What you say, and how you say it, and why it’s everything to me.
Dear Thomas:
When I sat down to write this triennial letter to you, I closed my eyes to think of all things Thomas, and one thing quickly sprang to mind: your voice.
Your voice, I’ve decided, comes from the Williams side of the family. Much like your Mom and your Poppy, yours is a voice that rarely struggles to be heard. It booms, even if it comes from your young frame; it cuts clear above the rest of the family’s chatter. From time to time, we will remind you to use an inside voice, but it doesn’t matter. Your volume switch bottoms out somewhere around “indoor voice, but as if one is in a crowded arena.”
How you use your voice to speak, and what it sounds like, are the products of hard work. As we marked your ninth birthday, we were mostly convinced that soon you would need surgery to correct what we had found was a physical gap in your throat that caused you to have a slight speech impediment.
