1 JULY, 2021

Dear Harry,

I have decided to call you by your first name, even though I’ll admit it still feels strange to me. I would never have presumed to do so while you were still alive. But now that I myself am approaching the age you were when you left this world, I’d like to think I have earned that right and hope to be forgiven if you disagree. 

For most of my early life of course I called you Daddy. We did not abbreviate it to “Dad” when I was growing up, as is commonly the case over here in America. It was always Daddy. My mother, an inveterate hoarder of all family memorabilia, saved some of the letters I had to write to you from school (I say “had to” because they used to sit us down every Sunday morning and require us to fulfill this filial obligation) and all those letters start out, in big, uneven, childish letters, with the words “Dear Mummy and Daddy.” Most of them, from my younger years, continue with stock phrases like “I am well. How are you?” 

I think I was uncomfortable with “Daddy” even as a teenager, but certainly by the time I was a young adult, a university student, I was embarrassed by the childish sound of it. Still, it was a while before I managed to make the transition to the more formal—well, too formal—“Father”, which I always found easier to write than to use in person. I also wanted to distinguish myself from the many people, especially among your high church friends and congregants, who would address you as “Father” because that was your profession. I have a distant memory, too, that you liked “Padre” from at least one military officer, in the war years… 

But now it’s Harry, and it will be Harry from here on. That puts us on a more equal footing, and at my age I think I’ve earned the right. Perhaps it’s something that I need. I have been feeling the desire for reconnection, or rather a connection that we never quite had. It distresses me to feel that I never knew you, my own father, and I’m hoping now—so late in life!—to get to know you better by picking through old clues that in my self-absorption, as a child and a young man, I never bothered to register or recognize—clues that might have helped me know you for the man you were. 

So let's consider this the start. 

With fond regards from your son, Peter