Book Daddy
Daddy is such a funny word. I dare you to google it. I wouldn't recommend doing it if there are minors lurking near the screen. On beyond Sylvia Plath's darkness, there are all kinds of equally negative connotations with which people have burdened what should be only the sweetest word. But even as I think of "Daddy" and "sweet", I go next to Sugar Daddy, and get only a moment's flash of teeth-sticking stretchy caramel festooned with bits of yellow wrapper before I go to the more contemporary usage of Sugar Daddy and visions of Anna Nicole come jiggling into my mind. And then of course there's Puffy.
But this week, I say, enough of the bad dads and the slandering of a good name. Many wonderful, loving men out there bear the name Daddy honorably and with great heart. Take my own dad, who I do actually call Daddy.
My father has many notable qualities: for starters, he is loyal, kind, honest, and true; he is a great story teller, a good fisherman, and a decent cook; he is generous and funny; he likes to buy roses and jewelry, and he likes to watch soccer on television--alot, maybe more than could be considered quite normal. He has more positive and intriguing qualities, as well, many related to foul-weather gear. But my favorite thing about Daddy is that he is a book head, and he made me one, too.
So many aspects of child-rearing get blamed on the mother, and I have to admit that my mother is pretty guilty of getting me hooked on books, too. But it's not Mother's Day this weekend. I'll save her contributions to my condition for another day. Together, my parents filled not only their own house full of books, but they filled several others' houses as well. And even after sharing that hard-bound bounty, their shelves remained as double stuffed as an oreo.
My father never told me about the value of reading, or preached to me about challenging myself. He never corrected my grammar or told me to read a certain amount everyday. He let me watch Peanuts cartoons and war movies and the Twilight Zone, and he never worried about me rotting my brain. He never told me to get a work ethic or get good grades in school.
But here's what he did: He read me stories every night. When I mentioned I loved the Little House on the Prairie books, he came home from work with the entire set in a cardboard box from the Brown Bookstore. When I mentioned I loved the Wizard of Oz books, he brought me all of them--in the same year as the Little House books. He brought me the D'Aulaire's Greek myths and then tracked down their Norse ones for me. He convinced me I could read Ovid, and he talked to me about it as if Achilles and Ajax would be stopping by for dinner before heading off to Troy. He brought me The Black Arrow, practically a dozen Horatio Hornblower books, and all kinds of serious looking classics with sober jackets that seemed a little overwhelming until a rainy Saturday afternoon when cartoons were over and they suddenly became amazing escapes.
Daddy brought me Kipling, and not just The Jungle Book.
He taught me that the most important design element in a home is bookshelves; that it is possible to go anywhere from a fishing boat to a black-tie dinner with a book; that good books can be relished time and again, even bad books can be diverting, and one should never be more than arm's length from a book at any point in time.
By passing his love of books on to me, he gave me a cloak of invisibility, a rabbit hole, a bottle marked "drink me,"' a donkey skin, a sword in the stone, and all the mysteries of the universe. Marge Piercy says that "life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third," but I would have to amend that to say that bibliophilia ranks up there as well. As understanding can be so elusive between people, perhaps I'd even place it right after love. Life, love, books.
My father has started taking my daughter to Murder by the Book. They come home loaded with new books--he with British mysteries, and she now with the Alex Rider series. Sometimes almost- twelve-year-old girls can be difficult to talk to, but as my father learned years ago, you don't need to talk to them if you can take them to the bookstore. Share the love.
How fine it is to find someone who has read a book you treasure and discover they liked all the same parts. How intensely we can argue with someone who doesn't value a certain character the way we do. How maddening when a favorite author is not appreciated by another. How amazing it is when we have just finished a book that we believe we will love like no other, and someone is able to share another, equally wonderful story with us. And how blessed we feel when it all transpires over family dinner.
In gratitude for launching me into this rich life of books, what will I get Daddy this Sunday? No question: another book. The trick will be finding one he hasn't read.
Twice.
When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?”
“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep, now.”
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.
She thought to herself, “This is now.”
She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
~Laura Ingalls Wilder
