Keepsakes Gonna Keep

I dumped about forty years of work in the garbage bin yesterday. Research reports, community plans, funding proposals, evaluations, some of them with some pretty great graphics and spiffy spiral binding. Writing that just now I had a twinge. I’d run out and retrieve it all but it’s raining hard. Plus, there’re likely five bags of passers-by dogs’ poop on the top of the heap. Appropriate.

Under all the professional detritus were the cleverly crammed envelopes of dozens of unrelated photos of kids, newspaper clippings about the reports that were already in the dumper, and letters. Letters from my older daughter from her time away at college and then in the U.K., Spain, and New York. I kept them all, even one that is a thin grey fading fax, especially that one. Letters from my sister telling me how generous and helpful I was, yes, the same one who hasn’t spoken to me in decades. Ah. History.

And then there was this letter from my dad.

He wrote to me a few days after he and my mother had come to Milwaukee for my graduation from UWM forty years ago. Here is the letter.

There are three reasons why I love this letter. First, I was 38 when I received it and this was the first time he’d ever said anything about being proud of me. Second, he forgot his beige golf jacket which he needed me to send back because he couldn’t wear his blue golf jacket with green pants. And third, it has a bunch of typos in it which was weird for him since he could type, as he would say like a bat out of hell, but he sent it anyway, I think because he was so eager to wear his green pants golfing. There was also the part about buying bushes that appeared to be nearly dead but were cheap, so what the hey. The whole letter is so him.

What luck to find it.

Whoever is here after I’m gone will have to deal with this letter. Right now, I’m putting it back in the stack. Keepsakes gonna keep.