Oh, what a beautiful letter! If this doesn’t remind the reader what it feels like to be young and in love, perhaps the reader never was either of those.

Dart writes in the afterglow of a phone call he made to Dot as an early Christmas gift to himself. Having heard her voice and told her some important things on his mind, he misses her more than before.

“Even though I’ve felt that we would eventually get some of the things we’ve been thinking said to each other, now that we’ve said them, it seems that we’re ever so much closer in mind and spirit than we were.”

He tells her he is constantly reminded of things about her that delight him. He’s glad she likes the same music he does. He’s tickled that they have the same ideas of what’s fun and share a  similar sense of humor.

He has come to the profound realization that being with her feels more natural than any other girls he’s ever spent time with. Feeling a little foolish about how long it took him to learn, he now sees the big difference between a girl who went out with a boy because she wanted to do something or go somewhere, and a girl who went somewhere or did something because she wanted to be with that boy. He sees now that he has been a free ticket and reliable transportation to so many girls, but he knows that Dot truly loves to simply be with him.

His mother has made the wise comment that Dot and Dart will have a fine time “growing up together.” Now he sees what she meant. Until Dot, all the dates he’d been on felt stilted, like something was missing. He now sees that what was missing was a natural, honest interest in the other person – caring about what they were doing or what they thought. “Beyond that, what seems to pass between us, whether we’re in each other’s arms or a quarter of the world apart, is indescribable. We read about it in books before it happened to us, and we scoffed or longed, perhaps. But now our early scoffing proved how young we were. Our longings show we were growing up. But our love shows that we’re still young, … for only the young fall in love, and once in love, they stay young.”

Is it any wonder these two kids built a beautiful life together?

Now Dot writes that Dart’s voice is still whispering in her ear, even though 10 hours have passed since his phone call. “I love you with all my heart and soul and hearing your voice over 3,000 miles utterly melts me.”

She says that when she hung up the phone, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she did a little of both. “My family thinks I’m nuts, but as long as you love me, no one else matters.”

Poignantly, she says that she was so relieved that he wasn’t calling to tell her he was going overseas. She knows that day will eventually arrive but says, “I’ll face that heartbreak when I come to it.”

For a couple of pages, she fills him in on news. She was profoundly moved by the performance of Handel’s “Messiah” at her church. She had the sensation that Dart was sitting next to her, so she turned and looked. The woman next to her gave her a queer look, as though she was considering Dot’s sanity. “I know I’m crazy – over you.”

Tonight, she and Betty went to see “Casanova Brown,” and on Christmas Eve, she, Cynthia and Janie will see “Since You went Away.” They all expect to bawl themselves sick because it’s such a sad movie.

She recently read a letter from Dart where he exclaims that he just has to get to her graduation. She warns him that he has just two months to complete his travel arrangements to Willoughby. Recognizing the impossibility of that feat, she says “It was a lovely dream while it lasted.”

“I love you, Darling, and someday (God, please make it soon), I’ll say it to you in person with all the feeling that Ronald Coleman puts into his love scenes. The only difference being that I won’t be acting. I mean it with all my heart.”

Dart’s letter is chock full of news from Camp Shoemaker. He received a huge package from Dot today, but he’s honoring her request that he not open it until December 25. He’ll honor it as long as he can, but when he gets his orders, he’ll need to stow the contents he’s permitted to take on board with him and send the rest home to Cleveland. That makes his departure seem so near.

This evening, he and a few other guys made use of the cocoa Dot had sent earlier. He hung around the office after his duty was over and decided to skip the inferior meal being served in the mess hall. His group chose to have coffee and sandwiches right there in the office. Chief Wagstaff sent a messenger to round up some sandwich fixings, milk, chips and ice cream. They used the milk to make cocoa on a hot plate and had a tasty little impromptu feast.

He plans to go to a nearby bottling company tomorrow and work for the day. He was able to secure a work permit and the yeoman got him a job, so the two will put in a day and see how much they earn.

With the return of the regular Ship’s Company Yeoman from leave today, Dart lost his temporary office job. Right away Lt. Forbes signed Dart up as Chief Wagstaff’s little helper on his duty days. He’ll take drafts to the warehouse to get them equipped with their overseas gear, recruit work parties, run around with the Chief on inspections, and generally function as his “little flunkie.”

A letter from Fred announces how happy the Marine is on his “little island in the Marianas.” Dart was impressed that the letter took only six days to reach California.

From the sound of Dot’s voice on the telephone, it seems like her cold didn’t stick around too long. He’s happy she was able to get some extra sleep to banish the bug.

