New York Dinners With Dad

It wasn’t until after I unpacked into my dorm that I found my dad’s letter. Not until after I’d said to my mum, as we were driving up for my second year at Barnard, “I think this summer Dad talked to Penny more than to me.”

Penny is the family beagle.

My mum didn’t laugh, ask me to please explain—she knew what I meant, and she knew it was probably true.

“You two are very different,” she offered. My dad is a businessman, in and out of the office. He generalizes. He wants to solve everything immediately. He doesn’t voice opinions, he tells you what to do. I’m the writer—I read, I think, I discuss.

For his last birthday, I bought my dad books, not books I loved, but books that I thought he would like, books that would offer an outlet from the never-ending scrolling down of e-mails, the dizzying squares of an Excel spreadsheet. All year, I watched the books sit on his nightstand—their bookmarks poking out where the Borders employee had inserted them upon checkout. I wanted to run over and rescue them by the armful from the fate of being unread.

A feeling similar, maybe, to how my Dad felt when he wrote me a stock-investing tutorial after I made money waitressing, only to watch my paychecks accumulate in my account—stagnant and untouched.

“And,” my mum’s voice heightened. “Your dad’ll be in New York for business—he’ll take you to dinner. Those go well.”

After a summer of skipping around each other’s unavoidable presences, nodding long-faced good mornings to each other, locking eyes only when our hands both reached out for the same section of the Times, I had forgotten our New York dinners.

Once my dad took me to a glass-paneled Japanese restaurant where the waiter served us a ceramic pot of soupy milk, put a lid over it, instructed us to peek underneath under no circumstances, and returned 20 minutes later to lift the lid and reveal magically perfect tofu. Another time, I met him near campus, and we went to a small place run by one waitress and one cook. My dad bonded with the cook—they had grown up in close Queens neighborhoods—and they served us, with the bill, the best chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever tasted. These are stories I tell people, stories I write in my journals, stories I like to remember.

Was it the distance? Could we only handle each other in small doses with spans of time in between? Or was it the place? In New York, we could experience enough together—the food before us, the exotically dressed couple across from us, the translucent building our table faced—that all our differences wilted under shared experience. Or was it that in New York, our roles were clearer? I emerged from that subway station my own person, ready with stories of my life here—what I was reading, places I was going, pieces I was writing—whereas, at home, I felt just as independent, but I was nonetheless navigating the same hallways I’d navigated when I was four, 10, 16, when I was clearly a child under her parents’ wings.

Later, when I was unpacking my boxes of journals, I found the letter. It slipped out from the pages of an old journal. The stationary was gilded, glossy, folded in half, and paper-clipped. The letter was dated Aug. 20, 2007, one week before I started college. Each page (there were four) had the page number penned in the corner. The letter began, “Dear Kari.”

My dad wrote down college memories and admitted how weird he felt around his new roommate. He wrote that he always found himself telling friends and business associates about me. He wrote that he was looking forward to meeting me for dinner. Actually, the letter read, “And our dinners—I can’t wait to have our dinners!!!”

I tried to imagine my dad writing a letter. Where had he been—a plane, writing on the fold-out tray stand? In bed, using one of my mum’s books as a hard surface? At work, surrounded by file folders of numbers? Was he smiling as he wrote? Frowning? Chewing his tongue as he weighed one word against another as I often did, when I wrote? I couldn’t imagine it. Not my dad, who always says, I’m no writer, who recalls only reading two novels until the time he was 20. Maybe my dad does have some writer in him, some poetry.

Poetry not necessarily in the words that he wrote, but in the image of his writing me a letter. The same kind of poetry there is in our similarly surprised faces when the lid is lifted to reveal tofu, something we both like. The kind of poetry there is when he types up a beginner’s guide to the stock market for his daughter, even if it isn’t utilized. The kind of poetry in a dad keeping a stack of novels his daughter chose on his night stand, right by his head when he sleeps, even if he has yet to read even one.

My dad and I have a lot more to learn about each other. There’s a whole strand of dinners to do this discovering, dinners where I’m not the subservient daughter, and he’s not the one-dimensional businessman-father. Dinners where we recognize each other as complicated and as our own persons. Dinners where our relationship is ever-forming and could go anywhere. My dad, after all, did end his letter with: “If you decide to be a professional writer, please consider me for your manager position.”

The author is a Barnard College sophomore.