On an early morning in 1935, a 24-year-old year old Robert T. Meyer begins his day by typing a letter to a Ms. Dorothy Deex. Robert, a young grad student at this time, was so tired he nearly “used [his] typewriter as a pillow”. He daydreams in courier new about his future in academia: “… why, maybe, I will be hired to teach the course in some university. By that time, I will have written books which, whatever their titles of subject will be, will be dedicated to Dorothy Emma,,,, only the name won’t be Deex anymore.” Recovering from his “slumber-sickness”, he details his morning to this point: picking tomatoes, reading Herodotus, getting a haircut “to really get a job”, taking a bath, breaking into a cellar with his pocket-knife only to stumble into a basket of fruit, milking the cows, retrieving the scoundrel cows who had broken out of their pasture— all accomplished before breakfast. This list would be difficult to believe had I not, reader, skimmed his collection of diaries (1932-1983) where he notes a remarkably early rising almost every day for fifty years. In a 1955 CUA Alumni faculty profile, Meyer was described “[arriving] to campus in complete darkness long before most of the university was awake,” where “he would be pouring through old Irish manuscripts”.
This letter, so far, may not appear to be much of a love letter— but it becomes that. Naturally, without instigation, Meyer shifts from the to-do list of a working class man to expressing the truest profession of his love for Dorothy. Reminiscing on the previous weekend they’d spent together, Meyer recounts how “it was so lovely to be with you last Wednesday evening, those three minutes,” where not a moment feels taken for granted. The next day, he fondly writes about their “walk to the “U” together. Then, Friday, when they went on a drive to Notre Dame before returning home together. Absolutely each moment with Dorothy, by Robert Meyer’s standards, was something he 
“always wanted to remember”. Where the days are more lovely with her in it, days “parting from [Dorothy] lay like a dark cloud on a beautiful day”. Meyer, both a romantic and an academic, could not truly encompass his love for Dorothy without likening her to one of his favorite things– “when I see you now, [you have] … the refreshing smell of an old book with a new shiny binding”. And, like an old book, every page in Meyer’s mind “has [her] stamped in it”. Meyer remembers some philosophic musings from the 1883 novel Doctor Claudius by Marion Crawford which sweetly encapsulates both his smarts and his adoration for Dorothy. In this novel, Doctor Claudius says “that two souls are ready for real love when they suddenly realize that their past has been a common one for the last days, months, or years”. Well, that gave the young scholar something to think about. Robert and Dorothy had spent quite a bit of time together by this point– so much time that “it [was] really hard to think of anything, but that [Dorothy] belongs to that thought too”. What follows is a direct quote from Meyer’s letter, as no one can word something so beautiful as a soul in love: “A lot of young people think that the good times they have together, are something that is out of the common. But, the only good thing that lifted all our good times out of the common was that we were together. Together we did nothing out of the commonplace. But what was grand and beautiful about it, was that my Dorothy was with me. Dorothy, I do so believe that our life together is going to be successful. I said our life— not our lives. By this I mean that our life will be but one life blended together. Just to think that we will always be together is such a fine and wonderful thing. It is the one thing that I am really sure of. It doesn’t matter that I finish school or not, that I have millions in cash, no darling, those things are all too complicated, and if real Love depended upon them, then all life, everything, even God Himself would be a mockery. But down in everyone’s heart, deep under the cheap glitter of money, pleasure, fame and glory, is the desire of loving and being loved in return. Isn’t it wonderful how much love counts upon two? Plants need earth, animals feed, and everything requires something. But man’s soul desires something far better than mere food to live. He needs love and that which implies loving in return…”
As we wish every love story to end, so I shall leave you here. Robert and Dorothy would marry on a cold spring day in April 10, 1937. Robert and Dorothy would have two sons, two daughters; and, by the end of his life, they would have three grandchildren. They lived in a quaint house near Gaithersburg, Maryland where he lived with “his wife, her looms (she is an expert weaver), their three children (at the time of publication), his four thousand books, and his garden” (CUA Alumnus Summer 1955, p. 12). They would indeed be together forever just as he had wished as a young man. What was once a typewritten daydream, signed off with hand-written kisses, we know now came true. He would become a CUA professor, he would write several monographs, and he would soon wed Ms. Deex into Mrs. Deex-Meyer. Long after their final days on this earth, their love lives forever in this yellowed and unsuspecting letter.
The author of this blogpost could not locate any definite photos of Robert and Dorothy together. The photos here are supplementary and not held in CUA’s archives.