Bibliophile

 Here is why it was a huge deal. To me.

My father had a longstanding history of not reading. With the possible exception of the daily obituaries in our local newspaper, he was free from the compulsion to have his nose in a book. Which was not completely freeing for him. The fact that his wife and his three sons carried the page-turning fever sometimes rubbed him just a little raw. Which is why his copy of The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich sat on top of his dresser like a three-quarter ton albatross, and stayed there until he moved out of the house. It became a punchline for us all, an emblem of things left undone. It was one of the projects that he left undone. The desk he was going to build. The bar he was going to construct in the basement. And finishing every one of those twelve hundred eighty pages. 

When he left my mother and went out in search for whatever it was that he was missing, it is quite possible that he was fleeing not just the lumber and various bits of hardware that would never be a bar or a desk, but also all those pages about Nazis. 

That is why I feel the need to point out these two anecdotes: Before he left home, while he and my mother were still nominally a parental unit, he presented me with a paperback copy of The World According To Garp. It came wrapped inelegantly in a brown paper bag along with a razor and a can of shaving cream for my eighteenth birthday. It was a package that served as my ersatz Bar Mitzvah. With that bag, I became a man. 

As my father spent most of his life in the world of printing, presses and binding and ink and paper, I have no shortage of book-related memories connected to him. But today the one I want to feature is the time that he quoted to me a line from Jitterbug Perfume. "The industrial revolution has shot its steely wad." This was the quote he shared with me to show his enthusiasm for the book that he had just finished. I have no idea how he landed on this particular volume, but part of me wanted to have further discussion with him about the rest of Tom Robbin's work. I considered him encouraging him to pick up a copy of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, or Still Life With Woodpecker. 

I didn't do that. Instead I marveled at my father's accomplishment. And let it stand. Which is why Tom Robbins' passing last week struck me in the way it did. I cannot say that Mister Robbins was my favorite author, but he definitely kept me busy as I waited for the next Vonnegut or John Irving. But the fact that my father could quote his work spoke volumes to me. For that I have to say that Tom Robbins stomped on the Terra, and I hope my father gets a chance to meet him in the Great Beyond. 

Aloha, Tom Robbins.