Letter from Le Mans, March 2, 1964

Valerie apparently got interrupted in mid-sentence and never got back to her heroic task of transcription, for these pages. I was sorry to lose the record I’d made of these eventful closing days of my first mission, and I’d been hoping it would turn up. Well, today (22 November 2010), I came across a letter that I’d mailed from Le Mans on our Cyndi’s minus-eighth birthday, 2 March 1964. Bearing, upside-down (of course) the (then-) new stamp depicting Marc Chagall’s “Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel,” (which, as I learned only later, Valerie dislikes), it was mixed up with photos and other miscellaneous memorabilia, quite separately from the beribboned correspondence and the bound journal.

Away from home base, I’d enclosed it in an envelope, instead of folding and sealing it with the usual red wax; so, it differed in format from my other letters. And it contained 15 of my hand-written notebook pages (I’ve reproduced the first on the next page) in French, along with a bit of journal material in the body of the letter (at left), covering the period from 21 January through 29 February (Happy Leap Year!). The last page in the pile clearly didn’t come in this letter: it has entries dated 1 and 4 April (Happy 23rdbirthday, Valerie!), very close to my release date. So, I’m translating this material and including it here. I have also a few later pages in letter form that Valerie didn’t get copied; they follow, where they belong in the chronology. More may yet surface; if so, I’ll add it. As memory permits and pictures remind, I’ll fill the gap with sidebars, composed belatedly in the twenty-first century. I do hope the mostly-still-missing month of March turns up. There’s no way that I neglected to write up my last full month as a missionary. Since the surviving photos tend toward the touristic, if you don’t have the journal entries, you’re likely to get an inaccurate impression that we just had fun. Truth to tell, of course, we did enjoy a lot of that. Like Elder Mitton, Elder Hart was not averse to appropriate missionary tourism. Helped us appreciate French history and culture and, I believe, made better missionaries of us.

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