Reading Required

My daddy loved reading.

He read books, magazines, newspapers - short stories, histories, novels, biographies, ususally in hard back if available, a bias he passed to me because I've never liked reading paperbacks - and he remembered and could quote what he'd read. He said it was a process of self-education and he was open minded to most anything that would help him learn. He was interested in things and people, inventions and theories, how things worked and what the world was doing. He never stopped a book because he'd lost interest or suspected how it might end. His joy was in the journey between the covers, his love of language and dialogue lasted him his whole life. He especially loved satire, British humor and Shakespeare but could be almost equally taken by Zane Grey or Mark Twain.

My mother favored glossy romance novels and scandal. She kept a copy of "Peyton Place" hidden in a drawer with stockings and underwear and her closet was littered with movie magazines and out of date TV Guides that she couldn't bear to part with. From a literary point of view, this was a marriage of true opposing forces and conflict. How could two so completely different people possibly be happy together? Their reading habits became a metaphor for their entire marriage to me, a kind of summary for all that was wrong between them. If ever there were two people less suited to each other, I've never met them. I know nothing of their meeting, courting, marrying, no details at all and as I look back, I wonder how that can be. Perhaps I never asked, understanding with some child's instinct that looking back could do no good.

So as my daddy sat in his recliner with Joseph Conrad open on his lap, my mother put aside her Grace Metalious in favor of a re-run of Laugh In. Maybe some of us are textbooks and others are Cliff notes.