Following this prize-winning essay, Sheila discusses the author’s craft and technique for creating an essay that uses imagery and details to work toward a felt understanding.

A Dime in My Pocket
By Kelly Sievers

I scooted a chair close to my father’s bed, pulled the side rail down, and released his hands from restraints. In his last hours he was listening, still responding. “Remember how you would drive all of us out to Lake Denoon for a swim on hot summer nights?” I began, “We’d race out to the deep water, fling our suits to the top of the raft, then slip in and out of the deep water, naked.” I drew closer to my father’s ear and hummed that crazy song he always sang, “I love to go swimming with bowl-legged women, and dive between their knees.” Eyes closed, he moved his head with the rhythm. He loved nearly bawdy songs and corny jokes. And he loved the freedom of swimming naked.

I don’t know what made me tell him that story. It had something to do with remembering the best family times as those spun from Milwaukee’s streets into the cool, weedy waters of inland lakes. We swam safe, darting and daring, in dark waters — each of us alone in our naked freedom.

I never put the restraints back on my father. He, at 89, refused all major surgery. I peeled off his EKG leads, the oximeter on his thumb. The nurse removed his tubes. He was free.

My father was a simple, principled man. A family man. A union man, tired from too much overtime, I wrote in one poem. As a girl I wanted Nancy Drew’s pipe-smoking father who sat in his library dispensing sage advice. In high school I looked at my father bewildered: Why couldn’t he be Gene Kelly? In 1943 a woman in the Los Angeles train station insisted my Dad was the movie star.

The very real father of my Wisconsin teen years stood in the kitchen in his long underwear clicking the back yard light on and off as my first boyfriend kissed me goodnight. In my pocket was the dime he gave me, “Call me if you need a ride home.”

Dad was a Tool and Die man, our Mr. Fix It man. We were a Sears and Roebuck family charging down aisles buying trusty refrigerators or magic walking dolls. On Saturdays we sat in the car with Dad, cued for a spot in the Sears lot on Mitchell Street. “Green Chevrolet,” the invisible man in the tower would announce, “Third row, five spaces in.” We waited patiently. Dad liked order.

He let each of us go without much fanfare. Bill, the oldest, to the Navy, me to nursing school, and Patrick to the Air Force. My mother sent me off with a sewing machine and Dad gave me a steel-gray fireproof file “for my important papers.” Then he and my mother moved to California.

 Within a few yeas Dad began his route to connect with us. For almost two decades clipped newspaper articles, poems, essays, and Reader’s Digest jokes, streamed into our mailboxes.

Envelopes arrived once or twice a week, fat, skinny, stapled, taped. They contained no letters, only comments along margins. Anything with “poetry” in the title came to me, the poet. When the Poetry Foundation received the astonishing $100 million gift from Ruth Lilly he asked, “Do you belong to this Foundation?”

Win $48,000! Win $2000! Every year the National Library of Poetry ad, plus the logo from the Christian Science Monitor: “Send something here.” A news announcement read: Poet Rita Dove set to sing at Giants game. Dad, the Green Bay Packer fan, wrote: “Maybe you could read your poetry at Lambeau Field.”

Recently, I found my favorite mailing. An envelope spilled tabs from a dozen Good Earth tea bags. “This Ginseng Tea is supposed to do everything for you,” Dad wrote. The tab: SOU, Chinese Character for long life. And a message from Jack London: You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

I had not looked at my collection for ten years. My brothers asked: Do you think he really read all that stuff? Yes, I think he did, but I had my envelopes of doubt. “Better than Junk Mail,” Dad wrote on one with clippings from the Christian Science Monitor: thirteen poems, seventeen “Words of Note,” and one article about subway poems.

Then, I found an essay from Harpers by Edwin Dobb with highlighted words: “No matter whom we reach out to when we most want to be embraced by another human being, we reach out in an attempt to overcome gravity, to take flight.”

And these words underlined by my father who never spoke about death, from a San Jose Mercury News article: “We sat around and sipped our beers after we’d finished playing golf — two middle aged people who drifted into talk, not about golf, but about death… As I drove home … I thought about the beauty of the day and the beauty of the people I love.”

I stuffed so many words back into their envelopes. We never talked about the poems he sent. Each mailing was its own message; our shared language did not contain poetry. I know, however, I felt his presence each time I opened a mailing. I knew he was thinking of me each time he sat at his desk carefully clipping a poem, addressing the envelope, fixing the stamp. Now my father is a comforting rhythm that hums in my ear reminding me allegiance and reaching out matter. With or without words, we can embrace.

A poem by Linda Bierds he sent reads, “I leave it to you, that shadowed conjunction of matter / and light/that flies, in its fashion, between us.” Even if my father and I stumbled in language, we understood something did fly between us. It was there in the water when we swam both daring and safe as a family. It was the dime in my pocket.

“What was your father like?” a friend recently asked. I gave him this memory: One July while my husband joined a baseball buddy for a series of Giant games, I visited my parents in San Jose. When it was time for me to leave for San Francisco my father drove me to the light rail station. We pulled into the station as one train was leaving. “Hurry up, you can still catch it,” he urged.

“It’s okay,” I told him, “There’ll be another train in twenty minutes. I don’t mind waiting; I’ll be fine.” He unloaded my suitcase, we said goodbye. We hugged. I rolled my luggage to the ticket booth and found an empty bench on the arrival platform.

