"Two Letters"

                                                                      “Two Letters”
         
         “My dad could beat up your dad!”  I've heard such proclamations several times as a boy and made similar ones myself.  The complex intricacies of the father-son relationship is perhaps best left to Freudian psychologists and their endless volumes of speculative analysis, I certainly don't fully understand it.  However, I am a son and  under the auspices of some instinctual desire I will always be bound by a need  to understand the man that is my father.  This compulsion is surely rooted in the need to understand myself for despite my individuality, my unique collective experiences and sociological circumstances, my soul, I am my father's son.  And who is my father?  He is a man of contradictions.  Patient and brash, intelligent and thoughtful yet  stubborn.  Strong, such as every son sees their dad.  Weak, such as every son one day realizes their superman is human.  I have a lot of good and bad memories to view him through, like tinted lenses.  As he would tell me, “looking through memory is like looking through clouded waters,” the older they are the muddier the water, the more obstructed the view.  But I have something, an interesting coincidence if there is such a thing.  I have two letters my dad wrote to two different teachers from different years and for starkly different reasons. They sum up his paradoxical nature better than I ever could and have given me a rare window into my fathers soul that most sons are never fortunate enough to see.

         I hated my fourth grade teacher.  She had it out for me, she embarrassed and harassed me at every opportunity.  The woman- whose name is immaterial- was a tyrant, if only in the muddied waters of my memory and I dreaded going to her class every singular day.  We had been working on a journal for a week or so, some rather inane project entitled “Power Writing.”  We were to keep  this journal and turn it in at the end of the two weeks.  My teacher whose name fortuitously rhymed with “Grendel,” the monster from Beowulf, harshly and consistently emphasized the importance of this project and  even felt it necessary to warn me specifically “not to screw it up,” compounding my anxiety about the assignment. To be fair I was a dreadful student with a proven history of screw-ups. I got up early for school (a chore I disdain to this day) on the morning the project was due and to my severe dismay couldn't find my ragged, chicken-scratch journal.  I tore my room apart growing increasingly panic-stricken at the doom that would await me when that wretched woman smote me for my failure.  She would publicly humiliate me as per her usual MO and probably fail me.  The other kids would laugh at me, horns growing out of their heads, pointing and cackling maniacally as she announced to the world I would be held back. As these thoughts raced through my head and the futility of finding my missing journal became apparent I simply sat down on my bedroom floor and started sobbing. 

         On this particular morning my mom had already left for work and my dad was grudgingly left responsible for getting me on the bus clothed and in possession of a lunch, my backpack and all the other necessary accouterments.  As one may imagine, I was not a very well organized boy so this task was more daunting than it may seem.  It was time to go and my old man had noticed with annoyance that I wasn't ready and had for some ridiculous reason cast myself to the ground in a state of hysteria.  Bothered at first he picked me up (probably with one hand as he truly was a large and rather intimating figure) and asked me what the hell the matter was.  In what was most likely a broken litany of barely distinguishable statements punctuated by sobs, I related to him that my teacher was in fact Lucifer and was about to spit and roast me for the sole purpose of propagating pain and evil in our earthly realm.  I expected him to disregard my nonsense and send my on my way but to my surprise he was actually moved by how distressed I was.  In fact, he was aware of my previous complaints about my teacher and it was my dad who came up with the sobriquet “Grendel,” which I found delightful.  Mercifully, he removed the focus of his wrath-beam from my babbling continence and placed it on the Grendel.  He wanted to know just how it was that a children's teacher could inspire such fear and anxiety in a boy, especially a boy that was accustomed to living with him.  The man wasn't abusive but he was fully capable of making me crap my pants with one burning look and even he had never reduced me to the pathetic sobbing visage I had become.  Seeing that my dad was coming around to my side I started calming down and explaining my fears to him.  Incredibly, I succeed in convincing him that my instructor really was picking on me and he came up with a plan.  Forget the bus! I would get myself together, he would drive me to school himself and furthermore he would come inside with me, escort me to my classroom and explain to the teacher for me that I had lost my journal and would make it up by whatever means necessary.  I found the prospect of him marching into my classroom in front of all my peers and fighting my battle for me as I watched cowering from behind his leg thoroughly unpalatable.  I shared my concern with him and he apparently saw the logic of it and decided on a different coarse of action; he would write her a letter. 

