What happens in the video
In a bedroom, a girl in a yellow top stands beside a box on the bed, holding a light-coloured paper. A man approaches and speaks with her while a woman watches from the doorway. The girl shows him the paper and he takes it. In the closing shot, the two are sitting side by side on the bed, smiling. The writing is too small to read.
Continuation:
Dad recognised the envelope by the drawing of a rocket in the corner. At twelve he had drawn that rocket on everything, including a newly painted kitchen wall, an offence his mother had remembered at every birthday since.
“What are you doing with that, Izzie?”
“There’s a date on it. Yesterday.”
She turned the envelope over. Across the flap, in handwriting that leaned perilously downhill, it said *Open on my fortieth birthday*.
He’d forgotten all about it. His mother must have rescued it from his childhood bedroom and put it into the box she’d brought over for his birthday. Izzie had been looking for candles when she’d spotted the rocket.
“It’s yours,” she said. “You can read it by yourself.”
He sat beside her on the bed. “I’d like to know what you think of the list.”
The boy he’d once been had wanted an extraordinary number of things. He planned to fly to the moon, own six dogs, eat chocolate cereal every morning and become a famous drummer. At the bottom, squeezed between the last line and the edge of the paper, was a question. *Have you ever heard your own song on the radio?*
Izzie looked up. “You wrote songs?”
“One and a half. Your mum heard the half. I think she married me out of sympathy.”
From the doorway her mother sang four notes, then forgot the rest. Her father sang four more. Izzie had heard that tune hundreds of times. He hummed it when he cooked eggs, tapped it on the steering wheel and whistled it while he hunted for his keys.
“That’s yours?”
He seemed almost as surprised by the answer as she was.
On Saturday, Izzie borrowed a keyboard from school. She worked out the notes while her dad tried to remember the words. The first line was awful. At his request they kept it. His twelve-year-old self had taken considerable trouble to rhyme *satellite* with *Friday night*.
Three weeks later, the school station invited families to send in songs for its morning broadcast. They recorded theirs at the kitchen table. You could hear a spoon fall during the second verse, but it was the only take where neither of them started laughing too early.
At breakfast on his next day off, Izzie turned the volume up. An announcer read both their names. Then came the four notes his wife remembered, followed by the four he’d sung on the bed.
Dad turned the old letter over and wrote beneath the rocket, *Yes. With my daughter.*
Izzie added a second question in the space underneath. *Same time next year?*
