Tips from the Bar: the Corine Hat Prompt

“A week after his wife died, my father wrote the first piece of writing he’d written in thirty-five years. As in, he hadn’t written letters, e-mails, journals, anything but grocery lists and reminders. Knowing this, his wife wrote her own eulogy, and a Death Letter (she’d been terminally ill for a while, so she’d prepared goodbyes for many of the people in her life), and left it for him to find. One of the things she mentioned was that she wished my father had written to people as easily as he’d talked to people. So my father took out an ad in the local paper and wrote a goodbye to his wife.”

Write something your father might write to you, had he not communicated with you for thirty-five years.