In the mid-nineties, I sometimes visited a Berkeley junkyard that doubled as a thrift shop. The outside area was full of collections of old windows, bicycles, pastel-colored toilets, and other random parts of houses that had been deemed salvageable. Inside the warehouse, there lived a collection of random junk that ranged from dusty encyclopedias to boxes of unplayable black 45s. There was a particular shelf that was cluttered with piles of papers and photographs, postcards and letters. One day I purchased some of these mementos, being a person who loved the art of the letter and still do.

I still have one of these folded sheaves of handwritten letters. They compose the correspondence of a single month — May 1945 — from a kid in the Navy called George, to his sweetheart Janie. He wrote to her almost daily. His handwriting is nice, though his spelling is imperfect, and he writes in a conversational style, slipping often into broad, sentimental declarations of love.

I have wondered whatever became of the two of them. Did they marry? Someone saved these letters for fifty years. Then they ended up in a Berkeley junk shop. Did their children drop them off one day in a box, after cleaning out the garage? Are there grandchildren somewhere who wouldn’t mind having these letters? I searched the internet, finding two separate persons by this exact name, one born in 1917, the other in 1926. I have no idea which one wrote the letters I have, though his voice is closer to that of a 19-year-old sailor.

What a voyage these artifacts made, from a battleship near the end of the Second World War, to a plastic bin in my own closet. How unlikely for love letters to have ended up for sale for a few dollars, to a stranger.