Father's Day

"The pages...look like the scrawlings of an hysterical octopus," Free Admission, Ilka Chase

 
One of the things I appreciate most about our Dad was that he wrote letters. He wrote letters to his mother when he was in the Navy. She kept his letters and they eventually came to me. I did not keep all of them, but I still have many of his letters to her.

In a letter he wrote in 1948 from Tangiers, Morocco: "...overlooking it all on the surrounding hillsides lies the international city of Tangiers, with its ghost-like Muslim women all veiled with only their eyes showing, Arabs dressed in robes and rags, and animals dashing about..."

Once we moved here, he wrote a letter every week and included comics that he cut out every day from the newspaper. I have many of those letters as well. He didn’t just stick the letter in an envelope and send if off.

No sir. His sense of humor came out when he addressed the envelopes. He carefully cut out bits and pieces from the tear-off pages from the Far Side desk calendar I sent him and other things he found in the catalogs they received, glued them on, and sometimes wrote funny things.

When I worked at the post office, and the weekly letter arrived, the clerk who handled the envelope would say, “Oh, here is something from Leilani’s dad,” and they would pass around the envelopes with much merriment.

Reading his letters took some effort. He was left-handed and his writing was very hard to read. I learned to decipher it.

There was lots of laughter in our home growing up, and he was the source of most of it. I cherish those memories. 

I miss him.

I am so very grateful that I had a wonderful father.