" - if we can get the world into some semblance of order and keep it there for a time, our son and his contemporaries will take over and make something really good of it. If we can clear the air for our child and his generation, we're fat!
You know, Betty Lou, in a few days we will have been married four years. We pooled our lives in our beautiful little town, surrounded with fine friends, up to our eyebrows in love. I don't know the date - it was sort of gradual like the unfolding of a beautiful flower that blooms only once, and once open, grows more beautiful with each succeeding day. And now that little rosebud of a baby is growing on the same bush. That place wasn't big enough to hold my happiness - even with the big window open. I've loved you there and in a thousand other places made wonderful by you.
This war seems incidental because it's already begun to exhaust itself. The vital thing is to get and keep the thing straightened out long enough for all the little ones to come to bat - not with two strikes on them but with a clear field. They'll have the intelligence to keep things in order. We'll teach them.
The setting is perfect for the things I love best - to dream of the two people who are my life, the lovely warm delightful Betty Lou, and our son right at the very brink of this beautiful life. By the time I get home I figure he'll be rugged enough to toss around a little - how I dream of that!
I hope our child has a chance to contribute his two cents' worth of light and color to this battered old world without being swept up on one of these mechanized free-for-alls.
My normal place is beside you, and my lifelong job is being your husband and our son's old man. That fine head of yours! That wonderful Betty Lou that I love to the very raw ends of my nerves! You know the picture of you and our child - you in that fine bemused profile and my baby yawning his old head off? Well, it is now mounted in a frame of Plexiglas upon my instrument panel - right between the gyre horizon and the altimeter.
God, how I'd like to be with you this evening. To talk to you and to touch your sweet young face - to watch your eyes when they sparkle - to hear you laugh.
These are the things I think of as I go to sleep and I think of them as I wake. They are part of the fabric of my mind. Woven in with all of my vague, uncertain ideas about things in general is this pattern that you have made by your mental, physical and spiritual warmth.
I am impatient with this tremendous war, anxious to be finished with it so that we can do the things we were meant to do - so that we can live. I want to live with you, Betty Lou - I want to give you everything I can - I want to live with you and love you for the next forty-three thousand years. I want to sit across a table from you in one of our favorite places and eat and talk and just watch you. I want to touch your hair and kiss you on your lovely mouth. I want long evenings with you filled with things we like together, long nights, your love and warmth.
I dream of these things. I want to wake up and see you there, and I want to have breakfast with you and begin a full, wonderful day together, the days following one after another with no interruption, just the two happy people with their beautiful child and their love.
The fine, fine years we had together fill my mind with wonderful happy pictures of things past. We will have such years again - better years - we have a child now and he makes us just one third richer than we were. I can wait, Betty Lou, as long as is necessary - but God, I'd like to see you. Stay with it, Betty Lou; this war isn't exactly going backwards.
Things are happening.
I think of that house and how we'll fix it up and how we'll live in it together. I get so happy my feet hurt. I want to see the funny hats you buy and I want to loaf around the house cluttering up things generally. This is a good war and we must see it through, but, dammit, Betty Lou, I want the life that we have planned - we can make it a beauty, darling. The living we've done together has been some of the finest I can imagine, and it will get better and better. We'll improve with age and grow mellow as a cello with the passing years. Our son and his friends will flock to our house. They'll love his mother and put up with his old man because he'll make sling shots and kites for them and tell them tall stories about the great war. I come from a long, uninterrupted line of family men, Betty Lou, and I plan to carry on in the old tradition, even if I have been interrupted a bit by this small but vigorous global fracas.
Hang on, lassie, fat times a'coming.
Keep that sparkle in your eyes and that tilt to your chin. Tomorrow the old man hits the 25th mark - I still feel like I should be about fourteen but there it is. How I should like to see you. I'd like to borrow just ten minutes from the great treasure of time that we will spend together when this war is over - just ten minutes - I wish I could send you a whole bushel of emeralds.
I love you two people with my very life and soul. My old heart is yours completely. Give my very best regards to the tribe - and remember, Betty Lou, I'm yours, all yours, and have just been loaned to the Army for the duration - "
Ingrid