From Writing in Faith


Reading your letter,
Ruth,
I wonder if you were worthy of my
Great uncle
Not yet twenty
In his third year of service in the US Navy
As a submariner

In the Second World War.

My uncle was a high school drop out.

Passion drove him
And though it horrified his mother,

She was an artist,

She understood,

She signed.

Go, boy. Fight.

He died fighting off the coast of Japan.

Reading your letter, Ruth,
I think you were the bright and flighty voice
Of home,
Of all that was simple and warm and fragrant
With your
Gees and sweeties and sugars
And send me an insignia I can pin to
My suits and jackets
Like the other girls with sweethearts
In the Navy.


You made a boy feel good.

He died for that feeling
And the place it came from.

You and the Japanese
And this boy's mother who saved
Every scrap of her son
In newspaper articles and announcements
Of his friends' engagements and marriages, life and death:

You brought us here.

Note: Recently my mother's aunt died, and my mother came into possession of her Uncle Laurence's high school yearbook.  Aunt Audrey had the book because she and Uncle Bert had named their son after Uncle Laurence, who had been a submariner in the Pacific during World War II.  He died in combat.  His mother, my great-grandmother, was a great saver of everything, and the yearbook contains the wedding announcements of his classmates, news stories about his boat, the USS Herring, other photos, and a single letter from Ruth, Uncle Laurence's girlfriend.  It is a wildly light and rambling letter that seems to be from a world quite distinct from the war zones my uncle patrolled during his years of service in the Navy.  Letters fascinate me for their way of capturing so much of a personality.  This particular letter struck me as a living voice of another time, a strange and sad dream.

One Single Impression