Two days before Christmas of 2011, my father died of a heart attack; he was 77 years old. He and my mother had watched an episode of Jeopardy! a few minutes before it happened. This detail, passed on during her tearful phone call later that night, seemed insignificant at the time; I had, of course, other things to consider. More than four years later, though, it’s one of the first things I think of when I recall that night. My parents didn’t do many things together, and had almost nothing in common, but for a half-hour each evening, they did have Alex Trebek.
Throughout my life, I struggled, as my mother did, to understand my dad. He was frustratingly aloof, and rarely made the proper associations in conversation, inevitably damming up what could have been pleasantly-flowing creeks. My wife, upon studying autism in graduate school, gave him a dime-store diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, and she may have been correct. But we’ll never know for sure, because we were too sensitive, or cowardly, to bring it up with him. So it was up to each of us to figure out how to forge connections with him, Asperger’s or not. For my mother, there were things like Jeopardy! and nature photography. For me, there were books.
In my childhood home, my father’s bedroom was lined with sagging shelves, filled with slipcased, hardcover editions of classic novels: Main Street, Omoo, The Last of the Mohicans. He was always in the middle of one book or another, and when I came of reading age, sometime in my early 20s, books became something, like baseball or the weather, that we could always talk about. He had never known what to give me for my birthday or on Christmas; now, suddenly, he did: Ethan Canin’s America America, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. He bought me a book of Mark Helprin short stories and implored me to read “Perfection,” about a Hasidic teenager who pulls the New York Yankees out of a slump. “The other stories are also good,” my father said, but you have to read ‘Perfection.’” I did, and found it wonderful. I was nearly as surprised by its narrative potency as by the fact that my dad had known what I might like.
Our newfound relationship as readers and sharers of books — and his unexpected death — came at a moment when books were losing their importance, being swept aside, with seemingly everything else, by a riot of digitization. In recent years, the Kindle, Nook, and others have been rightly hailed for their function and utility, their ease of use and simplicity of acquisition. These qualities are inarguable; it’s why tens of millions of Kindles (Amazon doesn’t release sales numbers for the device) have been sold. Yet there is nothing I want less than to read from a tablet — the thought of doing so irritates me irrationally — and I’ve begun to wonder if my attachment to the physical book has anything to do with an attachment to my father, or at least my memory of him.
In the eight years since the first Kindle was introduced, the tactile pleasures of books — oh, the feel of a just-flipped page…the smell of binding glue! — have been exhaustively, and often absurdly, chronicled. Those of us who refuse to give up the printed book — a population that seems, surprisingly, to have stabilized — do so for largely similar reasons: books bring a unique mental quiet, offer respite from our screens, are a habit we have no interest in breaking. These reasons are universal and specific to no one. The bond that books helped my father and I establish, however, was ours and ours alone. And that bond was so personal, so giving, that I wish I could somehow thank those books for everything that they did.
America America and the rest of them, up there on their shelves, are now as representative of my dad as the photograph of him that hangs by my bedroom door. And now that I’m a father myself, this concept of objects, imbued with memory, has taken hold in my mind — and my books are as worthy an expression of who I am as anything I can imagine. Though there’s every possibility that, after I die — whenever that may be — my son might frown at my old paperbacks and lug them to the curb, he might also cherish them, or at least pick out a few. E-readers’ branded, dark-gray impersonality strikes me as anathema to such emotion, to such a passing-down. There is little warmth in them; beyond the files stored within, there is no you or me. And while this isn’t the only reason I’ve resisted the devices, it’s been a subconscious one. To say that I “just like books better” now seems insufficient; there are reasons for everything. Some inscrutable logic tells me that if I were to abandon books, I would abandon my dad. It looks ridiculous up there on the screen, now that I’ve written it, but it feels true all the same.
Why do some of us stick with old things as the rest of the world hums by? Is it because we’re a bunch of musty Luddites, fearful of losing what we know? Or is it because we’ve lost enough already?
Image Credit: Pexels/freestocks.org.
