The other day I did some research for a friend about a Mesopotamian goddess, tracking down some details. Mythology has been an interest of mine since childhood. I read voraciously anything new to me. I tried to find everything and anything that was more than just the Greek and Roman myths. But it is not like my conversation at the dinner table was filled with references to mythology.
Even so, when I was in high school, for Christmas one year, my father gave me a copy of the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (with an introduction by Robert Graves).
The heavy book (about four pounds, in fact) is chock full of pictures that represent the mythologies of many world cultures. I fell in love with the book. And when I joined the research staff of Jeopardy! I took it into the office, and for the duration of my time with the show, invariably used it as my first go-to on most mythology clues.
But this research this weekend was the first time I’d taken it off the shelf in three years. I’d written up my notes to my friend and was sitting at my desk enjoying something else and vague thinking that I needed to put the research books back on their shelves. The Larousse sat on the top of the “pile” with the light reflecting off the still-shiny jacket cover.
Suddenly, I was thinking of my father and how he’d given me this book for Christmas way back when. I was suddenly looking at the book from a different perspective, thinking of how he must have seen it somewhere and chosen it to give to me. I certainly had not requested anything like it. But he knew it was the thing to get for me.
Now so many years later, long after he had passed away, I am thinking of how many times he chose gifts for me that suited me. And they weren’t always given for Christmas or birthdays. Sometimes they were things that just “showed up” in the house, or that he gave me almost incidentally.
One thing that “showed up” in the household was an omnibus volume of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
I had my first encounter with Sherlock Holmes when I was in fourth grade, reading His Last Bow in a paperback edition I had purchased on my own. It enchanted me, and made me hungry for more. Dad bought me an “abridged” version of other Holmes stories and I zipped through that so fast I was antsy when I finished. More, more! Not long after that, the omnibus volume “appeared.” This was not presented as being a gift to me. I know he read through it himself. But gradually, the volume came to take up residence in my room and by osmosis became “mine” (I have it still, in fact).
A few years later, when I finally bought myself a copy of The Hobbit and fell in love with the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, he bought me the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings for Christmas. Now, I probably did talk about The Hobbit a lot after finishing it, so it must not have been any difficulty in considering LotR as a good gift.
Why is it that children do not always register how well a parent is in fact paying attention? I know I suffered from the usual Middle Child syndrome of feeling overlooked and unspecial. And yet now I can see clearly that he paid much more attention than I ever realized.
Even little things that I might not have considered for years, he would still keep in mind.
One day, when I was in either nineth or tenth grade, he came to me after some excursion he’d made somewhere and handed me a little brass duck.
It’s about an inch tall. He had seen it somewhere and bought it for me. He said he thought I would like it.
I did, actually. It suddenly cast me back to my very young days, when I was maybe five. On Sundays sometimes, after church, we would go for drives. Occasionally, he would stop at some grocery, buy a day-old bread loaf, and then take us to a local park where we would feed the ducks. I loved feeding the ducks. Noisy, quacking creatures, but they would come up around us as we tore bits of bread off each slice and tossed it to them. They would zero in as a cluster, each trying to be the one to get that bit of bread. The way the brass duck’s head is raised still evokes those sun-lit days and the sound of flocks of ducks.
I often say to people that there is power in physical objects. And yet, I don’t always consider it in how that truth affects me. But today, sitting here at my desk, looking at the Larousse, I muse on the value of this book. It is precious to me, even though it is an older edition, even though some of the pages are coming loose from the binding, even though the dust jacket is slightly worn. It isn’t just the objective value of it as a good reference for mythology, or the years of use I have gotten from it. And it isn’t even “just” that it is a gift from my father who has been gone from me for twenty years. It is that it was a gift selected specifically for me, not random chance, not “this year’s popular gift,” but something that he, in his love for me, based on his careful attention to me, knew I would love.
What a talent for parenting he had. What a blessing it is to have been loved so. It is a pleasure to be able to say this, to have these memories to think of and rejoice in.
