The phone message crackles with distance and the whir of passing cars. But I can still hear my father’s voice, a note of concern mixed with curiosity, on a voice mail he left me five years ago.
“Mah baby, it’s your big Daddy,” it begins. “Just checking on you.” My dad, a Louisiana native, says this with a rich Cajun accent that makes me smile every time I listen.
I’ve been saving this voice mail over and over again since one August day in 2005. I always listen to these first few words before I press 9 to save it.
I’ve also kept one of his first e-mails to me and my siblings, from New Year’s Eve 1999: “Mom and I arose at 3:45 a.m. to watch the first New Year (Pacific Islands) and thought of all of you,” it reads, and then describes how he hoped we would all be closer in the new decade.
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When you live 1,000 miles away from your family, e-mails and phone messages become some of the strongest ties that bind you, the reminders of who you are — or were — and where you came from. I find myself repeatedly saving birthday voice mails and filing away picture-laden e-mails. But how much electronic memorabilia can, or should, you really save? And how do you judge what to keep?
In the early days of family e-mails, my father used to send lovely messages like the one above, filled with sentimentality and well-wishes, updates on his and my mom’s travels and suggestions for our next family vacation. But as the years have gone by, his personal e-mails have slackened, replaced by impersonal e-mail forwards: messages about Bill Clinton’s mistakes, photos of kittens trapped in boxes, lists of reasons not to get drunk.
I have never told my dad, but I hate e-mail forwards. I consider them the dregs of electronic correspondence, like the chain letters I received by mail as a girl. Whenever someone sends me an e-mail that instructs me to pass it along to the “women in your life (who) make a difference!,” I delete instead. Thankfully, few people forward anymore, a fact I attribute to social networking sites that allow people to repost the same sorts of inane messages without even having to create an e-mail list.
These days, my dad is my only consistent source of forwards. Although I have ignored the messages for years, he still sends them. I have never known why.
“What, you don’t like them?” he said by telephone from Texas, where he was shopping at a flea market with my mother. The confused note in his voice made me feel guilty for asking. “I send them ’cause I’m thinking you would like them. I send the pretty pictures. I don’t send the dirty ones.”
Truth is, I don’t even know if I’d like them or not. I delete many of his forwards without reading them. And for this, I feel especially guilty.
My dad has cancer. While it’s been in remission, we had a harrowing summer two years ago when he spent weeks in the hospital and the outlook seemed especially grim. That close call made me even more mindful of my correspondence with my dad. Do I delete the voice mail asking me about the weather? What about this e-mail forward with images of pretty sunsets? Each delete sparks a pang of regret, knowing there will be one day when the messages stop coming.
Since his illness, I have tried to mentally collect all of his quirks, even the ones that annoy me. I categorize his stories, his bad jokes, his favorite sayings, adding new anecdotes with each visit home. The way he pinches my arm and pulls me in close when he talks, like he’s going to tell me a secret. “You know, you gotta kiss a lotta frogs before you find a prince,” he says. Or when I lose my keys: “You’ll always find them in the last place you look.” Now I save all of his e-mails, even the forwards, in a folder marked, “Dad.”
And every few weeks or so, I listen to that voice mail again. I press 9, careful to keep his voice in a safe place. Because I know that one day I may need to hear him say to me again, “Just checking on you.”