I came early. At 1:15 in the morning, to be exact. Apparently I was in such a hurry that my mother's obstetrician arrived 10 minutes too late. I was lifted into the world by a doctor whose name no one had time to ask, while my mother, awake and laughing, and my father, in mask and gown, watched the moment of my entrance. I know this to be true because my father told me so, seven years after he died.

Later that night, as my mom rested and I got accustomed to life outside the womb, my father was at home alone. Euphoric and punch-drunk with the new arrival, he eventually found himself sitting with his Smith-Corona typewriter. No one, not even he, could decipher his handwriting, so everything from television scripts (for Columbo and The Execution of Private Slovik) to the grocery list were banged out with his two index fingers on that typewriter. It was the middle of the night in Los Angeles, in 1972, and my father couldn't sleep. So he wrote. He wrote to me.

Peppered with typos and misspellings he'd later attribute to the hour (but which I now know were a constant), the letter was my introduction to the world. He talked politics — a seemingly never-ending war in Vietnam. He talked medicine — the relatively new use of Lamaze. And then, for the first time, he talked as a father. He told me he was scared, but that at the moment his work was good, he and my mother loved each other very much, and he would "try to make things happy for (me) here." He signed the letter with his new title, "Your Father," put it in an envelope, and sealed it. I wouldn't read it for 21 years.

That was how it started. Each year, on the eve of his only child's birthday, he'd write a letter. He doubled up only once — one letter for when I was two and three. The first few paragraphs usually covered the basics. He'd tell me what I ate ("You're the damnedest picky eater since your father"), keep tabs on my vocabulary ("You've grown rather fond of 'No!'"), recap my travels, and note that my blue eyes were making their slow turn to green. Then he'd talk to me. Not down or around but to me. He said he was writing to the adult I would become.

June 13, 1974
I just wanted to let you know what you were like at a certain time and place. Yet you change and grow in the flicker of an eye — one minute willful and spoiled, the next tender and deeply loving — and there's simply no way to put you down on paper. It won't hold you. You can't be fixed, or frozen, or held down so I can neatly analyze you, and I'm delighted by that. We take your picture, and write down some of your words, but a day later you're a new person — and that's as it should be.

The pile of sealed envelopes grew. I could read them whenever I wanted, a fact Dad liked to remind me of. He'd sort of wave the letter of the year in front of me before putting it to bed atop the growing stack. When I was around seven, I said I wanted to wait until I was "really old" to read them, so I picked an age as far off as I could possibly imagine: 21.

Now I wonder if he had wanted me to read them as he went, to tell him if he'd gotten it right. Was the boy I had a crush on in fifth grade indeed Alec, or had I moved on by then? And just what was the true cause of my two-day nontalking fit with my best friend, Abbie? But I didn't read them. I told him I'd wait, and that he'd have to wait, too. He didn't. My father died on March 12, 1987. I was 14.