It is my Father-in-law’s (Blake) birthday. His father (Bob) is still a very healthy man at 91 and can be seen bicycling around town still. He also came to the birthday party for his oldest. I love talking to Bob and try to coax some nugget of information from him about his life each time I see him.
Tonight it was about the book he is trying to get finished/printed. He typed up 440 pages (in Microsoft word) worth of letters he and his dear departed sweetheart (Jessie) wrote to each other over the course of their courtship and marriage. I asked him some generic question about it tonight and got an absolute gem of a story.
Bob and Jessie started exchanging letters in 1943, shortly before his service in WWII. Space was a premium in the Navy and all he had was his seaman’s bag. But in the bottom of that pack he kept carried all of Jessie’s letters, never discarding them. He carried them across the US twice, and across the Pacific Ocean and back. He carried them across a lifetime.
Just a few years before she passed, he and Jessie were in their living room. She was confined to a wheel chair by then, but he was up and about straightening up a closet. He pulled from that closet a box that had been pushed into the corner. He opened it up and found a bundle of letters tied together. He untied the string and took the first letter out of the box. He found it dated 1943. It was the first of the letters Jessie had written to him. As she sat, he read it to her, like the voice of the past reaching out to touch them that day.
He had forgotten he had those letters. But he’d kept them safe. When he finished reading, Jessie told him that, “if you look in that closet over there you’ll find all the letters you wrote to me.” He said, “I’ve been in that closet a hundred times, there are no letters there.” But she insisted. So he went and looked. In a briefcase in the top of the closet he found another bundle of letters. Jessie had also kept every letter that Bob had written to her.
He had no idea, and neither did she. He has no idea how they survived that long without being damaged or thrown out. He said he isn’t even sure why he had kept her letters. He had been engaged to a different girl when they started writing and he didn’t keep the letters from that girl. He hadn’t even kept his own mother’s letters. But he’d kept Jessie’s. He’d kept the words of the woman he would eventually marry and love for a lifetime.
And so now that Jessie is gone, he has gone through those letters. He has put them in order and is publishing them as a genealogical record for his posterity to enjoy. I’m very much looking forward to reading it!
However, there was one letter he doesn’t have. There was one particular letter that Jessie wrote that really touched him. He kept it separate from the others so that he could easily find it and reread it. But because it was not safely stored with the others in his seaman’s bag, it was thoughtlessly thrown out one day by someone cleaning ship. He’d kept those other letters for 7 decades, but the one he cherished most was lost??? I wish I could read that one letter most of all…
…but perhaps some things are best kept between couples.
