MAY 9th, 2019

Dear Daddy–

I still find them occasionally, as I clean up a corner in the house, or go through a box of papers. Most of them try hard to look like official communications from some government office, or legal documents from an attorney. They often have addresses in New York– God only knows how often I’ve looked up those addresses on Google Maps, to see what was actually there!–and they often have checks inside them, made out for obscenely large amounts.

It’s time to talk about them. It’s time to talk about the scams.

April 10, 2019

Dear Daddy–

It’s been another busy week–or how many days?–since I wrote last. Taxes still loom over me. I have to delay paying until my next paychecks come tomorrow, and then I have to scrape together enough money to keep my credit card from maxing out completely. I really hate that I’ve got a maxed-out card. I don’t think I’ve ever had one. But I didn’t quite expect a $9,000 tax liability. And Lazarus still needs medical care, even though he’s healthy for an old man. Two visits this month for antibiotics to kick a UTI–you can relate!–and he needs a lump removed from his neck. Not helping lower that debt.

I own your truck now. Did I tell you that? Hard to remember. I do feel age creeping into my brain. It’s hard to know what I’ve said and what I haven’t, and I’m often asking people to repeat themselves, not because I’m hard of hearing, but because I just can’t process what they’ve said to me. I need to hear it again. Anyway, I just loaded up your truck with about a quarter of the waste wood from my old deck. I think I’ll hold onto it for a while, as some of it came in handy building Mother’s ramp. I’m going to drive it over and store it behind your garage, though.

March 5, 2020

Dear Daddy—

When did I last write? I don’t know. Months. Not good months. No one is to blame. Life gets too busy to handle. One person’s anxieties clash with another person’s anxieties. Changing life situations catch us by surprise and make the ground beneath our feet seem unstable. We take it out on each other.

There has been little to no progress on the house since I last wrote. I take that back. Christian has organized the tools. Ethan and Christian have cleaned up the basement, actually trying to reclaim it as usable space. Ethan unearthed two lab cabinets that you have bought decades ago. I remember carrying them into the room I think of as the “lab” room. It contains the water tank, the darkroom, the electrical panels and phone interface. It also has your workbench that you built in the 1960s with your own hands. It has the bloody (literally, as I recall) steel lab bench with the transite top that we bought from Sacred Heart Hospital. And it has lots, and lots and lots of oscilloscopes. And one last b-52 gunsite. Oh, and, yes, one more missile.

April 2, 2019

Dear Daddy–

So much has happened in the last six weeks, it’s been hard to keep up. Mother was in the hospital… Jim Heller died… Christian got a car… Tax season hit…

I already talked about Jim. That was a blow, and really got me thinking about my career and what I want out of it. Still thinking, so I won’t say a lot about that.

Mother’s hospital visit and aftermath… I wrote about her homecoming already. Since she’s been home, things have been stable, but our lives have changed a bit. Mother’s more forgetful than she was before. A severe urinary tract infection can do that to someone who’s 92 years old. They affect the brain, sometimes permanently. Mother is very aware of her short-term memory loss, and very frustrated by it. She asked me the other day why she had lost the ability to focus on something like doing her taxes. “I always did our taxes,” she said. “Your Daddy never did. Why can’t I do them anymore? I try, and it just frustrates me. I get exhausted just looking at them.”

I explained to her that the human short-term memory is like a table. When you’re young, the tabletop is big enough to hold, say, three rows of five index cards. Everything you can write on those cards, you can think about, all at the same time. As we get older, the available space shrinks–the tabletop has to hold our pills and our eyeglasses and our hearing aids. And photos of our grandchildren and the parents we lost a few years ago. After a while, maybe there’s only room for three index cards, and that’s all you can think about at once. If it takes seven index cards worth of information to do your taxes, well, you don’t have space for that anymore. You need to put them on another table, namely someone else’s brain.

March 6, 2019

Dear Daddy–

A friend asked me recently, “You’re under a lot of stress, right? Like, all the time?”

I had to say, “Yes.”

I am under a lot of stress all the time. Maybe it’s been that way my whole life. Maybe I do it to myself. I used to ask Ethan, when he was little, “What’s the going rate on trouble?” To which he would respond with a blank look in his little, blue eyes. And then I would explain, “Because you’re borrowing a lot of it.”

My little future economist would not then ask me to explain usury, because, of course, he knew it inside-out by the age of two. He would, however, ask me what it meant to “borrow trouble.” It’s a high art form for a lot of us, imagining all that can go wrong, stressing over it, planning for how we’ll handle it. It’s the natural state of a lot of science fiction writers, of which group I am (quite) nominally a member. It can be a valuable skill, anticipating what could go wrong, so you can prevent it from doing so. It can also drive you batty.

I also used to tell Ethan the tale of the three Sillies, the fairy tale about the man who went out in the world to see if he could find three examples of people stupider than his fiance and future in-laws. The deal was that, if he found those three, he would marry into a family of idiots.