Hello, everybody still with me. Tonight I am back in Fort Smith – it is Tuesday, the 4th of March. I see now that every day is going to be an anniversary of some kind. A month ago was Henry’s last night here in this house. I’ve walked around and turned on all the lights, wound all the clocks, and avoided the Dodger Den. When Peter and Cindy put me on the plane today they were very concerned that I would be alone – am not used to alone as I was in the glory days of drilling, that is for sure.

So, tonight, 11 year old Olivia came to spend the night – this is nice, even if we have to get up at the crack of dawn to get her to school on time.

The hardest day in Orlando was last Saturday, the day we went to Disney – Epcot. In the summer of 1959 our first Big Outing was driving to Disneyland from Vegas. Peter says “I still don’t believe you went to LA, did Disney, and came back to Vegas all in one day.” We did. We were in a Corvette, remember? Henry was a young buck of 24 going on 25, and I seem to remember there was no speed limit in Nevada during those years. Had there been, it would not have mattered! My, how Henry changed in later years, when he would say to me, “just because the speed limit is 70, it is not mandatory that you drive that fast.”

Anyway, last Saturday was a lonesome day, walking around Epcot with the cute little family but no Henry. I missed holding hands, missed just the smell of him. Our three kids worked at Disneyworld at sometime in their careers, so we have spent many days there visiting and checking up on them, and consequently stayed in most of the old original hotels. And, there was a block of years when nearly every item of clothing, including watches, had Mickey stitched somewhere on it.

So tonight, I’ve come home to The Mail. Allison has been collecting it, and had it arranged on the kitchen table in categories: the cards, the letters, the bills, the symphony and Coterie, Merrill-Lynch, junk, catalogs, and boxes of books. It is a literal mountain.

Which brings us to: Mail. In the first years of marriage I was not much of a letter writer, or much on thank you notes. Henry trained me up on these things. I meant to, just never got around to it. He saw to it that I did my duty, and when I procrastinated, he would finally give up and take care of things, as usual.

In Libya, the mail back and forth to the USA was so very slow, writing hardly mattered. I did write some, to my folks and Auntie, was about all. We had no phone. International calls were not in our vocabulary. Don’t remember if it was possible to call. Perhaps from the post office, I think. The only phone call I remember in those days was when we were evacuated to Italy during the Six Day War. I did write Auntie and the folks, and the US government mailed it. My Dad received that letter, called the State Department in Washington,DC, and had them track me (and his grandchildren) down! He called me in our hotel in Naples!

That’s another story…

Back to the mail. Aramco mail service was pretty good – anywhere from 14 to 21 days delivery time to the States, and about that long coming to us.

After Henry was working in the office, he always picked up the mail on the way home. It was custom. Once I went to get the mail in the day, as I couldn’t wait any longer – we had two kids out at school and I would check every day to see if they had written. Henry then checked the mail after work – there was nothing. He was so disappointed. So, I never picked up the mail again. Sometimes I would check by and peer into the box to see if anything was there, but always let him bring it home. Just a little thing. Didn’t really matter, the letters were already more than two weeks old, what difference did a few more hours make?

We all learned early on to send mail with whomever was leaving the Kindgom on repat. We certainly expected to take mail with us. I don’t remember anyone every refusing to take other people’s mail. Some people didn’t like assuming the responsibility, so we didn’t ask them twice. Some drillers on 28/28 schedules flying those charter flights later on were iffy. Occasionally the men never looked in their suitcases until they were packing to come back and then discovered they had mail! Oh dear, they mailed it 28 days late.

We always took empty suitcases out, and we brought them in, full. Full of children’s clothes in the next three sizes, shoes in graduating sizes, vitamins, bags of chocolates chips and at least two boxes of brown sugar – can one live on entire year without chocolate chip cookies? Later, the commissary carried brown sugar and chocolate chips, so the next project was smuggling in bacon. After the pork store was in business, the fun went out of trying to get past customs with our bootleg wares.

Speaking of customs, I remember the night we picked up a new hire drilling family in the Dhahran airport, to take them to Abqaiq, and customs found two issues of Playboy in the bottom of his suitcase. He swore he didn’t know they were there! as he stood there in front of his wife and little girls – he was so distraught, I believed him. All of us nearly went to jail that night! Guilty by association. Ah, the drillers were legendary.

What I am thinking, as I look at this mail here on the kitchen table, was our taking out mail on every repat. It was fun. We reserved a suitcase just for mail. People came by the house in a steady stream for two days running before we left, bringing mail and small packages – cookies and things for their kids in boarding school. By the time we actually left, we had visited with half the population of the town. Usually people did not have postage. It didn’t matter. Who cared? One year, it was while we were in RT, we had a huge suitcase stuffed with mail, as our trip was early November. We must have taken out zillions of Christmas cards. Henry never ever minded buying postage for all that mail, he expected to, and was glad to.

We flew to Florida to see whoever was working at Disney at that time, and I was anxious to get that mail off my conscience. Our conscience. Henry said, wait. We are going to Miami anyway – to eat at a Jewish deli – those of you who knew him well appreciate this. He said, let’s wait and drive down to Key Largo and mail it from there. Wouldn’t people wonder how their Christmas cards came to be mailed from Key Largo? We were eternally in the thrall of that classic movie.

So, we did. And dawdled on the way, the post office was only open a few more minutes when we arrived. There was all that mail, to stamp and process. The staff were quite surprised to see us come through their door with a suitcase of mail. We spent just under a hundred dollars in postage. Henry had such a good time at this, it was worth every penny to him.

I don’t remember if we ever got any feedback on the postmarks. Perhaps people don’t notice. Henry ALWAYS noticed postmarks. Peter brought that up yesterday. Peter remembered he mailed us a letter from St. George where he was in school, but the postmark said SLC – the postal service had consolidated by then. Henry pounced on that immediately, and wrote Peter about going off on a trip to Salt Lake City instead of staying at school, studying. Poor Peter, so innocent, he had no idea what Pop was talking about.

It’s time to close this down for now. As I’ve read through this mail tonight, I am struck, again, with the numbers of wonderful people we have been so fortunate to have in our lives.

We love you all…Bonnie and the Cook Family