Time Capsule: January 16, 1968

And tomorrow I will be thirty.

My goodness, you will say, life is short. Nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes would say. I am going back to strife-rent USA Friday [January 19] on the Queen Elizabeth and dock on January 24 if LBJ hasn't declared an embargo or head tax on all goods coming into the country. Or mined the harbor. I can hear him: "In the innerests [sic] of peace, yore president has mined New York harbor, Gallipoli, the Dardanelles, and the Atlantic generally." Depression and a desire to go home and fight Johnson (see you in jail) combine to send me back...Tomorrow I'll be in London, and Thursday if it isn't raining I'll go peer at Canterbury and see if the hooly [sic] blisful martir is there.
Yours in fog, John Bellairs

(From a letter dated January 16, 1968, sent at the conclusion of his six month stay in England.)

And tomorrow he would have been seventy.

Cheers, John.