Father’s Day letters

On Father’s Day I decided to send a couple of letters to each of my daughters. They will be dated on the twins 15th birthday, 2008.

They are to be opened in 2018, and 2028. I don’t know yet how to hold and send, but there is time to figure that out.

I want the girls to remember, then, the details of today that will otherwise fade. Through their father’s eyes, his joy and worry winding like rivulets down through time, contained within the banks of their lives.

A recall of their wonder and laughter at the smooth-skinned tiny rubber boa snake that was wrapped around a stick, thinking it was hidden because it had stuck its head in a crack. My hope that there was a life lesson there. When I showed them that he thought he was safe in a cave, with most of him outside, they laughed out loud.

When the girls open those letters decades from now, I want to give them a fresher memory about who they were. Hopefully this will give them a better understanding of who they have become.

Will they remember the effort to carry a mattress from one room to the other when their best friend came for a sleep-over? That effort may be important in a future when they think they are too tired to get off the couch.

If we are all at any moment the summation of who we have been, today is a too thin slice of time. We stack these slices, our fears and our joys, days and nights banding like alternating colors, and after a while the pile becomes so high that we can’t go back and see with clarity this day, a day that was unremarkable except for the fact that it was the present then, with fewer bumps and scars and tools and certificates pasted to the outside.

At some point in their future I want the past to come alive. I want to count the number of holes we put in the wall playing darts when we missed the whole board. I want them to remember that some dart holes in the wall were absolutely fine at one point in their lives, that fear of consequence was not the only principal of living.

I imagine them opening the envelopes like they were letters from a friend. But instead of some far away place, the letters were posted from a far away hour, not distant in miles or memory but enveloping them now, whenever that is, tying us together in the timelessness of love.