LITMIR.BIZ

      I first opened this lovely book in 1971 when I was twelve years old. My parents had divorced only a year or so earlier, and we four kids were living with our newly single mother in a semi-abandoned shipbuilding town on a river just south of the New Hampshire border. Downtown was one empty mill after another, rotted sheets of plywood nailed across their windows and doorways, weeds growing up through cracks in the sidewalk in front of the only businesses that seemed to be still running— a newsstand, a luncheonette, and a dim barroom in front of which were often parked Harley Davidsons, a jukebox inside playing Tom Jones or The Allman Brothers.

      My mother had rented a half-house across from a field of weeds where drunks lived all summer long, and on the other side of the house lived another single mother whose TV was never turned off, her young kids running inside and out. It was also a neighborhood of tough and angry kids I tried to keep away from, so for a while I kept close to our new rented half-house, its paint flaking off the clapboards onto the strip of yard between it and the hot sidewalk.

      On Sundays our father would pick us up and drive us four kids to church. He was thirty-five years old then and always kept his brown beard neatly trimmed. A few years earlier he had published his first book, a novel called The Lieutenant, and I knew he was a teacher in a college town a few miles up the river, though I rarely thought about him in this way; he was my father, and I missed him, and I was sure somewhere deep inside me that I and my brother and sisters had done something terrible that had made him leave.

      One of these Sundays he drove us to a church in Boston forty miles south. He heard its priests preached against the Vietnam War, so we went there, and after Mass, the five of us went walking through Harvard Square. I had never been there before, and I liked how crowded it was with people carrying books or backpacks full of books or guitars slung over their shoulders. Most of the men had long hair and beards, and the women wore tight bellbottom jeans, their hair long and shiny, and in the air were the smells of car exhaust and cigarette and pot smoke and coffee from some cafe. So many of the stores and shops had their doors propped open, and there were long tables set up on the sidewalks and on them were rows of jewelry, handmade leather pocketbooks and wallets, hundreds of albums wedged into cardboard boxes. In front of a big newsstand in the center of the square were five or six tables weighed down with hundreds of books, and this is where our father stopped and began to browse, and so we stopped and began to look through them, too.

      I hadn’t read a book since I was nine or ten. It was something I used to enjoy, but with the family breaking up and our mother having to move us from one place to another, reading had fallen away, and now my brother and sisters and I spent a lot of time in front of our black-and-white TV, watching silly game shows and half-hour comedies of laughing, happy people. But my father read books and clearly loved them. I could see it in the way he would pick up each one, turning it over to read the back cover, then slowly opening it to see what was inside. To him they seemed to be sacred objects, and this left me feeling far away from my father and adult life, and that is when he picked up a hardcover book with an orange and charcoal dust jacket and said, “Oh no, man. Not Bubble Gum and Kipling.”

      “What’s the matter?”

      He explained to me that this was a very good book he’d read when it came out just a few years earlier, but that now it was on the remainder table.

      “What’s that mean?”

      “It means the publisher has stopped printing them.” My father carried that book into the newsstand, and he bought it and

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