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18. MY FATHER AND THE BOOKSHELVES (Sept. 2002)
My father, Joseph Rosenstein, died about 6 years ago. I'm not here to mourn him, or to ask you kind strangers to. I'll remember him as the vigorous, and athletic, and superbright kind of hyper marvel he was at his peak, not the mentally bombed-out remains at the end, staggering through a world that by his early 70's had turned into a total fog. But that's not why I'm talking about him. Here's why. It's just a little story. I was sleeping over at his apartment, visiting with my mother. Now here's the arrangement in my old bedroom: Above the bed, as I'm sleeping, bracketed into the wall, is shelf after shelf holding a huge amount of my library, a lot of which is hardcover. Is there one other bedroom in this whole world that has such a lunatic arrangement? Such a dangerous arrangement? Every time I lie down there I reach out to feel the wall brackets for any wobble or looseness. Unquestionably if these shelves collapse while I'm sleeping I'm dead. Like him. Yeah, I'm reaching out to touch my father. He's steady as a rock. He built those shelves for his crazy, worthless, aggravating, ungrateful bookworm teenage kid and they haven't loosened a micro-inch in 3 decades. Thanks, Dad.
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