(My parents and older siblings taught me to love books. But Dad was the one who told me that reading could be humbling. It expands your knowledge, but it reveals your smallness. The more you read, the more you realize how little you know.
In the years before he left us, it was so sad to see him holding his grandchildren's books, turning their pages, and unable to read the letters. I wrote a poem after watching one such incident in 2011 or 2012.
Watching Daddy Struggle to Read
You hold a book open on pages 44 to 45
But it is just a weight on your jittery hands
Your decades of alliance with the written word
Have been broken, or worse totally obliterated
Your unsure smile reveals the hidden helplessness
You used to have such a sharp mind:
Your high school classmates would say
A genius with numbers
An English grammar police
Despite the strong accent
Reminiscent of that rustic place
You were born in
Where forthrightness and truth
Are more important than oration
With a foreign accent
I remember everything:
“You say, ‘independent of,’ not ‘from’
‘Result in,’ not ‘to’
‘Comply with’, not ‘to.’” I was nine or ten
But never too young to learn
For someone who believed
So much that familiarity with correctness
Could lead his child to bigger things
Perhaps, a voice for the unheard
A defender of the oppressed
Now, at 75, like a baby taking her first steps
You struggle hard-
I can only imagine how much-
To make sense of the letters
Your hand used to write so beautifully
The words you wrote were always
Shaped like an artist’s masterpiece
Now they are jagged on the edges
Like your memories- fuzzy on the corners
I wonder, Daddy, do you have nostalgia
Of the days when it was not like this?
How I wish the vacuum in your memory
Did not swallow remembered love for us
And our obedience, however failing, to your edict:
"Always be something for others
All the good books teach that."
