The Letters to the Editor Raised Me
My father read them aloud at breakfast like the real news.
My father skipped the front page the way other men skipped church.
Wars, elections, the price of oil: he would flap past all of it with the mild irritation of a man wading through advertisements to reach the actual product. The actual product was page eleven of the Harwick County Courier, the letters to the editor, and every morning of my childhood he read them aloud over breakfast in full performance, while the kettle ticked and my mother pretended not to enjoy it.
He did voices.
That was the thing. Mrs. Edna Pearl of Cavendish Road, who wrote in roughly monthly about the disgrace of the municipal flowerbeds, received a quavering aristocratic outrage that made my sister snort cereal. The man who signed himself 'Fed Up in Millbrook' got a low boil, building to the finish. A retired major who wanted the church bells silenced was delivered entirely through the nose. My father, who drove a delivery route for a bakery and to my knowledge never raised his voice at an actual human, contained a full repertory company, and it performed one show daily, at 7:15, for an audience of three.
Then came the criticism. This was the part that raised me, though nobody involved would have used those words. He would lower the paper, look at us over his glasses, and issue judgment. 'Strong opening. Lost his nerve in the second paragraph.' Or: 'She buried the best line. Never bury the best line, girls.' Or, with genuine sorrow: 'He had them, and then he got sarcastic. Sarcasm is what you do when you don't trust your argument to walk on its own.'
I thought this was what fathers were. I was eleven before I discovered that other families ate breakfast in silence or in front of a television, and I remember feeling sorry for them, the way you feel sorry for people who have never seen the sea.
School taught me writing the way you teach fire safety, as a set of procedures for avoiding disaster. Breakfast taught me writing as a contact sport played by ordinary people who cared insanely about visible things: potholes, bus routes, the maple that the council wanted down on Sheridan Street. The Courier's letter writers were butchers and retired teachers and one anonymous teenager whose letter about the skate park my father read twice and pronounced 'the best thing in the paper this year, including the paper's own writers.' I learned the shape of an argument, the cost of a wasted sentence, the way a plain fact placed at the end of a paragraph goes off like a firework. I learned it with toast in my hand.
My father taught me that ordinary people arguing about potholes were literature. You just had to read them like you believed it.
Here is what I did not learn until the spring he died, when my sister and I were emptying the house and I found the green shoebox on the top shelf of the wardrobe, under the good scarf he never wore.
Carbon copies.
Dozens of them, typed on the old Adler that lived in the spare room and that we had all assumed was for invoices. Letters to the editor of the Harwick County Courier, spanning twenty-one years, signed with names I knew like family: Fed Up in Millbrook. A Concerned Walker of Elm Street. And yes, Mrs. Edna Pearl of Cavendish Road, defender of flowerbeds, who I had once asked to meet and been told, with a perfectly straight face, that she did not receive visitors.
My father was the letters page.
Not all of it, but enough of it, for two decades, a bakery driver running a repertory company in print and then performing his own cast at breakfast, doing the voices, critiquing the arguments, telling us Edna buried her best line. He had reviewed himself, at our kitchen table, sternly, for years.
My sister sat down on the bed and laughed until she had to hold the windowsill.
I did not laugh... I was counting something.
Twenty-one years of letters, and the man had never once told us, never once taken the credit, and the arithmetic of that silence was doing something to my chest.
At the bottom of the box, under the carbons, there was one letter with no copy of a printed version attached, which for him meant rejection, the only rejection in the box.
It was dated three weeks after our mother's funeral.
It was not about potholes. It was addressed to the editor but it was about her, about how a town measures a person by committees and casseroles and never records the important data, that she hummed when she buttered bread, that she read the letters page over his shoulder and always guessed which ones he loved.
It ran long. It broke every rule he ever taught us. It buried nothing; it was all best lines.
Some editor at the Courier had, reasonably, kindly, not printed a grieving man's love letter in the space reserved for bin collection complaints.
So he had read it to no one. He had typed it, sent it, been declined, and gone back to breakfast, where two coffee cups on the table had become one cup and a habit... and he kept doing the voices for us anyway.
I write for a living now, in a small way, and people sometimes ask where I studied. I say a kitchen in Harwick County and let them think I am being charming. But it is the literal truth, and I have come to believe there are thousands of writers like him, unbylined, uncollected, holding entire towns together in comment sections and parish newsletters and letters pages. Some months ago I found a page online that gathers profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I read every one with my father's carbon copies in mind, thinking: there you all are. The repertory company is bigger than anyone knows.
Grief did strange things with the box. For a year I could not open it... then I could not close it. Eventually I did the only sensible thing a writer's child can do with an unprinted letter: I answered it. I wrote about my mother's humming, and about his silence, working through family the way he taught me, plain facts placed carefully, best lines never buried. The poem that finally came out of it was really about memory, how it is a kind of letters page too, cranky and loyal and signed with names that are all, in the end, one name.
The Courier stopped printing in 2019. The website that replaced it has a comments section, which is the same organ with the manners removed. I read it sometimes and I can hear him grading: lost his nerve, too much sarcasm, buried the lede. The standards were never about the newspaper. They were about respect, his conviction that if a stranger gives you their attention, you owe them your best sentence, even about flowerbeds. Especially about flowerbeds.
On Sunday mornings I still make two coffees. My husband thinks both are for me... and one is. The other sits across the table, next to whatever I have printed out that week, letters, poems, arguments from strangers on the internet, and I read them aloud to the empty chair, doing the voices badly, lowering the page to issue judgment.
Strong opening, Dad. You never lost your nerve.
And you buried your best line for twenty-one years.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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