I looked up as my father’s head and shoulders appeared, ascending the stairs to the platform. He soon stood beside me and hesitated before he spoke, “I found a nice place — over there in the shade — to park the car.” With that explanation, he sat down beside me. He took off his hat and held it in his hands. We waited for my train together. I don’t remember if we talked about anything.

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A Successful Personal Essay Weighs More At the End than At the Beginning
By Sheila Bender

I was very moved by Kelly’s description of her last moments with her father and her description of his actions over the years. By writing this essay, Kelly comes to a felt understanding that her father’s contributions and support were strong and meaningful. She sees that even though his language and his actions were not the complex ones of the literary or romantic movie characters with which she resonated, by making sure he maintained a presence in her life, he offered something more important than the sage advice she’d wanted as young girl. He offered protection and he offered connection, supporting her by finding information about her art and sending it to her with notes that indicate he was always thinking about her, wanting her to succeed. Kelly’s essay is a quiet one that takes the risk of making something from what is on hand — every day memories and envelopes of information her father sent her. In using these ingredients, she succeeds in transcending any earlier ideas she had about her father being less than she required.

In successful personal essays, the process of writing becomes a catalyst for the creation of new emotional meaning. An author places images from her topic as stepping-stones in a journey toward insight. As the memories marry into a new experience, she finds knowledge that was not wholly felt until the making of this experience. Writing the personal essay allows the author to find something of emotional importance that she might not otherwise have been able to say and embody.

Here’s how Kelly Sievers does this in her essay:

She establishes the essay’s occasion
The very first sentence lets us know, through the speaker’s actions, that the occasion is her presence at her father’s deathbed. Because we learn he is still listening, still responding, we know the speaker is saying goodbye by helping her dad live his last moments through the joy of their shared memories. By including words from the song the speaker sings, the author allows readers into the private world of her childhood and her father.

We know we are going to make an emotional journey because of the occasion and we do by first moving back in time to Milwaukee and lakes and naked swimming and then forward again to the bed and the hospital. And as the nurse works along with the speaker to free her father of the paraphernalia of medical institutions, and the father works to pass from this world, the speaker states who her father was — a simple, principled, family and union man who worked hard.

She builds toward insight, memory by memory, example by example
After the song and the memories of naked swimming, after the reporting of her wish that her father was a dancing Gene Kelly, the speaker evokes her father and the family’s life through mundane but striking scenes: He provided protection by giving his daughter a dime should she need a cab ride home, by flickering the back door light once she was home. With the example and picture of the Sears parking lot, she gives us something to go on when she asserts, “He liked order.” It does not go unnoticed by the reader that as soon as the speaker mentions he liked order, she skips to, “He let each of us go without fanfare.” This is another kind of order — the passage of time, the growing up of children. The speaker’s father honored that order, and he sent her off into the world with a simple tool for order — a steel file for important papers. For almost twenty years, he sent the speaker, who had become a poet, announcements, quotes and descriptions of poetry projects. He made simple suggestions and comments. She kept what he sent, called it her “collection.” I can’t help but think of the file box as I read about the collection, the father’s remarks, and the quotes the Kelly includes. By keeping envelopes of her father’s messages to her, the speaker has “filed” the valuable message of the important papers in her heart — the love and connection her father demonstrated. Because we know he is a simple man, a Tool and Die man, we feel an even greater poignancy — how far from his experience he was traveling to collect the poems and quotes and information for his daughter, how much he said with so little when he asked a question or made a comment.

She articulates something that might not have been articulated any other way
The speaker’s father has died. He is free. But in her descriptions of him and his mailings, in her telling that they never spoke of those mailings, she is finding a way to say what matters to her and will matter to her from now on: “With or without words, we can embrace.” Quoting lines in a poem her father sent centers the essay in its emotional occasion — the articulation, the assertion: “…we understood something did fly between us.” It was there in the water when we swam both daring and safe as a family. It was the dime in my pocket.”

At this point, the writer is deep into her description and memory and much of it melds into metaphor, which offers essence. Once we have arrived at essence, another memory comes — an anecdote about leaving — the day the speaker says she can wait for a train instead of hurrying to catch the one that is leaving, her father surprises her by deciding to park the car, climb the steps and sit beside her, hat in his hands, till the next train comes. Her memory is of a physical example of her father’s stance toward his daughter: He came to be with her even when she didn’t ask. The image of her father sitting beside her, holding his hat in his hands as she is waiting to board a train moving away from him is poignant. It parallels the image of her sitting beside her father in his hospital bed as he is moving away from her. Sparks did indeed fly between them as they rode separate rails in opposite directions — parent and child, one moving toward age and decline, one coming into her own.

She sets herself and her readers back on the ground after the deepening of her experience:
Kelly has described her father through the song, naked swimming and order he enjoyed. She has described him with the dime he gave her, the lights he flickered, the mail he sent to her, the hat he held at the train station, and the way he tells her he has found a nice place to park in the shade. With death, he has parked again; Kelly knows his love sits beside her. She has written from an emotionally “naked freedom” (a phrase from the essay’s beginning) to craft a loving, appreciate picture of her father, a picture made from the small things, the things that ultimately tell her what she was blessed to have received. And then she ends her essay with words that bring us to the present, “I don’t remember if we talked about anything,” as well as to knowing that the meaning she has made from what she has remembered is by far more important.