GETTING THERE.

Late one night in the summer of 1937 or 1938, a young man at a party--a cheerful fellow named Charlie, the older brother of a girl I'd once been seeing--came into the room where I was, looking for the girl he had brought and was now ready to take home. This was in a house on Parker Point, in Blue Hill, Maine, and the smoky, pretty room was full of young people I knew or almost knew--most of them part of the Blue Hill crowd, but with enough of my sixteen- or seventeen-year-old summer friends from nearby Brooklin in among them to make me feel at ease there, along about midnight. Charlie was from East Blue Hill, not my bunch, but I knew who he was looking for. "Anne? Light of my life?" he said, looking amiably and perhaps a little drunkenly around at us. "Figuratively speaking, light of my life, where are you?" There was some laughter at this, and in time Charlie found Anne--Anne Nevin--and the two said good night and went off together, as they always did. I've forgotten the rest of the evening, but I can still hear the tone of Charlie's question, which came back to me later that night, after I'd got home. Its ease and style--what I would think of in time as cool--dazzled me; I couldn't get over it. Charlie was older, perhaps twenty. I didn't envy him or want to be him, but the moment became one of those flashes which light up the long hallway stretching down the later teens to the door that opens out into adulthood. It promised that what lay ahead for me and others my age was a new life in which we would talk to each other, we young people, in these confident and amusing tones, within an intimacy shared by men and women who were ready for each other now, and eager to find the easy sensual laughter and affectionate idioms and grasped shoulders and wrists and playful glances that would come with our main preoccupation over the next few years. Romance and sex and love itself were almost at hand, and with them the discovery of what sort of men and women we would become, to ourselves and our friends, and, up beyond that, within our marriages and new families.

"Light of my life?"--would I ever be as easy and joyful as that? The delectable question turns to a wisp as we look at it across this stretch of years. It would not occur to young sophisticates today, who are given little time for yearnings before being knocked flat by the rush and crash of experience.

Another passing question that has stuck with me came five or six years later on a narrow staircase connecting some upper stories of the imposing red roofed stone headquarters building at Lowry Field, in Colorado. College has come and gone, it is the fall of 1943, wartime, and I am an Air Force corporal, most recently an instructor in machine guns and power turrets at the Lowry Aircraft Armament School but now converted to an official historian, of all things. Somebody at the Pentagon has decided that decent records should be kept about these suddenly overcrowded tech schools that are mass-producing trained personnel to maintain the floods of new bombers and fighter planes headed for the European and Pacific theatres, and has tapped its service records for young noncoms who were college English majors and perhaps can write. On this afternoon, I am going upstairs in search of some files stored in a dusty space under the roof. Ahead of me is a civilian employee in our office, a woman named Bettye, in her middle or upper twenties, and, just behind her, my boss, Tech Sergeant Maury Caples, a cheerful, informal thirty-odd-year-old type, not long ago in the advertising business in Cincinnati. Tromp, tromp we go, we three, when Maury, a step or two below the girl, says, "Have you had your Christmas goose yet, Bettye?"

"No," says Bettye, "but I think it might be coming soon."

"Nothing like a little goose for Christmas," says Caples, as we arrive, laughing together and a little out of breath. I am a married man--I've been married for a whole year now--but the bright-eyed look, a loaded glance, these two have just exchanged is outside my experience. Are they sleeping ...