Phil Wood's Letters
Letter #37
I Always Subconsciously Feel The Gap
To Margretta & Gretchen
14 November 1943
Sunday 14 November
Dear Girls,
A little while ago I found out that one of my boys, [Wilbur Ellsworth] Plitt, whom I made corporal, worked under Uncle George for about a year in the library.[1] We were talking about him, agreeing that he was a great fella – and for some reason, I had a sudden realization that many of my people-back-home are good people. People that you are proud of, the conduct of their lives direct; you would like to live their lives, all of them, savor the pleasures that they have obviously found in living, if only your life were a little longer. Aunt Iz, Aunt Kit, Uncle Dud, Lea [?], Gretchen, Daddy.[2]
All complete somehow, rounded within themselves, seeming to know what they contain – and, once being whole within, they can extend themselves outward to others: giving help, companionship, love. Rusty didn’t have it, she wasn’t self-sufficient enough.
Good people, people I love and want to be with.
For some reason, I have spent the whole day being homesick – very badly so. Thinking of you and of another lonely Christmas, thinking of the past, Christmas at Old Broadway, at Minturn, happy times when we were all together. Even when the three of us are together I always, subconsciously, feel the gap and expect Daddy to come, and we could go take a walk together as a family. Mother’s fur coat and green Robin Hood hat, past the Player’s Club, Gretchen and Daddy clowning, Fifth Avenue shop windows and biting cold wind. I wish many things – that we were together, that I was a civilian again – but nothing so much as that Daddy was with us again.
I’m sad tonight – and lonely.
Phil
Footnotes
[1] Phil is using the Marine version of “boy” meaning subordinate; Plitt, a mortar squad leader from Baltimore, was seven years older. “Uncle George” is not known.
[2] While Phil had an actual Aunt Isabel (Rapp) Hardy, it seems more likely that “Aunt Iz” is Isabella Zinsser. The Zinssers were close friends and neighbors from Hastings; she would be in the same vein as “Uncle Dud” – also a family friend.