The Shoe Box

From the time I got married, two things lived on the shelf in the hall closet: the wedding album from Nick's first marriage, to Lydia in 1953, and a Miles shoe box. The box, he told me (or what I remember him telling me) contained the letters he had sent Lydia when he was in the Army in the mid 1950s.

I never thought anything of it. Back when we first got married, we did unpack the Rosenthal china she had carefully selected from the PX in Germany, and the crystal glasses, and used them throughout our marriage. And we sat down one day and looked through the wedding album together. But the Nick in that album wasn't really my Nick - he was impossibly young, and really, I would not have recognized anyone in the pictures, not even his parents, if he hadn't been there to tell me who was who. In fact, after he died, I sent the wedding album to Lydia's sister. I knew she would appreciate them in a way I never would.

But the shoe box was another story. I certainly didn't mind that he had written her letters; I certainly didn't mind that she had saved them; and I could understand why, after her death in 1963, he had been unable to throw them out. It never bothered me. I had no need to be jealous of a ghost. And it wasn't like I thought he didn't have a life before we met. I never thought of it at all, unless I happened to open that closet, and even then, it was barely a passing thought.

When Lisa came across the show box, she asked me what to do with it. I said just throw it out, but she felt funny doing that, so the shoe box ended up getting packed and sent to me in Delray Beach with a bunch of books and other things. I sat down today and opened the box, meaning to just empty the contents into a garbage bag. And I got a huge surprise: it wasn't letters he wrote her; it was letters she wrote him. And think of the full impact of that: here's a guy in boot camp, in Fort Dix, and later Fort Belvoir, and finally in Germany, and he saved her letters. And he saved letters from his parents, his brother, his co-workers; even two from his sister-in-law. That just makes my mind reel.

I read through the letters. It was mostly just what you'd expect, letters telling of her daily life and errands, interspersed with sentences about loving and missing him. Reading letters from 1955, and knowing what happened in 1963, there was a sense of poignancy, especially in one letter, where Lydia had written "I will love you for the rest of my life" and had then gone back, crossed out the word "my" and replaced it with "your". And reading it, I realized that she had been right the first time: she did love him for the rest of her life; but I loved him for the rest of his.

The two letters from his sister-in-law Elva were pretty much what I would have expected, except for one thing: as far as I knew, Lydia was always Lydia. Nick never referred to her by any other name; neither did Elva or anyone else. But in both letters, Elva referred to her sister not as Lydia but as Lily. And it was on the one year anniversary of his death that I sat on Nokomis Beach with Mary and Linda, and changed my name to Lily.

In the end, I didn't keep any of the letters. I was surprised that it was her letters to him that he saved, bringing them along in his duffel bag. He had toughened up some by the time we got married, or at least he never showed that much of a sentimental streak.

I'm glad he kept them all those years. I'm glad he felt comfortable keeping them; that they were always someplace accessible to me, and there was never any conversation as to my reading or not reading them. But having them must have been important to him, that he moved them from apartment to apartment and finally to the house in Pennsylvania. He never could have imagined them or me - ending up in Delray Beach.

Reading them brought him here with me. Reading letters sent to him over 60 years ago, reading letters from people long gone from this earth...I can't really explain it. But they were letters to him, and we were one, and in reading those letters, I felt his love pouring over me again.