Armistice Day
November 5
Not sick! I even swallowed a pill and nothing happened.
November 7
Felt the funniest bump in my stomach. Like a bubble that popped out and popped back. What goes?
November 8
I’m constantly starved these days. An amazing gnawing goes on and on in the pit of my stomach. Spaghetti will douse it temporarily, and I sneak out into the kitchen while
Mom is busy somewhere else and gulp down practically a whole can. We had spaghetti for lunch on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Mother is beginning to look at it askance.
I’ve loaded her down with wool, knitting needles, and a yarn book with instructions for sweaters, knitted kimonos, soakers, and blankets. I hope she has fun. Then by way of reward I bundled her off to Bedford Village to an auction sale. We had a lovely time watching the bargain hunters and eating homemade cake sold by the local church ladies. I talked Mom out of spending her money on an Oriental throw rug, and made her lend it to me instead for the cutest old cradle you ever saw.
Only twenty-two dollars, an antique, dull waxed pine, carefully carved and in excellent condition, considering its age. We put the lovely thing in the back of the car and Morn cherished it all the way home.
Later I called up Peggy, who used to be a kindergarten teacher, studied child psychology, and knows all about baby-raising. The things she said could happen to Jake if I rocked him in a cradle I had no idea! There are men in jails today because their mothers rocked them in cradles.
So now the cradle is wrapped in an old blanket in the garage. I’ve got to keep Jake out of jail.
November 11 Armistice Day
It’s amazing what a child can do. The war used to seem to me like a dirty deal concocted by Hitler and Hirohito to interfere with my pleasant peaceful life in the country. To Pat it seemed his opportunity to don a suit of armor with a little gold bar on his shoulder and ride off on a shining charger to his last fling . To both of us it was just a case of having fun until those very ponderous wheels in Washington got around to Pat.
To Jake it was just nothing at all, though I privately felt that he hoped the war would wait till he had a chance to meet his father.
But I wasn’t so sure he’d have the chance. Pat’s hopeful application for enlistment had gone ignored now for four months but that blissful state couldn’t go on forever. It was just a race between those papers and the local draft board, with Jake and me squarely in the middle no matter who wins.
It’s queer how a relatively little thing like having a baby months and months off can make a close-up of a war 5,000 miles away .
Pat and I had lived for more than a year in England. When Mom came to visit us she and I went to Germany less than a month before the war began. (Pat was finishing up some business affairs in England.) We had seen a whole nation thinking, talking, acting under ruled, carefully-nurtured hysteria. I know there’s no arguing with people like that. There’s only one thing to do and I guess I know America has to help in the doing of it. But up to now it’s been something you read about. Suddenly it’s close and very real.
And I’ve got a feeling that Jake will be just old enough to do it all over again.