Love Letters

Everything you have read so far in this book has been about the work.

The garage. The telescope. The MICR encoder. The nine published software titles. The day my father turned Bill Gates and Paul Allen down. The roller coasters with his hands up. The agency I founded. The bets that worked. The bets I am still in the middle of making. That is the half of him I grew up watching, and the half of me I am best known for, and the half of this book most readers will remember.

It was only half of him.

The other half was the husband. The father. The grandfather. The jokester. The romantic. The man who saved every birthday card. The man who, when Christmas card season came around, would line the family up and insist on a round of selfies with everyone making the absolute worst possible faces, because nothing was more important to him than being silly with the people he loved. The man who got my mother from a P.O. Box in Everett, Washington to a three-story paddlewheeler on Lake Union and back again, over forty-seven years of marriage. The man who wrote love letters.

That is the half my mother carries with her every day. I am not the daughter of the engineer alone. I am the daughter of both halves. And the rest of this book did not have room for the second half. So I have put it here, at the end, as a gift — for you, for my mother, for whoever is reading this in the future trying to know who Kevin Michael Bagley actually was.

These are some of the love letters.

He met my mother — Linda Closer at the time — in Everett in the early 1970s. She had a P.O. Box. P.O. Box 2553. I have, in front of me as I write this, an envelope addressed in his handwriting:

Linda Closer

P.O. Box 2553

Everett, Wash. 98203

The stamps on it are Frank Lloyd Wright two-cent stamps. The postmark is from 1972. He was eighteen years old. He had not yet shipped a video game. He had not yet built the MICR encoder. They were not yet married. He was just a young man in love with a young woman named Linda. He saved the envelope. So did she. It survived fifty-three years of moves and storage and the gradual loss of almost everything else from that era. They kept the envelope.

That is what kind of marriage they had.

A few years later, while she was pregnant with me, he wrote her a poem on lined paper. It is undated, kept in the same box as the envelope. At the top, in his handwriting, it says: SLEEPING BEAUTY. I am going to type it out exactly as he wrote it, because it ends with the line that tells you everything about him as a father — before I was even born.

When during the night

I tend to love and caress

your sleeping beauty by

gazing at you with pure delight.

Through parted lips comes love.

Its soothing sound makes

all these words shatter at

the beauty of you at rest.

You turn softly, even look.

But the wonderful dreams

take you back to be sleeping beauty.

And for that moment you knew me.

And when you share this page in the morn,

you’ll know I want our child to be born.

— Love, Kevin

I want our child to be born.

He had been my father, in his own head, for months before I actually arrived. The poem was the announcement, in writing, that he had already chosen me.

Twenty-three years after that, on Valentine’s Day of 1995, he typed her this letter:

My Dearest Linda,

The love spoken of in the letters contained in this book comes from persons of fame, fortune, and sometimes misfortune. With my humble addition to these endearments, I offer not a meager token, but rather an equally intense version, whose scale is determined not by the stature of those involved, but rather by the measure of the love between them.

Passion exists in our love, as does tenderness and compassion. By comparison, these loves may be famous or infamous, but all pale when measured against the simple but powerful love that is, without question, timeless and ours.

It is with eagerness and excitement that I look forward to each and every day of our lives together.

Now, as always, deeply,

Kevin

The book he is referring to is a published anthology of historical love letters. He bought it for her, and then on the morning of February 14, 1995, slipped his own letter inside the front cover, because he believed his letter belonged with theirs. He was right. It does.

He also wrote, in roughly the same era, a handwritten document he titled, with characteristic Kevin Bagley flair: BONUS LOVE LETTER — AN ANTHOLOGY OF PASSION. As though he were not just adding to the canon, but editing it. The title of this section of this book — “Bonus Love Letters” — is borrowed from him. He named the genre. I am only following his lead.

He opened his anthology document with the famous Antoine de Saint-Exupéry quote, written in his own hand:

Love does not consist of gazing at each other,

but in looking in the same direction.

And here is the thing I did not understand fully until I started writing this book.

My parents had been looking in the same direction for forty-seven years by the time my father died. They were not gazing at each other. They were standing side by side, building. They built our family. They built a three-story paddlewheeler life on Lake Union in their later years. They were not romantic in the way of romantic comedies. They were romantic in the way of partners. The kind of romantic where you write your wife a love letter on Valentine’s Day after twenty-three years of marriage and you mean every single word of it.

That is the picture. The dinghy. The Seattle skyline. The outboard motor. One hand in the air. Glad to be alive. Glad to be on the water. Glad to be married to my mother. Glad to be in his sixties and still in love.

The Music

There were two musicians in our house, and the duet between them was the original architecture of their marriage.

My father played the piano.

Not the kind of piano where someone takes lessons as a kid and remembers a few songs from sheet music. The kind of piano where he would sit down at the grand and just play — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, the long pieces, the demanding ones, the ones that require a working relationship with the keys to even attempt. He had the ear. He had the hands. He had the patience for the slow movements and the playfulness for the fast ones. He never made it look like he was performing. He made it look like he was thinking out loud.

My mother and I would lie on the couch and listen for hours.

