A ROOM OF OUR OWN
Follette, Isabel B. La
A Room Of Our Own By Isabel B. La Follette WELL, Phil has been and gone, like the proverbial "breath of fresh air." 1 am sure that you were not surprised that I suspended the column for such a...
...He never saw the shabbiness of the furniture or the dust rolling under the chairs as we tried to cram two years of the past and heaven alone knows how much time in the future into a few precious days...
...I was re-impressed with the amount of effort and generosity to be required on all sides if we are to work out rationally the answer to our common problem...
...He kept repeating, "If you only knew how many times I have dreamed of sitting in this room again...
...Counting The Days My housewife friends will read between the lines that the little woman was not lolling at her ease during this period...
...You will appreciate that as I pull myself out of the abyss his departure flung me into, I am counting the days until the letters again begin arriving from the Southwest Pacific...
...1 am sure that you were not surprised that I suspended the column for such a momentous event...
...They really kept me in touch with him...
...In addition the telephone and door-bell were ringing constantly with calls from friends and from anxious wives and parents asking word or help of some sort for their loved ones...
...After a cable delivered to me by telephone at 3:20 a. m. telling me that he would see me "soon," I hung on the telephone until a long distance call came through from San Francisco, and there was Phil at the end of the line...
...Then picture me sitting in the railroad station waiting for over five hours because, as I later learned, after a 44-hour trip across the Pacific his plane from San Francisco-to Chicago made a forced landing and they thought they were "goners...
...that by dint of determination, ability, and application he had gained the confidence of his associates and has been given increasing responsibility...
...While he was here I cut out and pinned over the mantel a cartoon of a returned soldier sitting in the midst of his family as the children pounded on drums, fought over toys, pulled the cat's tail, and generally behaved "normally...
...It was a bitter disappointment for ourselves and because there were many friends he had to miss seeing...
...Then suddenly in the midst of it all came a cable from the Southwest Pacific ordering Phil back, with nearly two more weeks of his leave still to run...
...Frankly, however, we were both aware of the much-talked-of gap between' the returned soldier and civilian life, not between ourselves as individuals fortunately— we kept thanking our daily correspondence for that— but the difference produced by experience...
...The wife asks, "Is 36 hours all they gave you, dear, or is that all you asked for ?" In our case, the wheels ran rather smoothly oh the whole, and Phil was like a hen who could not bear the chickens out of his sight...
...Those men who went out into the Pacific in the early days of the war and saw their companions die for want of decent support, bear soars that I fear will never heal...
...He looks fit as a fiddle, not much grayer than when you last saw him, and exudes that enthusiasm, joy in life, and confidence in the future which we all associate with him...
...Families, even on the return of the master, still eat three times a day and have to wear clean clothes...
...I urged Phil in talking with the men out there to try to get them to distinguish between the war profiteers as well as the dealers in words that others must pay for, and people like ourselves who are doing our best to understand and act in good faith...
...Bridging The Gap One of our friends remarked that she could see that his mind was centered over in the Pacific, and I replied, "Of course," that at the age of 45 Phil had plunged off the end of the world he knew into a completely new field...
...When he walked up the steps it was like a favorite dream—unbelievable but familiar, and one of my first impressions was that the photographs sent us give a false impression of weight and age...
...Fortunately, most of the men are buoyed up by their dreams of home, and here again there is readjustment...
...But as the communiques from General MacArthur's headquarters reveal, they are moving fast out there...
...He has formed warm friendships and is most appreciative of the personal associations and of the opportunities for learning something about that vast area of the earth's surface that his work has given him...
...In trying to give him his favorite dishes I found another phenomenon: he had actually learned to eat and enjoy tomatoes and numerous other vegetables which formerly he never would touch...
...I kept pinching myself to appreciate really that the long-hoped-for day was there when I went to Chicago to meet him...
...I was wondering about that later, and suddenly realized that this was because of his letters which I have been reading in The Progressive all these past months...
...Those of you who did not see Phil will be interested in the observation of one of his friends who told me, "I didn't get a chance for more than a word with Phil but as I watched him across the room I had the strangest^., feeling that I had been following him in his experiences and thought and that we were still close...
...As his brother Bob remarked, "That's one beneficial result of the war at least...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 42
