a tale in two parts
I am a 68 year retired woman, married for almost 48 years to the same man with two grown children, 5 grandchildren, and a frustrated, shadow writer. What do I mean by a shadow writer? I would start writing something (a short story, a poem, a novel), go full board on it for a couple of days, and then save it in my special folder on my computer (or before computers, a manila folder which is long gone now). I’m always reading about how you can write and publish your own works or have a podcast about your thoughts and ideas, and I came across the article "The Social Distance Project" about your desire to “publish” stories about the COVID-19 shutdown. This was quite fortuitous because my story actually comes from the same day I discovered the article about your venture.
As I said before, my husband and I have been married to the each other for almost 48 years. It was in the year 1972, the Vietnam War was still raging, and my husband was a sailor on a ship which was “on the line” off the coast of Vietnam. Back in the day, the only way you could communicate that wouldn’t cost you an arm and a leg (phone calls were VERY expensive) was through letters. Before that, we had begun dating after high school (1970) and were pretty serious so him joining was quite a shock to our relationship. This would be a test of the “separation makes the heart grow fonder” adage. He joined the Navy in 1971 at the ripe old age of 18 and thus began our correspondence.
Back to the present, my husband had been reminiscing about those days for about a week and was trying to put together some pieces of his time in the Navy that he wasn’t sure he was remembering correctly. This investigation was something to do during the shutdown. He was in our garage looking for some paperwork from his days in the Navy and he came across my box I had saved of his letters to me from that time. They dated from 1971, the year he joined and deployed to participate in the Vietnam War, to when he got out at the end of 1974. He started to read them hoping for some insight into his history at that time.
I was in our den, reading all I could about COVID-19 (I am obsessed about this), when in comes my husband with one of his letters. He was smiling one of the biggest smiles I’d ever seen (he is what you’d call reserved). “Honey”, he said. “I can’t believe what I wrote you when I was young!” Now remember, we’re an old, retired, married couple so romance isn’t what it use to be. We make love every 6-10 days, hug and kiss every now and then, and hold hands when we’re out together. Words of love are also not as frequent as they use to be and a form of extreme comfort has replaced that. So seeing him so excited was something to behold. For the next hour or so he would run in with another letter, I would read it, and we would laugh and reminisce about how young and in love we were. Even back then my husband wasn’t what you’d call effusive with his romantic overtures; at least that was what I remembered. But as I read through his letters, there was the young man I fell in love with telling me over and over again how much he loved me, missed me, complimented me, and that we would be together for the rest of our lives. This hour of togetherness, caused by the COVID-19 shutdown, was one of best we’d had in a long time and showed us both again why we married back when we were too young to know better and that it did work out as we had envisioned all those years ago.