It’s Sunday, a week away from this column appearing on your screen or breakfast table. Before me is a short list (three) of column ideas to pick through so you can finish your oatmeal and get to church.

So here I am, each day sitting alone in my house overlooking the brand new city of Waterville, deep in wide, cold, windy central Maine, picking through the pile (three) of ideas.

Whilst picking, I found something from the past, the very long ago past, so long ago that the years and sunlight had turned it almost unreadable.

It’s a note to the girl I left standing at the late night train station at Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, of course, Illinois.

“Dear Barbara,” it begins, “The doctor here at Lackland AFB, in San Antonio, Texas, told me right after I endured six or seven needle shots of something, that I had something called a ‘deviated septum’ and that it’s possible that I could, just one week into my enlistment, get a medical discharge and be back in Grayslake.

“This is what he told me: ‘A deviated septum is a condition in which the nasal septum — the bone and cartilage that divide the nasal cavity of the nose in half — is significantly off center, or crooked, making it hard to breathe. You can’t fly for the Air Force, or even function in any way in the Korean War if you can’t breathe. So if it pleases you, I can put you up for a medical  discharge.’

“I was, you can imagine, this side of stunned, after a soft career in the USAF of one week, by the option to be back in Levis and sneakers, in Waukegan, Illinois with you. We sat there with the hot Texas sun burning through the window, staring at each other as he, with pencil ready, waited for my answer. For a few seconds, as I sat there, mouth hanging open, trying to breathe through my broken deviated septum. I imagined having a tall Dr. Pepper and fries with you at Baer’s Drug store by next Monday. Then I gulped, closed my eyes and answered him.

“’Doctor … I had a father who served in the Marines during the Spanish American War and in the Navy as an officer during the first World War, five brothers in the Navy, ten days after Pearl Harbor, where the oldest had just survived the attack, and the others who survived four years in the Pacific Ocean, and (I gulped) had six cousins who did the same thing.

“‘As exciting as it would be, to get out of Texas and go home, you can imagine me walking into the house in front of them and my mother, and announcing that I had a medical discharge for having a, what did you say?’ ‘Deviated septum,’ he replied. Then, this young doctor looked at me, smiled and passed me my entrance form into the United States Air Force and said, ‘Good luck in Korea, Airman.'”

When I came home almost four years later from my “Asian” tour, Barbara had married the owner of a gas station, and I and my deviated septum sit here in Waterville, Maine, writing this absolutely true, almost forgotten story.

Go to church.