Letters from My Father

June 28, 2017 By Stefanie Kalem Leave a Comment

Lots of fancy-striking (letters from my father, part 5)

It's my dad's yahrtzeit today. I don't know if that means it started last night or it's starting now, at 8:30 p.m. as the late summer day starts to stretch out its last. The app I have on my phone that tells me when it's the third day of the Jewish month of Tamuz doesn't tell me if it's erev or not. And I didn't buy a candle, anyway. They're getting harder to come by, it seems, so I buy three at a time. But now that Harv is gone, too, I go through them …

June 25, 2017 By Stefanie Kalem Leave a Comment

“Show me a man who smiles all the time and he should be in an asylum” (letters from my father, part 4)

This letter was a little hard for me to transcribe. It's from 2011, when my dad was 79, still living on his own in his condo. His health would start failing soon after, and by the time we went to South Florida a year later for his 80th birthday, I believe he had moved up to Jacksonville to live with my brother. A year after that he was diagnosed with the cancer that he would beat back twice before it killed him in 2015. That said, this letter is funny …

June 18, 2017 By Stefanie Kalem 2 Comments

Cromagnum man, moving to Sweden, and “do a nice nice” (letters from my father, part 2)

My dad disliked "Hallmark holidays" — his relationship with them fell somewhere on the spectrum between apathy and antipathy. But as I've built this series (started last week) around Father's Day — today — and his yahrtzeit, it seems wise to post a particularly meaty missive from Young Harv. This one lacks an envelope and, as my father was unlikely to put years on his letters and even less so months (he was more into days of the week in his …