With final exams starting tomorrow, Dart didn’t study as much as he should have today. He simply didn’t feel much like it.

He ushered at church today and has an invitation, along with his parents, to go to the Burke’s house for dinner tonight. The aunts wanted them to go out to Ashtabula with them today to visit his Uncle Art, but the Petersons had to decline. Pop sleeps most of the day on Sundays, Helen uses her “day of rest” to cook and clean, and Dart begged off to study a little.

Uncle Ed and Aunt Blanche are visiting from Middletown, Ohio this week. They drove up in their brand new Chevrolet, which Dart deems “the cutest little car ever.” He thinks it must be nice to be a successful lawyer like his Uncle Ed. The soon-to-be-newlyweds have an invitation to visit Ed and Blanche at their home in Middletown as soon as they get settled.

Most of the Cleveland relatives received their wedding invitations yesterday, and the Peterson phone has been ringing off the hook. Guy and Ann are unable to attend because Ann will be delivering her baby sometime close to the wedding. Gill and Jesse’s kids have been quarantined since February! First, they all came down with chicken pox, one after the other. As soon as that scourge was over, the measles came to stay a while.

“Every time I look at those appliances Mom and Pop are giving us I get a thrill. I’m gonna love being married to you, Dot. You’re swell, and it makes me awfully glad to be collecting things with which to start our housekeeping. ”

He uses the next page and a half to say good night, comparing the feeling he has to the times when they just couldn’t bear to part from each other in order to go to their separate bedrooms. “I bet that being married will do wonders for our bedtime! (It might destroy our willingness to get up in the morning, though!)”

With two finals under his belt, Dart declares them a “lynching.” Of course, he follows his usual pattern of predicting dire outcomes, but the truth is revealed in his comment that he can get a 66 on the final and still pull a C in Spanish. Remember how he’s been suggesting all semester that he can’t possibly pass this course? That may be a wee bit of an exaggeration.

He calls his psych test one of  “Wallen’s Wonders;”  because Dart wonders what it was all about.

But, he admits success in the form of the Skyline that came out today. His sketch of Mr. Schmidt is published therein, along with several other fine pieces by other writers. He’s sending a copy to Dot.

He writes at length about the rain. It rained yesterday. It rained today. It was a 24-hour “cloud burst,” coming down so hard that the storm sewers were overwhelmed and the city streets flooded. On this, the second day of the month, Cleveland has reached 45% of it’s normal rainfall for June.

His cousin Margaret, the pianist, is getting to fulfill one of her life’s dreams this weekend. She’s playing the organ at the wedding of a friend, but this is not just any organ. This is the biggest and best organ in Ohio, housed in a church near the Cleveland art museum. The church, whose real name Dart fails to mention, is dubbed “The Holy Oil Can” because of it’s unusual shape. I know the church he mentions because my parents always pointed it out to me in our visits to the city when I was younger. I wonder if folks still call it by its irreverent nickname of 1947. I wonder if today’s youth would even know what an oil can looks like.

Dart delivered a book report and a copy of Skyline to his journalism professor at the Plain Dealer tonight. Mr. Dildine told him he could forget about doing the third book report because he’d been doing “very satisfactory” work in class this semester.  Mr. D. also promised to pass Dart’s Skyline story around the newspaper so the staff can read the character sketch of the editor, Mr. Schmidt. Dart hopes the old man isn’t too mad about the piece.

He suspects that Dot won’t feel too much like painting their new apartment after all the painting she’s been doing at home. He promises that their bedroom will be easier to paint than that huge kitchen she just finished; there are no cupboards to paint around and no heavy appliances to move.

Then he asks, “How’ja miss out on sleep Thursday night? No more of that, ya’ understand? I want my bride (that’s you, Dot!) to be fresh as a daisy when I see her, and 5 hours of sleep isn’t even enough for a buttercup!”

He wishes her good night and tells her to keep a stiff upper lip and her cheerful expression. He expects to see her one week after she gets this letter!

Dart’s day has been less productive than it should have been, so he’s writing this letter early with plans to study after dinner. He wonders if Dot may have written him and airmail letter that was on the plane that crashed in NYC. (Apparently he hasn’t heard much from her lately.)

With his purchase of a second pair of trousers today, all that’s left on his shopping list is a pair of slippers and a few items at the drug store. He’ll only need to dip into their savings account once more when he buys the round-trip train ticket to Greenwich.