That is one of the most peaceful memories of my childhood. The light coming through the windows. My mother on one end of the couch, me on the other, our heads usually meeting in the middle on a shared pillow. My father at the grand piano in the next room, halfway visible through the doorway, working through whichever piece he was inside that afternoon. Nobody talked. Nobody had to. The piano was the conversation. He played for himself, mostly, but he also played for us, and the difference between those two things was so small that for years I did not realize there was one.

The grand piano in our house was not a piece of furniture. It was a member of the family. It was the thing that turned a Sunday afternoon into a Sunday afternoon worth remembering forty years later.

And he was not a solo musician.

Before my parents were my parents, they were in a band together. Both of them. Linda and Kevin. They played the music of their era — The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, the singer-songwriter aesthetic of the late sixties and early seventies, the kind of music people made when an acoustic guitar and a piano and two voices were the entire technology stack. They played at small venues. They played at house parties. They played because at that point in their lives the most natural way for them to spend time with each other was to make harmony together, and they were good at it.

My mother had a voice. My father had the keys. The duet was the original architecture of their marriage. Long before they had a daughter, long before they had a paddlewheeler on Lake Union, long before he turned down Bill Gates and Paul Allen — they were two people who had already learned how to listen to each other in real time, in front of an audience, and not lose the song. Whatever they were going to build for the rest of their lives was going to be built on top of that.

That is where I got my love for music. From the two of them. From a couch in our living room, a grand piano in the next room, classical pieces filling the house on weekends, and a back catalogue of late-sixties and early-seventies songwriter records that I will play, with no warning, in any car ride my husband and I take, to this day.

Who He Actually Was

I want to tell you, before I close this section, who he actually was. Not what he did. Not what he shipped. Not what he turned down. Who he was.

My father was both serious and funny as hell. He was brilliant before his time and a freaking prankster. He was logical and pragmatic. He was loving and wild. He was, simultaneously, all of those things. He never picked. He never apologized for any of it. He never tried to streamline the contradictions into one tidy version of himself for the comfort of other people. The same man who was hand-coding the MICR encoder for the American banking system in the late seventies was the man who would set up an elaborate joke and wait, deadpan, for the punchline to land. The same man who walked out of a warehouse on Bill Gates and Paul Allen was the man who lined our family up for ridiculous Christmas-card faces, every year, without fail. The same man who wrote a love poem to my mother in 1972, before I was born, was the man who, in his sixties, was driving a dinghy around Lake Union with one hand in the air.

And the list of things he was good at — like, genuinely, eerily good at — went well past the work.

He was a serious photographer. The dark room I told you about earlier in this book was not a hobby. It was a working studio. He shot. He developed. He printed. He understood light and composition and timing the way a person understands the things they have been quietly studying their whole life. That is where I got my eye. Whatever instinct I have for an image, for a frame, for the right moment to take a picture — it came from him. He never sat me down and gave me a lesson. He just took photographs in front of me, in our house, for twenty years, and let me watch.

He was a scientist in the original sense of the word. He was somebody who actually wanted to know how things worked, in detail, all the way down, for no reason other than that he wanted to know. The astronomy software was not a hobby grafted onto his programming career. It was the natural product of a man who had spent his nights reading about how the universe was put together. He read papers. He kept notes. He asked the kinds of questions other adults stopped asking somewhere around the seventh grade.

He was a spelunker. A caver. Somebody who, on weekends, would drive into the mountains with rope and a headlamp and lower himself into the dark spaces under the surface of the earth, on purpose, for fun. I want to be honest with you about how I felt about this as a child: I thought it was the most insane thing in the world. He thought it was the most natural thing in the world. He could not understand why other people did not want to climb into the wet, narrow, cold, lightless places under mountains and look at what was down there. To him, those were the most interesting rooms on the planet. Of course you would want to go in.

He was an unbeatable chess player. I am not exaggerating. I am not romanticizing. I never once — not as a child, not as a teenager, not as an adult — saw a person sit down across the board from my father and win a game. People tried. Visiting friends tried. Coworkers tried. Other dads at the park tried. He would let the game develop, sometimes appear to be losing, and then — calmly, almost apologetically — produce the move that ended it. He was not loud about it. He never gloated. He just won. Every time.

He could solve a Rubik’s cube, fully scrambled, in under a minute.

This was in the early 1980s, before cubing was a sport, before there were YouTube tutorials, before there were communities of speedcubers trading algorithms on the internet — because there was no internet. He figured it out from scratch. He sat with the cube, turned it in his hands, watched what it did, and worked out, on his own, the algorithms that would take it from any state of chaos back to its solved state in fewer than sixty seconds. He would do it at parties. He would do it for my friends. He would do it for himself, sitting in his chair, the way other men flipped a coin or shuffled a deck of cards — because his hands wanted something to do and a Rubik’s cube was the closest available object.

He was all of it. At once. In public. Without apology.

He was a writer. A developer. A traveler. An inventor. An employer. A gamer. A jokester. A family man. A romantic. A pianist. A bandmate. A photographer. A scientist. A caver. A chess master. The fastest hands at any party with a Rubik’s cube on the coffee table.

He married the love of his life and wrote her love letters across five decades.

That is who he actually was.

He married the love of his life and wrote her love letters across five decades.

That is the second half of him. The half this book did not have room for inside its argument. The half I wanted you to have anyway, before you closed the book.

Now you have it. As he would have wanted. As a bonus.