He recalls how excited he was when he reached the Cleveland train station on his leave. He doesn’t even recall running up the steps – merely being lifted by the buoyancy of his own emotions. In answer to her question about what new things he learned about her, he says it was mostly, “the same, but more so.” More natural, funnier, sweeter, more playful, etc.

He has warned her about his moodiness, and even demonstrated it in some of his letters, so he hopes she’s prepared when she first sees that characteristic in person. He closes by telling her he sent her a package today with no note enclosed. She knows what’s in his heart, so a note would be superfluous.

Dot’s note is short and silly, written in a kind of Scottish or Irish dialect.  After about a paragraph, she begs Dart’s forgiveness and explains that some Irish girl with green eyes was singing on the radio and it ran chills up Dot’s Scottish spine. (How does one know the color of a singer’s eyes over the radio?)

Anyway, she says she’s too tired to write, and there’s no news to write even if she weren’t so tired. She hopes he’ll check back with her tomorrow when she hopes for better luck at writing a decent letter.

This is a brief note Dart writes from a hotel room in Oakland, where he and Spiegler have come on liberty. They visited the model railroad club, did a little shopping and are now looking forward to a good night’s sleep in real beds before heading back to Shoemaker tomorrow.

He feels guilty that he’s not spent enough time with Dot in recent days. He’s thought about her. He’s talked about her; just ask Spiegler and Chuck and the girls he danced with at the YWCA how much he’s talked about her!

He misses her terribly and hopes to get back to writing a decent letter soon.

Dot makes up for not writing yesterday by sending a six-pager today. I’m a little stumped about the content, but I’ll clarify what I can. A few days ago, although I didn’t mention it here, Dot sent Dart a little piece of string that she’d glued to a small card. Her caption said something about “dropping him a line.” Well, he apparently had a snappy come back for that, maybe written on the envelope, but it’s lost to time.

Unfortunately, she devotes nearly the entire first page of this letter going on about his clever retort. It seems she has shown it to the whole town of Greenwich and everyone has “practically gone into convulsions over it.” She’s told everyone how incredibly witty and clever he is, so she warns him that if his line was not original, he should plan on being on non-speaking terms with her for the rest of her natural life.  Now she must stop raving about how funny it was or there will be no hat in the US Navy large enough to fit his swelled head.

She feels the same way he does that the phone call makes it seem as though they are even farther away than before. But she confesses that even if she saw him every day, she couldn’t love him any more than she does right now.

In case he has doubts, she wants him to know that she gets the biggest kick out of his letters. Today at work she was thinking about something he wrote and the way he said it and she began to smile without knowing it. She was about 3,000 miles away when her manager walked in and found her grinning to herself. He brought her back to Earth when he said, “I bet that radiant beam on your face means you got a letter from ‘the one’ today. Am I right?” Because it’s so obvious, she’s decided there’s no use trying to hide how she feels from anyone.

In that vein, she thinks she should tell him that he’s more than a little okay. In fact, he’s so doggone nice that all she can think about is how lucky she is to have met him.

She hereby grants permission for him to open the Christmas package as soon as he reads this letter. She instructs him to keep what he wants and send the rest back. She really wants to get him something he wants and needs. Speaking of Christmas presents, she reminds him that he ignored her previous instructions to call her collect as his gift to her. She thinks it’s important to inform him that she controls 51% of their partnership, so she has the final say and he must obey. When she says to call collect and he ends up paying for the call, he has not obeyed her! To correct the error, she implores him to call again before he leaves the country and to do it by reversing the charges!

She’s impressed that the Navy lets him take civilian work at the winery. Maybe he’ll want to make a life of the Navy with rules like that. She just heard a story on the radio about an 83-year old man who had been with the merchant marine for 70 years and was still on active duty! She asks that he banish that thought from his head.

She confesses to a little scheme she has going on at work. About three times a week, Mr. Goldstein sends her to the tailor to deliver or pick up alterations for customers. As soon as she puts her coat on, word spreads throughout the store, and she is inundated with requests for errands. Today she went to the tailor, the grocer, cigar store, drugist and even stopped by her home to see if there were any letters from Dart. She fears that someday, someone will see her in the wrong place during work hours and her fun will have to stop, but for now, she enjoys the freedom.

It’s taken her several hours to write this letter, with all her daydreaming about a certain sailor, so she must get some shut-eye.

True to his intentions, Dart manages to write a nice, long letter today. He’s alone in the barracks, in the mood for nothing but writing to Dot, and hoping the guys don’t come in to bother him. He’s usually happy to talk with the boys, but they invade his privacy at times and make it hard for him to write sweet nothings to his favorite girl.

