I have told this story many times since I had cleaned out Mom’s house and found the shoebox in the attic a week after she died in 1997.

I just never know how to make sense of it. I thought of writing a novel about it and even had finished a few chapters, but life got in the way and there it sat inside my laptop going nowhere.

I thought of a short story, much less work than a novel that might take years.

And yet, I wanted to see it all played out before my eyes so I decided to write a play in hopes I could watch my father come to life on a stage, to feel his presence, something I had felt little of while growing up in a Cape Cod house he built on Desna Street in Piscataway, New Jersey, with his own hands. The play is still a work in progress, but I will finish it to acknowledge the man who helped bring me into this world.

On the day I found the shoebox, I was taking one last look around the house before turning the keys over to the new owner.

When I checked the attic again, my eyes were drawn to a floor space where my father had placed an American Flyer train set that never came out of the box and never circled a single Christmas tree and was finally sold 20 years after he died when Mom needed extra cash to help make the mortgage payment.

I looked to my left and the dust covered shoebox lay under a rafter.

Inside were 22 small envelopes, yellowed with age. Each was postmarked in 1939 with Thomas Jefferson imprinted upon a 3-cent stamp.

They were addressed to Miss Verna Reshetar from Hazleton. This was my mother’s maiden last name before she married my father in 1941. The return address was Lowell, Massachusetts.

I never knew my father to be healthy. He had been stricken with restless legs, bleeding ulcers, and emphysema so debilitating that he could not be regularly employed. We were very poor.

I was a paperboy. If I wanted anything, I had to pay for it myself. Besides my mother ironing wealthy people’s clothes and cleaning their houses, we lived on welfare and food stamps most of the time.

We were a broken family.

Angry arguments between my mother and father, fueled by alcohol on Saturday nights that lasted way past midnight had me curling my pillow over my 11-year-old ears while I lay in bed.

My father was never of importance to me. He was just a man passing by in the hallway when I was walking toward the kitchen.

He yelled at me for coming home late one night and I snapped, “Oh, is that you who’s pretending to be my father?”

He died after having awakened from a 26-day coma in 1970 at the age of 52 when I was 19 and about to begin my freshman year at Rutgers University. During the three-day viewing before the funeral, I stared at him in the open casket asking myself, “Who is this man?”

Twenty-seven years later, I found out who he had wanted to be when I opened the shoebox and read one of his letters dated Nov. 19, 1939, to my mother to be.

“Darling of mine,

I’m thinking of you so much that I can hardly remember that today is my birthday. Sweetheart, while I still am so sad from missing you, I sit at the table and dream of you with my eyes wide open. Mrs. Shuba made me supper and a cake and put 22 candles on top. As soon as I blew out the candles, I thought what a lucky guy I’m going to be when you become my wife and we can start a family.

I look around the table for you, but of course, you’re not here. We move a little closer to the day when I can come to you and have you all to myself. I will write again one day next week.

Stay as sweet as you are,

Your loving future husband,

Nick

Every letter in the shoebox said the same thing with his pledge of love to his soon to be bride.

I was shocked to say the least. He was not that man I remember from our house on Desna Street where he never showed an ounce of affection for Mom or for me. How could he be the man in the shoebox, filled with love for her, his “darling of mine”?

His letters defined a man with hopes and dreams for a good life and a wonderful family, dreams that after they married had drifted too far away from his grasp and had blackened into the darkest of nightmares.

I saw my father cry once. He had come home from the hospital after Mom suffered a heart attack when she was just 43 years old. He leaned upon a kitchen chair and wept like a little child and I was ashamed of him. I was taught to believe that no man should ever cry about anything.

Now I have a totally different understanding of that moment. All the failure and misery and stress that nearly killed Mom was the final breaking point of the life he had dreamed having with her only to see it crushed by life’s misfortunes. My disdain for him has evolved into forgiveness and compassion.

I believe my father’s spirit had guided me back into the attic 27 years ago. Before that, he was just a guy living in our house, but ever since that day of discovery, he’s been the man in the shoebox to me.

I love you, Dad.

Happy Father’s Day.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com