I felt depressed and angry as I drove home from the
basketball game. I wasn’t sure whether I
was angrier at Jennifer for taking the letter or at myself for acting like a
foolish school boy running after a non-existent romance. But before I got back home, I realized that
there was nothing to be gained by punishing my daughter. Jennifer was mortified by what she had
done. She cried almost uncontrollably
when she gave me the letter and confessed that she had broken the trust that
had built up between us over the year since her mother had walked out on
us. Nothing more could be gained by
grounding her, which was about the only punishment I could give her that made
any sense. I mean, you can’t spank a
17-year old. Taking her phone would only
mean I couldn’t reach her, and she couldn’t call me to let me know where she
was. She needed her laptop to do her
school work, so taking that away made no sense.
I suppose I could have deprived her of watching TV, but honestly, I would
be punishing myself. I really enjoyed watching
television with her and sharing a bowl of popcorn.
No, I concluded that her embarrassment of telling me
she had taken and read my letter was punishment enough. Rightly or wrongly, I decided that any further
punishment actually would have made my daughter feel less guilty about what she
did.
The day after getting stood up at the basketball
game, I picked up the letter and re-read it searching for clues that might lead
me to the sender’s identity. I double-checked
the date of the game to be sure I hadn’t gotten it wrong, but there was no
doubt that I had gone to the right one.
I asked Jennifer, “Do you think it’s possible that
your mother sent this as some sort of cruel joke?”
“Well, I definitely smelled Wind Song on the letter,
but mom stopped using that ages ago. You
remember when I was in middle school and decided I was a fashion expert? I
talked Mom into changing perfumes to something I thought was young and
trendy. I don’t even remember what it
was. I mean, Mom can be nasty, but I
don’t think she would play that kind of trick on you.”
I tried to put it out of my mind, but the letter and
its sender kept coming back to my thoughts.
Perhaps I was the one that stood her up.
I hadn’t shown up until the game was practically over. Maybe she left early because she didn’t see
me, or maybe she just got cold feet waiting and decided to leave. It continued to bother me over the next
week. I remembered the team schedule the
students had given to me. It actually
contained a list of the members of the team, along with their height, class and
other statistics. I pored over the list to
see if any of their last names rang a bell.
They didn’t. I even pulled out my
old high school yearbook to be sure, but there were no matches. I tried to visualize being in my sophomore
English class and looked around in my mind’s eye to see who was there with
me. But I drew a total blank. It was just too many years. I thought about the last class reunion I had
attended. Unfortunately, I had skipped
the one that had occurred last fall. And
outside of a few good friends, I couldn’t remember who had attended the
previous one.
No, I decided it was a hopeless puzzle and tossed
the letter into my wastebasket.
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