He’s very enthusiastic about sleeping until 0800 this morning. The hotel bed provided a good rest, and the room only cost him and Spiegler a buck a piece! I wonder if that was a service man discount, or if that’s the going rate for a hotel room in 1944. If it’s the latter, it’s no wonder my mother gets sticker shock whenever she needs to reserve a hotel room these days.

Tomorrow brings a minor shake-up at Shoemaker. They are trading the lieutenant and the ship’s company men with another battalion. Dart hopes the “old boy” they get won’t be as big a stinker as Lt. Forbes was. Chief Wagstaff, on the other hand is a 30-year Navy man, serving as a bandmaster; a good guy and a true friend to the enlisted men.

He tells her that the Christmas mail rush has slowed down her letters. He’s a little concerned that all the stuff he’s been sending to her won’t get there in time for Christmas. He’s mailed some first class, some parcel post and others were shipped by the stores where he bought them.

Perhaps he dwells too much on those moments when the two of them were in perfect sync with each other, but those moments, and the hope that they’ll have forever together in the not-too-distant future are all he has to dream about. He keeps thinking of their afternoon in the park and how much he wanted to ask her to marry him. I’d heard often when I was growing up that Dad told Mom he didn’t think it was fair to obligate a young woman to marry a man who was going off to fight a war. What if he didn’t make it home, or if he came back a different man? In the beginning of the war, Dart believed that engagements should happen after the war was over. It must have been hard to keep to that self-imposed rule while he held her in his arms for their last time together for many, many months.

He writes that his pleasant reverie of those moments was interrupted by his quick trip to the office to see if his name was on a new draft that just came down. It wasn’t. Then he and Spiegler had a little snack of crackers and sandwich spread.

He confirms that he gets the same question as she does about whether she still loves him. Lt. Forbes asked him today when he was reading Dot’s latest letter. Dart blushed so deeply that Forbes tried to read the letter over his shoulder. I think that really annoyed him.

Just as she imagines wrapping gifts in her sleep, he finds himself stooping to pick up crates of empty bottles as he’s drifting off.

If his memory is correct, she was the first one to use the salutation “Dearest” in a letter. He believes that letter arrived the day before he was sent to the hospital at Great Lakes and he was overjoyed to get it. He’s always been grateful that he fell for her so hard and so fast that he was able to throw caution to the wind and be bold. He was bold enough to ask for a goodnight kiss on their date in Cleveland. The overthrown caution let him write that he loved her in the December 4, 1943 letter. He has no regrets.

It’s true that she has never told him to his face that she loved him, but she’s said it on the phone, and she’s said it in different ways. He loves the way she’s said it and he loves her, all of her. He fears the “short time” until the Big Day his pop wrote about is going to pass painfully slowly until the war is over. It’s all he wants in the world.

Dot gets a little start on her letter while at work  because she has plans for this evening. She and her friend Jean are going to the Greenwich H. S. basketball game of alums vs students. Although Dot doesn’t care a fig about Greenwich H. S., she likes basketball and spending time with Jean, so it should be a fun evening.

She didn’t get much writing done at work because Mr. Goldstein got sick and Dot had to run the department alone. The game went well, with the alums winning on account of Dot screaming for them. Now she’s hoarse and tired.

Since Dart plans to go to the admiral to complain about a change of officers at Shoemaker, she decides she won’t make him also complain to the Postmaster General. Dot’s getting Dart’s letters all out of order, even though they’ve all be sent Air Mail. She’s so happy to get them at all, that she supposes it’s not necessary to complain about when they arrive.

She’s getting a little nervous about the day when Dart will reveal some of his faults to her. She can’t really believe he has any, and she won’t be the one to insist that he reveal them. If she had her “druthers,” he’d keep them hidden always so she’d never have to be disillusioned.

This is a long and thoughtful letter from Dart, revealing in equal parts a gloomy, frustrated sailor and a positive, cultured young man.

He is seriously out of sorts today. Camp Shoemaker – never a pleasant place – is starting to wear him down. He’s angry that he’s wasting three, four, five weeks here doing nothing of value, waiting for what comes next and unable to make any plans. Why did the Navy give them such short leaves after their advanced training school just so they could rot in this God forsaken hole?

Every day is filled with endless queuing up. There are lines for the toilets, lines for chow, lines for dirty dishes, lines for showers, lines for liberty passes, lines for bowling and theaters, lines for buses, and lines for finding out what line to stand in. There’s never an opportunity to sit while in line, unless one wants to sit on sharp gravel or muddy muck.

He was able to score a single ticket to the San Francisco orchestra concert last night – a full program of Russian music. He was enchanted by the “Francesca Da Rimini” piece by Tschaikowsky and amused by a humorous collection of four short pieces called the “Suite Diabolique” by Prokofeiff.

