Letters to My Children

Why here? Why now? Firstly, because the second of my children—my girl—just turned eighteen and thereby earned the right to her letters. (The first of my children—my boy—did the same not quite three years ago and received his nineteen letters (eighteen birthday letters plus one letter written on his day of birth) on his eighteenth birthday. She starts college in the fall; he returns to college for his senior year at the same time. They're both responsible for paying their own way through. As you no doubt know, this ain't no easy task for parents, much less for young adults. They agreed to the publication of these otherwise private letters as a possible way to pay their room, board and tuition and thereby step out into the world without having to outrun an avalanche of incendiary debt. Only time will tell whether our collective wishes can be met.

But we're not now looking for a hand-out—or with any of our six hands held out for any kind of charity. I started this project the evening of my son's birth—on November 25, 1991—and started with a plan. I don't remember the weather or temperature. I remember only a Pentel Rolling Writer ™ and a blank piece of paper. As both mother and son slept comfortably in the Women's Lying-in Hospital on Amsterdam Avenue just across from the Columbia University campus, I lay—or rather sat—comfortably at home in Astoria, Queens. All was right with the world—except for those preemies lying in crack-induced agony in incubators the attending nurse, Gladys Quick, had so wisely (because tragic-comically) given me a tour of before I left the hospital.

I never forgot them—and I never forgot Gladys. We've been in touch every year since then at Christmas: she from her Harlem residence; I, from wherever the four winds might've blown me. My son and I will see Gladys for the first time after almost twenty-one years in the next couple of weeks, and she'll be the first recipient of these letters: a gift of pen and pulp to her in return for the indelible visual memory she once gave me.