Joan Dumser

I am part of a close-knit family and feel lucky that we talk to each other nearly every day. Now we email and text. Years ago, we wrote letters: one sibling would go off to college or another would marry and move away and the rest of us would write. Mom’s letters often included a clipped newspaper article; Dad’s some advice about a job or school. I saved all the letters addressed to me.

One letter stands out. I thought often about a letter from my father, but couldn’t find. It  almost didn’t matter that it was lost,I told myself, because in my head I knew exactly what it said.

Or so I thought. Memory is many things, but accuracy is not always one of them.

This letter that I recalled so clearly – the color of the stationery, his precise cursive handwriting, the time of year I received it – rested in my memory the way I wanted it to. I remembered it as intrusive and not at all helpful.

When my boyfriend, now husband,and I were planning our wedding, my dad wrote that he didn’t like the idea of our getting married by a judge. He thought a civil ceremony, without benefit of clergy, was a bad idea.

In my memory I received this letter a few weeks before our wedding date. In his neat handwriting he told me that having a clergy person marry us was important to him. He almost didn’t care which denomination, as long as clergy presided.

Finally, without actively looking for the letter, it turned up in a plastic bin of memorabilia and of course,  it was not at all what I remembered. It was written a good six months before our wedding and there’s more in it than talk about the ceremony and who should officiate.

Reading it now, 40 years after it was sent, I’m angry with myself for remembering it negatively. I don’t know if I responded to him in writing or by phone. I feel in my upper body how I more than likely answered him: my shoulders tightening, a lump rising in my throat, eyes burning with tears.

Had I lost the letter permanently my memory of it would always remain what I had made it out to be, a lecture from Dad, who didn’t understand me. Now, when I hold it in my hands, I see it for what it is: him lovingly describing our differences and his wish to span the gap.  The words are the same, but what it means to me now is so very different.

I keep his letter in my desk drawer.