlfriend looking very happy together. Dot was quite jealous until she realized that someday people will look at her and Dart the same way.

Yesterday she got her invitation to the prom at Andrews to be held on graduation weekend. Naturally, she won’t be going, but she suggests that when he’s home, she and Dart should learn to dance. Then they could have their own private prom and dance every song together. “Don’t mind me – I couldn’t thrive without my day dreams,” she says.

Today a co-worker brought in a photo of her future daughter-in-law from England. She was beautiful! Dot protests that the Lend-Lease Act was not supposed to lend all the young men from the US to beautiful women overseas. The least the other countries could do was to either send some of their own men over to us, or return our guys. Dot prefers the latter choice.

She’s going off to get some sleep and perhaps to dream of Dart. She’s heard one never dreams of a person one thinks about constantly, so she’ll probably have no luck in the dream department.

Her second letter was written near midnight at the other end of the day. She and El went bowling after work and bowled four games. Dot’s high score was 139, a definite improvement over recent games. As soon as she got home, she was ready to go back and try again, and was able to convince her mother to join her. Since her mother had not bowled a game in over eight years, Dot was confident she could beat her, but Ruth prevailed. Still, Dot has the bowling bug and hopes to get good enough to play for the Franklin Simons team.

El had a phone call from Don today while he was on a 24-hour pass to his parents’ house. They talked for about 20 minutes until Arthur picked up the extension and said, “If you keep this up, you’ll have to postpone the wedding for another year just to pay the phone bill.” They hung up in a hurry.

That’s all for now. Tomorrow is a big day, with letters from both Dot and Dart.

Well, the mystery of the abruptly ended letter from yesterday has been solved. Dot simply continued it past midnight and dated the new page with today’s date, fooling me into thinking there were two separate letters

She begins with “Don’t tell me you’re still sitting on your bunk waiting for me to finish this thing! Well, I guess I can keep it up just about as long as you can stand reading this stuff. This shall be a case of the ‘survival of the fittest.'”

Does Dart remember that Thursday night when they had a nice long talk and he said something about her nose and Dot made a crack about how stupid it’ll look when she’s sixty? He tried to console her by asking how she thought his bony frame would look when he was sixty. Well, she’s been giving it some thought and she knows there’s hope for his bony frame. There are a number of things that can be done to put some meat on him, but there’s no viable solution for turning her poor square nose into a pretty little triangle. (Note to reader: There is not a living creature on Earth who ever found anything objectionable about Dot’s nose, except Dot. It’s a lovely nose, well-suited to her pretty face.) She goes on to tell Dart the sad story of her cousin who was born with no bridge in his nose. He recently underwent a painful surgical procedure with very little improvement in his appearance. She suggests she should quit stewing about that which can’t be fixed and worry more about the size of her body rather than the nose she seems to be stuck with.

While writing this letter, Dot has been thinking about what she was doing five years ago and what “they” will be doing five years from now. At the tender age of 13, she had just discovered a brochure from Andrews School and was determined to attend there. When she looks forward five years, it seems like an eternity in the future, but when looking back, she can scarcely believe how quickly those years have flown. How glad she is that she and Dart didn’t meet back in 1940, because a 16-year old boy would probably not had much interest in a 13-year old girl. Although she would like to have known him better and longer, she thinks the disadvantages of an earlier acquaintance outweigh the advantages. Still, she says the only reason she was happy at age 17 was that she didn’t know what she was missing until she met Dart.

Commenting on Dart’s portrait (the one where his eyes are turned away from the camera), she says his radiant smile is lighting up the wall in her bedroom. If she holds the picture at a close angle and closes one eye, she can almost imagine that he’s looking at her. She sure hopes he won’t flash those pearly teeth at any Australian girls, should he happen to meet any.

She’s proud that she’s gotten this far into a letter with very little effort. Is he starting to get bored? Has he been reading it on the installment plan? she asks. Having reached page eight, she declares that this has been loads of fun on her part and she hopes they can do it again sometime. She also hopes that by the time he receives this, he will have read all her other letters, too and that she will finally have heard from him.

Tonsillectomy adds a brief postscript and the letter is finally complete. As Dot prepares for her trip to Cleveland for graduation, she will write no other letters this month. We’ll have to rely on Dart to keep us connected.