Quite the critic for a non-musician, he deems the SF orchestra inferior to Cleveland’s. To his ear, the brass sounded “tinny” and the string section lacked the full, rich, harmonious tone of his home town’s orchestra. Still, he was happy to have been able to attend the concert.

While crossing the Bay Bridge yesterday, he saw the hull of a huge new battleship looming out of the fog. As he got nearer, he saw that it was the USS Missouri, in town for a check-up after her shake-down cruise. He was so impressed with her size and the number of guns on deck. She was moored next to a tiny destroyer, fondly known by sailors as a “tin can.” Dart expressed a keen interest in being assigned to a giant battleship rather than a flimsy little destroyer. He believes all that massive steel and the mighty guns would feel much safer to him. No doubt.

The new battalion commander at Shoemaker brought a larger support staff with him, so Dart has lost his cushy office assignments to the regular staff. I guess now he’ll take his turn on the work crews again.

He’s happy to have mailed all his Christmas cards and hopes they and his packages all arrive in time. He’s mailed several things to Dot; some are Christmas gifts and others are ideas he’s had for awhile that he’s only recently had time to buy.

The final paragraph is sweet. “Well, it’s time to crawl back into my shell for the night. So I’ll kiss you goodnight in the doorway and hold you close for so long that we almost lose our balance (and our minds.)”

The big news from Greenwich concerns El and Don. Eleanor has been worried about Don because she hadn’t heard from him since his leave ended. Then she got a call from his mother saying she would be bringing El’s Christmas gift because Don is in quarantine. The gift is a beautiful, sparkling diamond ring. Although they’ve been engaged for awhile, El has been wearing Don’s high school ring this whole time. She is so enchanted with her ring that tonight at dinner, she was dazzled to the point that she put mounds of salt in her coffee!

Dot’s father has been down for the count the last couple of days. It’s the first time he’s been too sick to go into his shop in years. When Dot asked him this morning how he was feeling, he replied, “Well, I’m not feeling fine, but I’m feeling a lot less worse.” See what a Yale education will do for one’s grammar?

Ruth Chamberlain has been holding the shop together during Arthur’s illness, in addition to her work at the library. There’s no taking it easy for her, even though she just got out of her sick bed the day before her husband fell ill. Dot explains “My cold meant so much to me that I simply had to share it with my whole family.” It seems like the entire eastern seaboard is under the weather.

With six more shopping days until Christmas, Dot’s beginning to doubt she’ll survive. She’s exhausted.

It’s a melancholy note from a homesick sailor today. He hasn’t heard from Dot for three days – must be the mail system, because she’s been pretty faithful. “Aside from the pay line, laundry and sweeping a road, I have nothing to talk about. I’m hungry, but that doesn’t make much for talk.”

He claims people around the camp are doing their best to make the place look nice for Christmas, but without cold weather, sparkling decorations, cheery words and songs, Christmas seems hollow.

He recalls the Christmases of his childhood; awaking so very early, a reluctance to get up off the floor and try on the new scratchy clothes, the toy train chugging around the Christmas tree.

A restlessness tonight inspires him to want to take a long drive in a car. He’d love it if Dot would come along.

There was a card in the mail today informing him that Dot’s parents have given him a gift subscription to Readers Digest. He asks that she thank them on his behalf until he can do a proper job of it.

With tongue in cheek, he cautions her not to get drunk on New Year’s Eve. He tells her he’ll be thinking of her from his little bunk at sea. This strikes me as an unnecessarily snarky paragraph. Will he not be writing between now and December 31? Does he have orders to ship out? If he doesn’t, why taunt her that way. I guess this is an example of the moodiness he’s warned her about.

With a hope he can do a better job on a letter tomorrow, he sends his love and signs off.

Dot’s letter is also brief, but more cheerful. She’s curious why his mother sent her a card saying that she’d mailed a package from Dart that he’d sent to Cleveland. Why did he send it home first? Also, what’s with all the packages he’s told her he’s sent? Is he trying to make her feel like a bigger heel than she already does? She’s buzzing with curiosity and excitement.

She wishes he were with her tonight (and every night.) The lovely old town of Greenwich is having her first snow of the season. With the gracious homes, welcoming streets, and stately trees, the whole town resembles a Christmas card. “The earth looks like a soft white blanket sparkling with diamond sequins and the air smells like a freshly laundered sheet, just taken off the line. It hardly seems possible that there could be anything but ‘Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men.’ And yet, there are millions of people who have never seen such a night, nor will they ever have the opportunity. God bless them, and I thank God I’m an American.”

Yawning, and with one eye propped open, she sends her love and closes the letter.