Sgt Roman F. Klick 36620923
HS 1393 Engr APO 709
c/o PM SF Cal
16 July 1944
Dear Aunty Clara,
Sunday
This letter should reach you either on your birthday or the day before, so this is a right on the spot greeting (I hope) --- "Happy Birthday, Aunty Clara". Now tell me how you celebrated your birthday. What presents did you get? Did you have a cake? Who was over? I hope against hope that next year will find us both celebrating those most important birthdays together. It is not just that casual wish that people make but it would be so wonderful if it could be possible next year more than anything else.
We saw the picture "The Adventures of Mark Twain" this evening with Frederick March and Alexis Smith. It was not as good a picture as I expected it would be. In fact, I was disappointed in it, yet I shouldn't have expected anything better knowing the life of Mark Twain. According to the picture, he came in with Halley's comet in 1835 and went out with it in 1910. It's true, too, for just now I looked it up in the Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Seems strange that that should happen although coincidences like that seem to happen quite frequently to men of fame. In that line, I always think of the strange deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both on the very same day of the same year --- 4th of July.
After the show, we came back up to the office and listened to a very good program on "Suspense". You haven't ever answered me whether or not you get to hear that program back home. Tonight's program was really a complicated affair but was unusual compared to ordinary plots.
Another thing about a salt water swim that is no good, is the fact that an hour or so later, when the water dries off of a person, he is caked with salt. Not literally, but with enough grains of salt to make the feel of the skin rather uncomfortable. I don't see what people rave about the salt water swims so much and how in the world Miami Beach or the rest of those beaches on the oceans can be so popular is beyond me.
Tomorrow begins another working week and it will bring the war just one more week nearer the end. That is the way I'm getting to look at time more and more. No longer do I think of really living in the present hour for the present alone but rather as time to be spent before our final release. That is the wrong way for under such a prison-like count of the minutes, hours, and days the time will only go by much slower yet that is what is happening and I can't stop myself from thinking that way. Just think, Aunty Clara, on July 15th of this year I completed the twentieth month in the Army. On that day too, Jack M was beginning the first day of his forty-first month! And of those twenty months, fourteen of them have been spent overseas.
By the way, I may have answered three letters in the last twenty-four hours but I have done nothing on putting Pat's letter into final form so that I can send it out to her. The time has come for me to do so and I want to have it in the mails before the night is over. One letter a week to that sweet young thing is my motto, whether it does any good or not. She is an interesting subject but sometimes I wish I never did begin writing letters to her again. Yet I like to receive her letters, that's the bad part about it. This love life of mine is killing me --- I think more of that gal than any other one I know, yet I don't know her well enough to tell if I could actually care for her after I did know her --- you get what I mean? I believe I have gone through that same story from time to time anyhow. She is what you might call a potential girlfriend. Another thing I'm wondering is whether she is just being patriotic or whether she likes to receive my letters and write to me? It really doesn't matter but I would also like to know just how old she is. She could be anywhere from sixteen to nineteen. O well, this aimless surmising and talking isn't getting me any place.
Did you know that Mark Twain's wife came from Elmira? That is the town Lewis is from and he was in his glory this evening.
So-long,
/s/ Roman
Roman