Jim and Terry

Jim and Terry met at a dance the day before he was drafted, in 1968. They wrote letters almost every day the whole time he was in basic and then when he went overseas. They got to know each other letter by letter over the first few months he was away, asking and answering questions, like a stop-motion conversation. A year in, he was assigned Apache gunner which he did for 40 missions before the Viet Cong shot off his right hand. In the hospital, he taught himself to write with his left, and those letters are noteworthy not only because his handwriting was suddenly like a child's but because he was on large doses of morphine that played hell with his attention span and allowed him to say more than you'd expect from a usually tight-lipped boy from the U.P. Till the day she died these letters made her blush, even when dementia left her unable to remember if they were from Jim or from Jim Junior, what with the childish handwriting and all. After the war, they got married in Ann Arbor, where he worked 40 years at inside sales in the tool and die industry. Terry raised 4 boys. When the youngest left home, she went to school and got a biology degree and worked in a lab into her 70s. They are known for their spring bulbs, maybe the nicest display of daffodils and tulips in Ann Arbor.