Our Family Therapy

By Patti Davis

What would my father say, if he could, about the just published volume of his letters? You first notice its heft--almost 900 pages, if you count notes and acknowledgments. He might shrug, smile mischievously and say something like, "Gee, these editors must have had too much time on their hands to spend so much of it collecting my letters." Lifting the book, I thought about the weight of a life. We leave imprints of ourselves on this earth: memories, relationships, accomplishments as well as mistakes. All have weight. So do letters; they mark the paths between human beings.

I can so easily walk through a door of memory into long-ago afternoons when I came home from school to find my father at his desk in my parents' bedroom. Sitting in front of a small atrium filled with ferns and tropical plants, he would be writing, soft green light falling around him. He wrote speeches on white note cards, letters on cream-colored stationery. He wrote letters that said more than he could say in person. It's odd to think that the man who has been called the Great Communicator was often shy with others, yet it's true. As I grew older and went away to school, I knew the thick letters from my father were outpourings from his heart and head, and could only have happened when he picked up his fountain pen and began writing.

Historians and political scholars will peruse and analyze his letters on policy, ideology, the cold war and the Middle East. I want you to see the man who wrote to friends, to his children, his brother--as well as to people he had never met, simply because they had written to him. Notice how many times he opened a letter with an apology for having taken a while to respond. He came from humble beginnings--an eager, determined, dream-filled boy in the flat endless miles of the Midwest. He was taught to be polite, and he never forgot that.

In some of the letters to old friends or to strangers inquiring about his childhood, I discovered things I didn't know about him. "Fire engines were horse-drawn then," he wrote about his early years, "and the sight of them made me decide I wanted to be a fireman." I also didn't know how, on a Saturday night in Tampico, Ill., a 9-year-old Dutch Reagan, along with a friend, found a shotgun belonging to the boy's father and blew a hole in the family's ceiling. We pore over our parents' childhoods when we are past our own and have grown old enough to be curious.

I vividly remember my father's letter to me in 1968 when I had turned myself in for smoking at my boarding school. He praised my honesty while not shirking his parental duty to admonish the crime. A group of us had been huddled in a closet smoking cigarettes. I had actually just exited the closet when the teacher came and busted everyone else. I'd got away with it, but my classmates' glaring looks shamed me into confessing my sin. Of course, I didn't tell my father those details. I made myself out to be a budding George Washington, whose crime was a Marlboro Light instead of a cherry tree. His letter made me feel I'd snatched victory from the jaws of juvenile delinquency.

His letter to my brother when Ron was a teenager fascinated me. Within families, each individual relationship has its own fingerprint and, like a fingerprint, is unique. I got to see in this letter how my father spoke to his son, a male-to-male moment. He used words like uptight and cop out, which he never used with me. It's as if he were looking ahead, past the need to be a disciplinarian, to a future when he and Ron could have the camaraderie of two guys hanging out.

In a letter to friends, when Ron and I were in our 20s, my father wrote casually about my songwriting and occasional television roles, and about Ron's decision to become a ballet dancer. He kept to the smooth surface--a parent passing along news of his kids. He didn't divulge that our relationship was strained because I was living with my boyfriend, or that Ron's career choice had caused some bewilderment (it wasn't prejudice on my father's part, just that Midwestern boy showing through--guys in his town never wore tights). Like the accomplished swimmer he was, he knew that the calm surface of the water is easy on the eyes and soothing to the soul. It's the turbulence beneath that's risky. He gave his friends the soothing view of our family, sparing them the rough currents below.

The weight of my father's life in letters is heavy, but the lightness of his spirit and the easy way of his heart are evident throughout. In a letter addressed to me when I was still a baby, he wrote, "There were no 'Northern Lights' last night but there was a big moon and a sky full of stars shining down on the glaciers and snow covered peaks. It was a beautiful night with a constant breeze that seems to come from out among the stars and it seems at times that if you listen very carefully it will whisper secrets as old as time." The letters we leave behind whisper with secrets of their own.