Have you read all of these?

No.

The books were my father’s.

Plenty of mine are here, too, and more at our house, but the vast majority were his.

He grew up in Kansas and Oklahoma and would buy Classic Comics at the drugstore and be entertained for hours as a child. He was very good in school, and went to the University of Tulsa where one professor in particular, Mr. Eikenberry, showed him what literature and the study of it can be.

He was attending graduate school at Stanford when my mother became sick. Rather than continuing that academic track, he continued on as a public school English teacher at Booker T. Washington high school in Tulsa, where he encountered as interesting a group of teachers and students as could ever be hoped for.

Former students still come to tell me how important he was to them, how he opened their eyes to the world of ideas and guided their writing.

I’ve never known anyone who could explain how something in a book was relevant to teenage lives, and why they should care, as my father.

When he was in poor health and declining, I confessed to him that I couldn’t do with books what he could do. I didn’t always enjoy reading, and I lacked his ability to translate the written word to the world we live in.

My father never yelled. But he did then.

“SO WHAT? That’s what was important to me. You don’t measure yourself by that. You find what is important to you.”

Well, if you put it that way, life makes a lot more sense.

I definitely read, but I prefer shorter literary non-fiction to the largely fictional works in the farmhouse.

And I built the bookcases. That was important to me.