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Reader, your mouse has hit a low point after a really splendid week. She’s sick and snuffly and unable to deal with anything remotely challenging or intellectual. She needs a hug.
So imagine her joy when, during a long phone call (mostly consisting of said mouse whining about said illness), her father lets slip that he has got her the perfect Christmas present.
Oh, reader! There is nothing, nothing like a Pléiade. I have never owned one. I have fondled many. It will be difficult to choose between reading it and just coddling it, nuzzling it, smooshing my face into it. And Montaigne… oh, reader.
The word, I believe, is “bibliogasm.”
This is just to say that I am grateful for my relationship with my father. Some of you have heard me give my canned spiel, a spiel that begins, “It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that I did not have a conversation with my father until I was sixteen years old…”
And it isn’t.
But I just spent the past three hours talking comfortably and continuously with him about stuff I care about a whole lot, which also happens to be stuff he’s got a hobbyist’s enthusiasm for. He respects me and what I have to say. When he doesn’t know something, he asks me. When I don’t know, I run up and get the appropriate book or dash to the computer to track down the answer, and we read it together. The conversation began with such a question: “Did Shakespeare have an ‘original’ for Falstaff?” I ran for my Arden 1 Henry IV and read the introductory material on that question aloud. We talked for a long while about Falstaff, Shakespeare, texts and editing, poetry. He told me stories about his sister, Jean, typing his undergraduate papers and howling with laughter with his librarian mother and aunt. He told me lots of stories, many of which I’d heard before. I listened and laughed and when he asked me if I’d heard these stories I smiled and said, “No.”
I don’t know anyone else – well, maybe one other person – who would listen to me reading ten pages about Sir John Oldcastle and what he may or may not have been doing on the Elizabethan stage. As I looked around us at the rapidly-filling ashtray, the antics of the dog, the scattered empty teacups and cigarette boxes and the books and magazines piled around our feet on the ottoman, I thought, “This is miraculous.”
How did we get here? How, sometime in the middle of my twentieth year, did we suddenly begin to understand each other? I’ve marvelled at it ever since, and I am deeply grateful for it.
