Love Note, Day 12

Nearly every day for seven months in 1945, my grandfather Bill wrote a letter home to my grandmother Margaret from the U.S.S. Onslow, a Navy seaplane tender ship in the South Pacific, where he was stationed as an electrician’s mate.

He was a new husband and father, about 30 and halfway around the world. He must have been scared.

“Hello my Darling Wife & Son” they begin. The young son was just starting to talk then and “into everything.” Much later, he became my “Uncle Lou.” My dad was not born until 1948.

Near the end of his life, my uncle gave me the four bundles of letters. We were at his house in San Diego, where we spread our family archive of snapshots and the letters on his dining table, then spent the day delving into our family history. A single day to download what I could about my father’s family, of which I knew little.

Uncle Lou found the letters in the basement of my dad and Stephanie’s house, while staying there to help my dad with chemotherapy treatments.

They were among items from my grandmother’s house, and below some water pipes that had leaked, he said. Other items nearby had water damage. But not my grandfather’s letters.

I have read a fraction of them. The faded ink swirls of my grandfather’s handwriting soothes me. They comforted me after my dad died, then after Uncle Lou died. They offered a new perspective on my grandparents’ lives.

Bill writes to Margaret of some assortment of daily rituals: the movie playing that night, a recent card game, whether he received all his clothes back from the laundry and what he’s going to do next: take a nap, shave, have a cup of coffee.

The most ordinary things in extraordinary times is their new gift to me.

Read “We Came From Love” about the letters from Bill, who I knew as Pop Pop.

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