A Father's Day remembrance

With Father's Day ahead, I have been thinking more about my own father, whom I saw twice a year in my childhood. This would be at Christmas or on my birthday, and of the gifts he brought I best remember the books. One was a self-study guide to Spanish, and every summer in my high school years I would start with the first lessons, quickly faltering as I struggled with how to roll an "r." Another had been a magnificent two-volume set on the wonders of the past, something which I looked at with the best intentions of someday reading but somehow never did.

Books, for me, were these promises of access to a greater world. They were the keys to open door after door to all the knowledge handed down through the ages. I'm not at all sure why I did not read the books my dad brought me, since otherwise I was constantly reading. Perhaps it was because I was far more excited, as I am still, by a good thriller, and once I discovered a favorite author--Sax Rohmer was one--I would hunt down all his books either at our local library or, better yet, at the fabulous central library in downtown Los Angeles.

No, I do not think it was any suppressed resentment at my dad's absence. Despite the fact that I had grown up hearing the litany of his sins from my mother--not least of which was his failure to pay any kind of child support at at time when she was supporting us by peddling handmade potholders from store to store--I always looked up to him, and later, when I became an author appearing on radio and television, I found that his was the approbation that mattered most.

Perhaps, had he been more a part of my life, I would never have been drawn to the Jesuits. He had vague thoughts of my applying to West Point since he knew a congressman who would put in a word for me, but I was going by that fearsome logic that drove so many of us to the priesthood or religious life: it was better to be a priest than a layman, and it was better to be member of a religious order than it was to be part of the diocesan clergy, even if I could have been accepted as the offspring of a marriage that the church did not recognize.

As a Jesuit I did have a hard time of feeling that I really belonged. Unlike most of my fellow novices, I had not attended a Jesuit school, I was both an inept athlete and even a worse singer (the split seemed to be between the jocks and the choirboys, with the most promising able to fit into both camps), and I was resolutely attempting to divorce myself from my past. What saved me, I think, were the books. As a novice one of the jobs I held was as the individual responsible for distributing books from our own library, and then upon taking vows and moving to the opposite wing of our house of studies in Los Gatos, I found I could freely wander through the stacks availabkle to the priests and other scholastics. It's not that I read so much as the very possibility of being able to read whatever I chose.

At our scholasticate in Spokane whatever I understood a Jesuit library to be was almost unbelievably expanded. Following the Second World War Jesuits had bought up and transferred much of the material available in Europe, and here I could pull out leather-bound volumes printed three hundred years before. Again I did not really read much out of these fantastic collections, but the idea that they were there was what mattered most. As a regent living on the campus of USF, again I was enthralled by all the options that were there.

I presently have an enormous library with shelves in several rooms and boxes upon boxes in storage. I have history and philosophy and so much more, and, again, I have to admit that it seems to be the possession that matters more than the use. If I choose, I can open more doors, see more vistas. I will still buy books, often compulsively when I develop a sudden interest, and most remain in pristine condition (I just counted up my cookbooks and realize I have close to a hundred), and I realize that much of this only continues that tendency I had as a kid and again as a young Jesuit. Books were my silent friends, willing to open themselves to me if I so chose but never holding it against me if I ignored them.