18 years, 4 months and 24 days worth of emails

Let me tell you a story about my dad on his 70th birthday.

Lately: I was supposed to be in New Orleans this weekend. Nature had other ideas. The trip was for my dad’s birthday, which bring’s me to this week’s essay:

18 years, 4 months and 24 days worth of emails

The first email landed in my inbox 6,725 days ago — that’s 18 years, four months and 28 days. Very nearly half my life.

They reached me in two dorm rooms, two creaky Georgetown houses and a an apartment in a college town in Missouri. They came to a sublease in the East Village, a short-term rental in Dallas, a dorm on Columbia’s campus. There was an apartment in Minneapolis with two walls of windows, another in L.A. that walked out to a pool, another in a tall building in Denver right by the ballpark. Then I bought a house a few miles south, a condo in Lincoln Park in Chicago, a different condo in West Town. The emails kept coming to my brother’s house in New Orleans as covid dawned, to a tiny rental in D.C. and now finally here, to the house my husband and I bought on Capitol Hill three springs ago.

I tell people sometimes, casually: Oh, yeah, my dad has emailed me every day since I left for college. But put like that, stretched across all those dorm rooms and apartments and houses and cities, it’s staggering. Accounting for pauses over college breaks and holidays and sporadic visits, I’m guessing the tally of notes is well over 6,000 by now. They land in my inbox every morning, usually around 6 o’clock Central Time. The subject line is always the date, and below, my dad gives a quick accounting of what he’s been up to, what he has planned. He birdied the ninth hole. His sick patient at the hospital is doing better. The cat’s on new medicine, his car’s in the shop, he’s excited for his yearly trip to Palm Springs. I always answer with the same type of updates: quick, quotidian, sometimes a bit more cheerful than I’m actually feeling. I want him to feel like he knows the rhythms of my life so many miles away. I want him to know I’m okay.

I’m sharing this now because my dad turns 70 today. Eighteen years, four months and 28 days ago, that might’ve sounded old — but today, he seems like the same man he was then, the same man he’s always been. He is the steadiest person I’ve ever met. He likes simple things: walking 18 holes of golf and swimming laps and listening to podcasts about the Byzantine Empire. He drives a 2009 Honda Civic that’s in pristine shape — “It still works!” he’ll tell anyone who asks why he hasn’t bought something new — and his greatest vice is a daily Big Gulp of Diet Coke. He works 60 hours in a slow week, saving sick patients’ lives. His bedside manner is mind-boggling. The nurses he works with adore him.

I’ve been thinking lately about all the different versions of me who’s opened those emails: the homesick 18-year-old, the career-focused 24-year-old, the heartbroken 31-year-old, the 36-year-old negotiating a new career path. I’m grateful each one of them kept answering, kept the streak alive. Way back in 2006, I could never have imagined we’d still be emailing; I thought it was a college thing, then a grad school thing — and then I stopped thinking about it at all. Emailing became a reflex, like brushing my teeth or making coffee. It’s support I don’t realize how much I need, because I’ve never gone without it.

A couple years ago, I started filing the emails away in a special folder instead of deleting them every time I tidied my inbox. Here, then, is the record of so many hundreds of early mornings: plans, thoughts, complaints, weather. A million mundane thoughts in sans serif font, typos, bleary eyes staring at a 6 a.m. screen. I wish I’d begun saving his notes sooner, but there will be more to collect — more changes and so much that will always be the same. The sentences will be quick and the emotion will be spare and the sum total of it all will never cease to knock me over.

I’m with my dad today in St. Louis, so I won’t get an email. But now he has, from me. Happy birthday, Tom, and let’s cheers our Diet Cokes to 6,000 more.