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I miss the pace of snail mail. I miss the anticipation of a letter and the tactile feel of it in my hands. In a tiny never-used room at the top of my house are bins and boxes full of all the pre-email letters I’ve never been able to throw away.

Last November I added a new box to the storage room, a small Whitman’s candies box filled with the letters my father sent my mother daily from basic training. I couldn’t open any of those letters, couldn’t open them, couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t, and then, one morning last week, I did.

My father was a giant man with a hot temper who terrified me as a child. But my God, these letters. His hidden gentleness, his love and longing for my mother, are in every one of those handwritten missives. So much innocence and excitement about their upcoming wedding. In his letters I see the decency of a young, good man who had fallen in love, whose whole life was yet to come. I know him so much better now.

My Father’s Diary, by Sharon Olds

When I sit on the bed, and spring the brass
scarab legs of its locks, inside
is the stacked, shy wealth of his print.
He could not write in script, so the pages
are sturdy with the beamwork of printedness,
WENT TO LOOK AT A CAR, DAD IN A
GOOD MOOD AT DINNER, LUNCH WITH MOM,
TRIED OUT SOME RACQUETS—a life of ease,
except when he spun his father’s DeSoto on the
ice, and a young tree whirled up
to the hood, throwing up her arms—until
LOIS. PLAYED TENNIS WITH LOIS, LUNCH
WITH MOM AND LOIS, DRIVING WITH LOIS,
LONG DRIVE WITH LOIS. And then,
LOIS! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! SHE IS SO
GOOD, SO SWEET, SO GENEROUS, I HAVE
NEVER, WHAT HAVE I EVER DONE
TO DESERVE SUCH A GIRL? Between the tines
of his W’s, and liquid on the serifs, moonlight,
the self of the grown boy pouring
out, kneeling in pine-needle weave,
worshiping her. It was my father
good, it was my father grateful,
it was my father dead, who had left me
these small structures of his young brain—
he wanted me to know him, he wanted
someone to know him.​ 

​Click here for more information about the wondrous Sharon Olds. Today’s poem is from Blood, Tin, Straw, first published by Knopf in 1999. 

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