Cpl Roman F. Klick 36620923
Co A 353rd Engrs APO 502
c/o PM San Francisco Calif
22 February 1944

I've just come back from another hilarious picture, "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." It was a comedy riot and Mersing and I laughed all the way thru it. I was glad I went in spite of the fact that by going it put a kink into my program.

Do you realize that by tomorrow evening I had intended to have my lesson number three completed in addition to having my entire correspondence caught up with? Well, it is a cinch that neither of those things will be completed by tomorrow and probably not for the next day or even the day after that.

I'm very tired for home again. A soldier always wants to go home but there are times in which you can bear up under it and other times when you are actually tired and fatigued for wanting to be home. Sometimes I say to myself that I wouldn't care if I was a complete wreck and had to spend the rest of my life in bed if only I could be home once again. Then, at other times, I say that by adding day upon day the war itself will soon be finished and we can all go home once again for keeps.

Just think, Aunty Clara, it won't be so many months more and we will have been overseas a complete year. Sure there are a lot of fellows who have been over that long and some a lot longer than that but that doesn't make it seem any shorter to the individual soldier.

There are things which I want to do again like going off to Stanley's candy store and buying a few ice cream cones to bring back and eat on the back porch on a warm summer night. Or go once again into Lenke's Ice Cream parlor and order a cherry-flavored lime rickey. And get dressed up in a suit in the morning and then walk down to the 56th Avenue "L" station to go to work. Or have my own desk again at Rathborne, Hair and Ridgway Company. And put up a new pulley line for you on the back porch. Or even take down the ashes on a brisk autumn day (even though I never did like to do that when I was home).

I'd like to have a double chocolate egg nog for a nightcap along with a huge piece of sponge cake or chocolate cake with coffee frosting. Or ride down to the Karmel Korn shop next to the Berwyn Theater and bring back a big box of Karmel Korn on a Sunday evening so that we could sit thru Jack Benny, One Man's Family and all the rest of the programs while munching away on the stuff. I'd like to spend another of our famous Saturday nights with such guests as Senor Gonzalez, the Infiestas, the Millers, the Reeds et al.

I'd like to go to the library and pick out a good book to read. I'd like to walk along the lakefront. Or take a trip out to George Prokopec's house. Or go play a game of golf with Jerry at Columbus Park on a Saturday afternoon after coming home from work and managing to gulp down a glass of milk, a half a sandwich of bread and frankfurters and a piece of coffee cake before leaving the house dressed in brown pants, old shoes, blue sport shirt and sun glasses.

I want to be able to answer the telephone when it rings or go down for the mail after the mailman has slammed shut the front door. Do we still get those Polish papers? They will still be coming after we are all dead and gone. I want to spend a morning playing records on the Victrola and an evening studying some lessons in the dining room while coming into the kitchen every once in the while to eat up the chocolate and vanilla cookies you just took out of the oven.

Then there will be the times when we will go visiting and ride the "L" and street cars just like always and talk, talk, talk all the way to where ever we are going and then talk all the way back home. We will transfer on Crawford Avenue "L" station or wait for the "Ls" in the Loop or even waiting for a connecting suburban car. Those are the things I miss and thoughts like that run thru my mind when I get homesick.

So-long,   /s/ Roman   Roman