then Gets Foot Stuck in It

     We were a Company of men in a goin' on pass mood. Me too. I hitched a ride with a coupla former 9th Division sergeants and headed down to the airport.
     Step back a moment or two here. Lois wasn't supposed to happen in my life. Love between us just wasn't in the cards. Or so I thought. One day about a year and a half before meetin' her at the Honolulu International Airport, I woke up outta my twenty-one year fog and found myself head over heals. Turned out she felt the same way. I won't and can't say much more than that.
     I will say Lois wrote me nearly every day throughout the eleven months we were apart (there's a thought for you. In love for a year and a half with most of it spent apart. Guess those war days got in the way of a lot of things).  It'd be the truth to say that I lived for mail call. That and not sproutin' holes through vital body parts. And readin' those letters over and over; my favorite form of literature. Now she was gettin' off a plane in a strange city out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean not knowin' what to expect.
     We'd talked on the phone a coupla days earlier. Lois said she'd cut her hair. Shorter made more sense in the hot humid tropics. I understood. Or at least thought I did. Some form of fuzzy picture musta formed in my head of what to expect.
     Now you gotta understand, the two of us have disagreed from that day forward about what I said when I first saw her. And in my defense I was a little out of sorts 'cause of the inspection, lack of money, my Article 15 bust to PFC and havin' to take a bus to Schofield that I'd have to catch somewhere in the city, exactly where I had no idea. Not to mention bein' a screwed up in the head Vietnam vet.
     So as Lois recalls it my first words were, "What the hell happened to your hair?" And that's on top of not havin' a lei to put on her shoulders 'cause I never thought of it, a fact she's never mentioned. Looked like my thoughts toward the future ended at gettin' a ride to the airport and didn't start up again 'til I headed back to duty come Monday mornin'. You might say I was mostly thinkin' of myself. Not yet into thinkin' as part of a couple.
     Like I said, the words she recalled me sayin' at the airport might not be the ones I actually said. But they probably were.