The Potunk House,
Westhampton Beach, L.I.,
Sunday, November 4, 1917.Dear Miss Turner,
It was indeed sweet of you to write to me at the begining of my "commencement" and I certainly appreciate your doing so. I have thought many times of that note and of the spirit that prompted it, and have been cheered and comforted. I really can't tell you just how much your "best wishes" did effect, because they are still actively engaged in doing their bit.
Indeed I never was so wonderfully happy as I am this year. I just bubble all the time. This is a small town, on the ocean, and the school has about three hundred in it, of which seventy are in the High School. Well I didn't know there could be seventy such adorable little sinners. "Seventeen," alive and squirming, is my constant delectation. I have the most fun teaching them Spanish, and they all love it too. They'll soon know more than I do. But alas, that won't be much. I have to stock up madly every night on everything I expect to dole out the next day. German I abhor, (though I love it) because I can't learn German overnight, nor English grammar either. However, we all learn something every day.
College is still a rather dim memory, - dim and painful. I am a thousand times thankful to have dropped down below the horizon, - and landed so gently on this soft cloud. This is a new life. No one cares about super-sails or Strindberg, and you do your best - and it seems to be all that is asked for. Well, I don't know within a thousand times nearly enough to fill my job, but I plug away at it, and don't feel my capacities so over-taxed as to pass into chronic delirium.
But I seem to verge on it when I recall last year and the insane delusions that clouded my senses. I don't wonder at the chant my mother adopted "when you're in college you're crazy." I certainly left it with the feeling of being shot out of a cannon's mouth.
All this rambling reminiscence is in partial apology and complete regret, because I never "got around to see you" last year. I felt myself continually a loser in not giving myself that benefit, and had a standing engagement with "Sweet Billy" to go. But that delusion haunted me, that I ought to work on - this and that, and see So-and-so about this and that, and my poor brain was so completely addled that I did everything madly and as I supposed conscientiously - and spoiled it all. Rather on the principle of a painting, with the nervous second and third and fourth going-over - it's obscuring the first fresh outlines and leaving - no impression at all.
"Well anyhow," as my babies all say, believe me that your card was a value to a sore spirit, and I was farthest from hypocricy in saying that the year when I was so fortunate as to be studying with you gave me something I can never lose. And the sense of it is coming back to me, or is being freshly impressed on me more and more as I see - well, life. If it weren't for - chromosomes, I'd never get over the thought of emptiness and futility in a mechanical world.
The kind of a community that I am in is a wholesome and refreshing antidote for a spirit that scorned bromides and the "unenlightened." The blacksmith is the most cheerful obliging man I ever saw, and brings his healthy cheerful family to church every Sunday. One of my "pets" is the undertaker's son - an endlessly non-irritatable, good-natured, hard-working boy. The plumber's son is more a man than any manicured city sapling I ever was acquainted with - and at home they all seem to belong to that sapling class - perhaps, on close view I should find that virtue.
Again, "well anyhow," excuse me for taking so much of your time, and thank you for giving it. We sing "The Miller of the Dee" in school every onceinawhile [sic], and I love the "heroes they the soil who've trod."
Telling of the wonderful adaptations nature makes, as in (if it's so) sharpening the hearing of a blind man, the sight of a deaf one, etc., you are sure to be impressed when you realize that a man with one short leg always has the other longer.
"Class, everyone turn and look at his appendix."
You see, I've written too much. Excuse me. Thank you. Good-bye.
Affectionately yours,