He resumes the letter later that night with the news that a radio repairman just returned the innards of the big family radio this evening.  Because the family had been without a radio for so long, they had to sit for a while listening to beautiful music. That music, and the brilliant full moon, swelled his chronic sense of loneliness to an acute longing for his bride. Oh, how many songs they’ve heard and how many moons they’ve gazed at while they were separated by too many miles! He thought that tonight’s moon is nearly as bright as the one that shone over Saipan the night he read Dot’s letter in which she said “yes,” and bound them together for all the moons that will follow this one.

Dart’s one-page note begins by selfishly wondering where her letters are. Didn’t she promise to write him every day this week?  Gordon wrote to say he’d be an usher for Dart. He got a letter today from fellow Haggard man, Bob Vert. He’ll be getting married on June 20th at 8:00 PM, too. “I have 1052 pages of English to study for tomorrow’s test, so I better get busy.”

That’s the last we hear from Dart until June 9 when he writes the last letter he’ll ever write to his fiance. I’ll see you back here then.

Dart’s letter begins, “Can it be that this is the last letter to my fiance? Even this will probably arrive after I do. May I watch you read it?”

Although this is his final letter to Dot before making her his wife, it is not an overly sentimental one. It’s filled with last minute news and commentary about his preparations to join her in Connecticut.

He tells her that they’ll have no idea for a long time how close his pessimistic predictions about his grades might be. His grades will probably arrive sometime in July, long after she has committed herself publicly and legally to him. I’m sure he hopes his grades won’t make her regret her decision.

In response to something Dot wrote about giving him some of Mr. Miller’s cast-off clothing, he writes, “Sorry to say my arms are not as long, nor my shoulders as broad as Mr. Miller’s, so I don’t think I can use his shirts. I wear either a 15/34 or a 15-1/2 /33, preferably the latter.”

He expects that her wedding dress will be a dream and that she’ll be the world’s prettiest bride. The thought gives him full-body tingles.

As sorry as he is that he missed young Eric’s birthday parties, he wonders if he will always be invited to little children’s soirees now that he’s in Dot’s orbit.

In her note that arrived on Thursday, she was already hurrying him up, and by now he guesses she must be a nervous wreck in anticipation of his arrival. When he kissed the big X on a recent letter, he felt a warm thrill at the thought of how close their next real kiss is. “It felt like somebody was dumping dry navy beans into my stomach!” (Ah, such a romantic wordsmith, our Dart.)

He’s a bit perplexed about the $25 balance in their “radio-phonograph fund.” He’s happy it has a nice balance, but he has no recollection of starting a special fund for that particular item. The news is a nice surprise because he knows such an acquisition would enhance their enjoyment of their cozy little apartment.

With George and Gordon acting as his ushers, the whole wedding seems to be turning into a Chamberlain affair. He fears that baby Gretchen will feel left out as the only member of the family who has not been pressed into duty. I think Dart must have shared my observation that even if Chamberlains outnumbered others by only one or two people, they always seem to be a huge majority. Most of the Chamberlain clan had bigger-than-life personalities.

He sure hopes he has something to show Chuck the next time the tyke is in Cleveland, but his own train layout is in rather sad shape at the moment.  He had hoped to take a spare roll of film and get some snapshots of various real trains in the Cleveland area to make a little book for Chuckie. Unfortunately, when there was film and money to accomplish the task, there was bad rain and no spare time. Still, it’s  thoughtful of Dart to have come up with such a gesture to please a small boy. (Or was it his sinister plot to recruit the younger generation into an obsession with railroads?)

He’s happy with the news that Ruth, Harriet, and Gretchen plan to make the trip to Ohio in September. That means he and Dot will have to get their little place fixed up pretty darn quick when they get home from the honeymoon. I’m not sure how they’ll do that, with Dot looking for employment, writing wedding thank-you notes, learning to cook, and taking care of Dart while he takes summer classes and more hours at work. He remarks that the only tools they’ll need to accomplish the renovations are a saw and a good plane. “After that, we need the ever short rations of time and money to stretch enough for us to finish the job.”

He had the trunk lock repaired today, for a cost of $4.00. That takes their bank balance down to $245.00 and he still needs to buy slippers. Also, he’d love to go to the formal dance Dot mentioned, but he needs to know how much the tickets are so he’ll know how much cash to bring with him.

“I’m so lonesome, and so tired, and so very much in love right now that I feel like the first seam in ‘Spring is Bustin’ Out All Over.’ Goodnight, my darling. Will you marry me?”

This may be his last premarital letter, but it’s not quite the end of the blog. Come back in a few days and I’ll have a few more posts to finish telling this remarkable story of young, true, and lasting love.