Let Me Call You Sweetheart

One day about 2 months after we met, Dorothy told me she had plans to go visit her grandparents for a whole week. She had to go all the way to Ponca City, Oklahoma, and she was going by bus. I immediately became concerned. Traveling by bus in 1943 was similar to traveling by bus today. It was a bit more popular, but the people on the bus then were as seedy as they can be today, and the trip would have taken about 24 full hours.

Dorothy's grandmother, Nora, had to provide all the care for her bed-ridden grandfather, who had been paralyzed as the result of a beating he received at the hands of a hitchhiker. In those days, hitchhiking was a fairly common thing, but criminals often used it as a method of getting from one place to another.So even though the bus was safer than hitchhiking, or even picking up a hitchhiker, I still felt justified in my concern. I asked her for the address so I could write to her while she was gone. She gave it to me and I felt a little better about the whole affair.

I saw her nearly every day at the hospital, and being apart for a week felt like a lifetime, at that point. I began writing a letter to her, and I realized, I'd only known her a bit more than a month and I didn't have a lot to say. But, I did have one thing I wanted to tell her, that I thought of her as my sweetheart. So I wrote that down. I'd been wanting to say that for a while, but at the hospital it seemed a little out of place, and that was mainly where we saw each other. This was a good opportunity, and I was pretty sure she felt the same way. I closed the letter off by asking her if she thought that was OK.

My instinct was right. She returned home and our romance moved to a higher level. It seems to be true that absence makes the heart grow fonder.