Who is this letter for?

For the longest time, the only hard copy of my father in his own words existed for me in a St. Patrick's Day card from 1982, sent from Jersey City to me in Arizona about a month before he died. The card is tall and thin, and there's a cartoon leprechaun perched on a photo of a mushroom on the front. The leprechaun's saying, Who cares if you're not 100% Irish! You can still have a happy St. Patrick's Day! You open it and the inside reads, You have a happy Halloween and you're not a pumpkin, are you? Daddy found a green marker to address the card to me and to sign it with lots o' love, really leaning into that Irish thing. On the back, in green marker again, I'll see you at Easter Time. Easter was about a month away at that point. He died before we could see him again.  A few years ago Mom gave me a stash of old letters Daddy had written to her and to us, right after we moved away to Arizona, November 1981 through March 1982. I took my time reading them. It's odd to have someone who exists only in half-memories come alive on the page — his insecurities, his hopes, his attempts to wax philosophical, his repetitive admonishments that Santa Claus would know if we were not being good. In some of the letters, it's clear where the notes to his kids stop and where the letter to his wife begins. But there's one from December 1981 that's different. He has his letter addressed to Mom, then a separate one that is addressed to me and John, which begins:

Normal enough. But then the next paragraph goes into how business has slowed, and some details about someone's mortgage, and the applications he's filled out looking for work. Then,

The letter doesn't have any transitions marked, it just turns on a dime. "The program" I assume is methadone maintenance.   The strangest parts of these letters, and the reason why they're so valuable to me right now — not just emotionally, but as pieces of the narrative puzzle I'm working on for this book — are the passages he wrote to her after she left him. I don't know what it means that this December letter doesn't differentiate between adults and kids properly, that there's no clear line of demarcation between Santa talk and "the program." He said that writing to us felt like he was just talking to us. And so the letter reads, in a way he couldn't have intended, like we're all in the living room together, and he's just turned to tell Mom about some boring grown-up thing as we kids turn our heads back to our toys. Do our desires always find a way to come out in our writing?   The photo above is Easter 1979 or 1980. I'm 2 or 3 (cropping in Tinyletter is weird, so you can't see how tall I was already — tall) and John is 5 or almost there, prematurely missing his front teeth due to an accident. We're at my paternal grandmother's house there—one of my favorite places in the whole world—in Milford, Pennsylvania, up in the Poconos. Maybe this is the Easter scene he thought of as he made plans to see us again. His kids in their shiny shoes and tiny formal outfits. His beautiful young wife beaming at his side. His mother or sister telling us all to say cheese for the camera. It's possible that he believed, right until the end, that she'd come back to him, and bring us with her.   What I'm reading, besides my father's letters: I just finished The Essex Serpent, a novel by Sarah Perry that I nominated for our book club August book without realizing how long it would take to read. An eccentric widow and her companions hunt for a menacing cryptid in rural Victorian England in a story that looks like a love triangle but turns out to be a meditation on the nature of friendship, including that between men and women. It's a slow burn but worth it, and includes plenty of epistolary passages to boot.   Other questions asked:

• Has a single good author ever owned a dog? A better question: Why does the New Yorker still publish Karl Ove Knausgaard?

• Have you watched To All the Boys I've Loved Before? This might be the perfect teen movie for 2018.

• Are Keanu and Winona really married ... in Romania? Ask the Christmas lights to confirm.

• How much does Beto O'Rourke sweat? One shirt a day doesn't seem like enough.

• What on earth is a "Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer"? Petition to get Jimmy Carter as a guest judge on Making It.