         My dad blew the dust off our outdated computer and started typing away with his two index fingers on one of those old DOS programs where the background is black and all the words green.  I furtively tried to sneak a peak at what he was writing but he admonished me to wait in my room.  After a suspenseful half an hour or so he came in with a sealed envelope and handed to it to me.  I remember his words quite vividly.
         “Marty, don't even think about opening this letter.  If you do, I'll know.  Just go to class and hand it to your teacher.  Tell her it's from your dad and that'll be the end of it, understand?”  I nodded stupidly.  Somehow I was convinced he would know if I opened it, being susceptible at that age to a superstitious belief in his unnatural powers.  He said one last thing as he put his strong calloused (and always unusually warm) hand on my shoulder. 
         “Trust me.” 

         He drove me to school about an hour late without another word.  As I walked to class I felt the letter burning in my hands, leaving behind third degree scars.  What could it say?  Would it embarrass me, cause her to hate me more than ever?  The dreaded moment came and I walked into the Grendel's lair.  The first thing out of that nefarious womans maw was “Where's your Power Journal?” 
         I just stepped forward and handed her the letter saying something awkward like, “My dad says I'm supposed to give you this.”  Grendel snatched the envelope out of my hands and ripped it open with her talons. With her glasses hanging at the precipitous edge of her villainous nose she started to read with a look of consternation at the sheer inconvenience of such a preposterous request.  But as she read I swear to you her look became rather more grave, which until then I didn't think possible.  I also give you my equitable word that the color literally drained out of her face as her eyes continued to scan the mysterious paper.  She finished it, quickly opened a drawer in her desk, jammed the letter in and slammed it shut.  For a moment the Grendel just stared ahead of her at nothing, if I didn't know better I'd say she looked frightened. Then she turned to me. 
         “Don't you worry about the journal Marty,” she said to my astonishment.  “You can just re-do it and turn it in whenever you finish, okay?  Why don't you go sit down.”  She didn't pick on me for the rest of the year.  To this day I don't know what my father had written.

         The second letter came first.  That is, a year earlier in third grade we had (who could guess) another  inane assignment.  We all had to ask our parents to write a letter to the class about us and subsequently our teacher would read them all out loud.  I found this a little too personal for my liking but what the hell I didn't have to do any real work.  Like the other 90% of the class I assumed it would be my mother doing the writing but when I blithely gave her the assignment at the dinner table my dad slapped his fork on his plate with an intended clank and declared that he would opt for this task.  This was an unexpected turn of events but I couldn't see the harm, in fact it would be enlightening to see what this mysterious figure who was my father had to say about his son.  Probably something about how I have never managed to clean a dish or keep my room clean.  All true by the way.
         “When is it due?” he asked me, resuming meal consumption.
         “Tomorrow,” I said resuming my own.          
         “You little shit,” he said between mouthfuls.

         I can't tell you too much about the letter, in fact I can't remember it all that well.  I remember that like my future fourth grade teacher my current teacher of a more kindly disposition displayed a look of surprise when she opened my letter. I was the only child in the class whose dad had written one.  As she read the eloquently worded document that described me as the best thing my dad had ever done, his reason for being, the apple of his eye, I was in a kind of state of shock.  She continued relating the letter as best she could before she started choking up.  The delicate words I didn't know my dad had in his vocabulary flowed past me and I had this strange feeling that my teacher and the other kids had vanished and I was sitting alone at my desk. It felt like it was just me and him in that room and I knew that's how he intended it to be.  Right around the part where I was being touted as all the best things my father ever had in himself, right before the part where he said he wished more than anything to give me the kind of childhood and father he never had, my teacher started full blown crying.  The rest of the class had meanwhile turned around and was staring at me as I sat dumbfounded in the eerily silent room. 
         I've since lost that letter, and I never got the other one back from Grendel.  But I wasn't kidding when I said that I “had” them.  I have them.  I'll always have them.