The house I grew up in was a tiny thing, 1100 square feet, but it seemed like a palace full of surprises. I suspect that was due in no small part to the mountains of books stacked to the rafters in every room of our house. When my stepmother and Dad remodeled and updated the creaky old lady, they built bookshelves that went from floor to ceiling in three rooms, every nook and cranny packed with enormous tomes. All the other rooms had books or periodicals crammed willy-nilly in corners, on our built-ins, over tables. There was no room left tidy; there were just too many damned books.

There was rhyme and some small reason to the order, though at times flexible to interpretation. The living room was devoted to art and art history books, a collection which many universities would envy. The foyer (wasted space in such a tiny house until the shelves went in) was the overflow, an annex for books that didn’t have an easy home elsewhere in the collection. The upstairs hall, another completely impractical room that created a sort of bizarre catwalk around the stair case, housed literature from the classics to the absolute trashiest fluff, including the collected pulp novels about Tarzan the Apeman. I liked them for their risque and ridiculous cover art, Tarzan shouting in agony over the limp body of a scantily clad Jane.

In this environment, Dad was all-knowing. I suppose that’s nothing new to anyone who’s ever had a parent (!); parents seem omniscient, as if they can see around corners, and know all the answers from the mundane to arcane. And they definitely seem right most of the time, even if one doesn’t like it. I think Dad’s grandeur was bolstered with the rather imperious stacks of knowledge that crowded every surface, his stage set behind him at all times, encouraging one to think, “Good grief, with all this to back him up, how could I ever doubt him?”

I flipped through dozens of art books, though none of it really stuck. I saw the words “Dada” and “Baroque” on the spines of books and couldn’t have told you the difference, but I knew that Dad knew intimately and could have waxed a rather lengthy bit on either. He knew about literature, history, art, who wrote what and when, where they came from, how they painted, and why (or why they weren’t) famous. Dad swam in his ocean of books, and I was in a dinghy puddling about, surrounded by all the knowledge (and some of the kitsch) that helped give Dad a sagacity that I was pretty awed by.

There was a funky little antique bookcase in the hall, stuck in one of the many useless corners. A musty old thing, but I loved it. It had transom glass doors that hinged upward and revealed a collection of books from Dad’s childhood: Robin Hood, King Arthur, Treasure Island, all lavishly illustrated by N.C Wyeth and preserved with their dust jackets worn but still protective of their masters. This was the swashbuckling section, with love, tragedy, adventure and heroics all represented as if out of history. I never read them, though I know my brother did, but the bookcase held some sway over me; I knew that it was important, if only because it represented time and what had gone before.

That this represented Dad’s childhood possibly never registered in my proto-brain; Dad was always the academician thumbing through his collections, searching through archives for his next syllabi. He was never a child to me, though he told us stories of someone who shared his name in the distant past. The notion of his childhood was irrelevant; children are always creatures of immediacy and any past before their own time is as alien and unreal as any story in a book.

When Dad got ill and was closing up like a fallen leaf, he was increasingly watching old movies. Musicals, sometimes, but mostly swashbucklers or dramas from when he was a kid. He needed to not be too challenged, an instinct I understand just from having the flu or a common cold. No heavy lifting, no Ingmar Bergman films. No subtitles, no moral ambiguity. True evil versus true heroism, and even if the antagonists are more likable than the heroes, the resolution is fair. I recognized too that it was the solace of his youth, the tales that saved him from his insufferable mother and his somewhat lonely childhood, the sanctuary to which he could retreat and be embraced by old friends and foes.

In my helpless way, not knowing what to do other than squire him from doctor to medical device and home, I gave him the Harry Potter books to read, trying to fill his need for delivery from the betrayal of his body. It’s not Ullyses, but it’s a good yarn, as they say. And it seemed to fill the bill for the great wonders of literature, the magical tales that have the ability to transport without making you work too hard for the trip.

He devoured them one after the other, and I could sense his childlike glee with each plot twist and evil machination. He was particularly delighted and horrified by Professor Umbridge, the bureaucratic sadist who delivers Hogwarts not to ultimate evil, but the evil of busywork and petty tyranny; I suspect he was reminded of his last years as a professor himself, increasingly subjected to staff meetings and committees which had no aim but the bottom line and obscured the sole purpose of higher learning: to teach people how to think for themselves.

I still don’t know what to do most of the time, but I bought the Harry Potter movies so that we could watch them together. We saw one the other night and as we watched I could feel him squirming next to me, either in sympathy for our beleaguered heroes, or admonition toward the antagonists, just as he must have when he was a child absorbed by his Robin Hood‘s and Robinson Crusoe‘s. And I don’t have too many other cards up my sleeve, but for once I gave my Dad something special that could transport him away from his travails, if only for a while.

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