Today is the Lakewood Library Book Sale. Last week, I had planned to take my father, as my mother cannot bear being with us in bookstores. My father is a browser -- handling books, reading inside jackets, introductions, pondering the purchase, and ultimately returning home with nothing, but happy nonetheless. (He can't see parting with the amount of money a full-price book costs. He's really bad at spending money.)
We used to go to the Strand in NY when I was 5 or 6, and spend the whole day browsing -- he would buy me a book or two, and he'd pick up something cheap on European history or mathematics, and we'd sit next to one another on the subway (remember, this is the 70s in NYC, it's as squalid as you think, if not more so) and read happily until we got home, where he would take my hand and we walked wordlessly to our apartment. It was our time, without my siblings who had little interest in sitting in a musty basement room poring over books, and while we didn't say much to one another, we shared something that to this day connects us.
Today, we went to the book sale, in a musty basement crowded with people all vying for bargains (crowding the usual suspects' shelves, where my favorites were quiet and untouched), and about 2 minutes in, I could see he wasn't going to make it. I stationed him out of the foot traffic, and said, "I'm going to run around to what I'm looking for, buy them, and we'll call mom and she'll pick us up. OK?" I expected him to fight me on it, but he didn't. He was already wheezing a little, and nodded.
I got lucky and found some great old science textbooks, 2 good neuroscience collections, and The Collected Stories of John O'Hara, which everyone should own but is sadly out of print -- all told, 9 books for $4.50. I called my mother, then helped my father back upstairs.
All I could think of on the ride home was how, as a child, I had felt safe with him on the train. He would protect me should someone bother us. And now, I did the same for him, except rather than danger, I proected him from his own frailty. My sadness hangs onto me right now like that child I was, skimming my peripheral vision everywhere I go. I miss the father I had, and mourn him a little more every day. Perhaps, I think, this will ease my grief when he succumbs to the illnesses that wear at him like water on rock.
I know that this is not true.
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