November 12, 1962. A naughty little boy cartoon with the adage, "Keep Smiling!! It makes people wonder whaat you've been up to." He must buy this stuff on the base. Military humor? No. Just the same silly shit we see today. But it's another love letter. He says he could just keep writing "I love you" ad infinitum, but is afraid I would get bored, and says he actually doesn't want to do that, because "I would never stop using these letters to scribble my inspired esseys (sic) to someone who reads them, and still more remarkable, answers them with some sort of intelligence."

The kind of letter that makes me wonder once again, why did I ever leave this guy? Didn't I know I would never meet anyone like him ever again? He loves me, he finds me necessary to his life, he thinks I'm intelligent. "...you are far too valuable to me...to risk losing by flooding you with an endless stream of stagnant copy."

I had another love who was as, if not even more, intelligent than Larry.

But he did not love me in the same way.

Why didn't I know that?

August 29, 1962. 9:25 pm. "P.S. I wish I had someone to pinch my nose for me."

I wish I could say, "Oh, I remember, I used to pinch his nose. It was so cute." But I don't. I don't remember that at all. Why in Her name would I pinch his nose? It wasn't big. I don't think it was runny. What the hell kind of endearment was pinching his nose? I mean, I assume that he misses ME pinching his nose. I assume that he isn't in actual need of anyone pinching his nose at the moment of writing.

We think there are things we will never forget.

We do.

Just a short bit today. No new revelations - about him or me. Just the fact that he spells oaf "olf." Surely a misprint. Have I said, most of these letters are in pen and ink on notepaper. A lost art. He calls me "darling." Also a lost art. So is "olf" a mis-scribble?

I was thinking the other day about one of my favorite words. "Gloaming." Just looked it up, to be certain of its origins. Comes from Old English "glom" - "dusk." I was surprised to see that it was NOT characterized as "archaic, poetic." As a matter of fact, it was the "Word of the Day" on Dictionary.com on 28 February 2000. I'm going to begin using it in conversation.

It's 4:03 p.m. In an hour or so, we will be in the gloaming, darling.

6 November 1962. The stationery has a cartoon charactor at the top - a buck-toothed little urchin - and a tag that says: "Don't ask me. You'll do what you want to anyhow."

Wonder if it's some kind of response?

Nothing much happening here. He's in clerical school, and is happy that he is meeting other "intellectuals," or at least, fellow college graduates instead of the "morons, punks, etc." with whom he is otherwise billeted.

I was probably of a similar mind, being all Ayn Randy rational, or so I aspired to be. I don't remember when I became a little more broad-minded, or what prompted it. What prompted my acceptance of and even identification with the "morons, punks, etc." Was it when I realized that I was a failure at Randian rationalism? Was it later, when I grew tired of being the proper little intellectual and thought perhaps the morons and punks were having more fun? I don't remember.

I do remember hunkering down in an alley someplace in Green Bay, Wisconsin - years and years later - to smoke a bowl of hash with some - well, no - not morons, not even punks. These were fellow "intellectuals," fellow students from the University of Wisconsin. I had come from a meeting of some humanities group, met these guys at the bar, and now we were proceeding to get as sublimely wrecked as possible. I remember think I was lucky - lucky to be equally at home in both places. Humanities seminars and dark alleys with an illegal substance. I still think so.

Nearly 25 years after receiving this letter, I met another boyfriend while he was bartending at the Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle. He had also been in the clerical corps. In Vietnam.

Beginning 2007 with a letter dated 22 September 1962. I'm getting the date from the envelope - and changing said date. I could swear the envelope says 1961. But it simply cannot be. I graduated from high school in 1961. By September, I have barely started college and possibly don't even know who this guy is, not to mention having any idea of the drama/s to come. So - Ft. Knox, from where this is posted, has erred somehow. 1962 it is.

JFK has given a speech at Rice University on going to the moon. I don't know if this is THE moon speech, but according to Google is the "Rice Moon speech." Here is an excerpt:

"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

Larry is simply in the Army, as males did then upon finishing college. I think there was a draft. Viet Nam is just a twinkle in someone's eye. Someone's advisory eye. As for the letter, I detect trouble to come, if only because he tells me, "As for your activities at C.C. (Carthage College), etc., you are not free to do what you plese. You must realize that you are bound by certain mores to which you must conform. You know what is expected of you and you can use your own discretion if in doubt, or you can discuss it with me whenever possible."

I have no idea what he is talking about. Seems I wrote to him that some people were questioning my activities as an "engaged person." I know, even today, how I would have reacted to people questioning my activities, and even more so to someone telling me that I was "bound by certain mores..." He was right, of course, but in those days, those were fightin' words! I wasn't even being bad yet. But when, by the end of the school year, it became possible for me to be bad, I'm certain I remembered these words and stuck out my lower lip in a stubborn pout. I know that look well. I've seen it on my daughter's face.