A Fine Young Man
Pepper Scott
I have declared war on our house.
Not on the house itself. The house is innocent. The house is just standing there, minding its business, quietly holding everything we ever were. No, my war is with the stuff inside it.
I have been searching for the right word. Mess feels wrong. A mess is accidental. What we built together was entirely on purpose, piece by piece, year by year. Clutter? Too dismissive. Everything here earned its place. Mementos? Getting warmer. But even that word feels too small, like calling the Pacific Ocean "a puddle."
What I am doing, I have decided, is not house cleaning. It is more like archaeology. I am carefully excavating a life.
Today's dig brought me to a letter.
It is dated December 15, 1959. Written on lined notebook paper in elegant, careful cursive, in blue ink that has faded just enough to look cinematic. The paper has fold lines from six decades of patient waiting inside some drawer or box or envelope that Terry never let go of.
The letter is from his teacher.
She is thanking five-year-old Terry for the beautiful pink pin he gave her as a gift. She says pink is one of her favorite colors. She tells him she will think of his thoughtfulness every time she wears it. And then she says something that stopped me entirely.
She called him "a fine young man."
Five years old. A fine young man.
Then she offered a bit of wisdom, the kind teachers have been handing down for generations.
"The finest gift you can give any teacher is to use the mind God gave you."
He did exactly that. His whole life.
I sat there smiling.
First, because Terry saved it.
For sixty-five years.
Think about that.
Moves, apartments, houses, jobs, marriage, all the twists and turns of a lifetime, and somehow this little letter survived them all. It remained important enough to keep.
Second, because I realized something.
I was negative five years old when this letter was written.
Negative five.
Terry was already out there in the world being described as a fine young man while I was still several years away from making my debut.
Life is funny that way.
At five years old, he had no idea that decades later a woman not yet born would be sitting at a dining room table reading his kindergarten correspondence and laughing at the thought of it.
And his teacher had no idea either.
She was simply writing a thank-you note to a sweet little boy.
But she was right.
The fine young man she described grew up exactly as she hoped and envisioned.
He became thoughtful. Kind. Curious. Helpful.
He became the man who would one day become my best friend.
My husband.
The keeper of letters.
As I carefully folded the paper back along its well-worn creases, I found myself grateful.
Grateful for teachers who notice goodness in children.
Grateful for children who grow into themselves.
Grateful for a man who thought one small letter was worth carrying through an entire lifetime.
So the conquering of the stuff will have to wait another day.
The boxes are patient.
The drawers are not going anywhere.
And sometimes, among all the things we think we need to sort, donate, organize, and label, we uncover something far better.
A glimpse of a five-year-old boy.
And proof that someone has been a fine young man all along.
