When I was forced to put up with my son’s sense of humor, which included turning every word he read onto his family members, the search was on. Could I, as a supportive and patient parent I attempt to be, find a right book for my son? A book that encourages my son to tell a joke that won’t have his mouth washed out with soap? I had to admit I wasn’t confident.

Now, I have a book Jake the Fake Keeps It Real at hand. In fact, Jake is not a perfect kid. The first book in the series, Jake the Fake Keeps It Real, opens with Jake’s explaining how he cheated on the admission of an arts and music academy for gifted kids.

So when Jake realizes that to fit in at art school, he has to come up with some strange ideas, I almost died laughing. Not only did I think that was funny, so did my son. As a matter of fact, Jake the Fake Keeps It Real turned out to be a great distraction (使人分心的事物) from my son’s being disrespectfully funny. And I would rather my son imitate Jake by chewing (咀嚼) the same piece of gum for six hours and then writing a play about it.

I succeeded in one thing: Finding a fittingly funny role model for my son.

The end of the book, chapter 13, where Jake, no-talented, has to perform in the school talent show (obviously if you blow it, you have to quit school and work on a fishing boat). Jake sits down at the piano and knows he can’t do it, so he stands up from the piano.

Here’s where the book really wins my son’s heart for life, because maybe one day, my son might say, as Jake says after his mother praises his talent show appearance and hugs him tightly, “She’s pretty cool sometimes, my mom.”

Growing Up in the Library

I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way. I was raised in the suburbs of Cleveland, just a few blocks from the brick-faced Bertram Woods branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library system. I went there several times a week with my mother. She and I would walk in together, but as soon as we passed through the door, we each headed towards our favorite sections. The library might have been the first place I was ever given autonomy.

Even when I was maybe four or five years old, I was allowed to head off on my own. Then, after a while, my mother and I would reunite at the checkout counter with our finds. Together we'd wait as the librarian pulled out the date card and stamped it with the checkout machine — that giant fist thumping the card with a loud chunk-chunk, printing a crooked due date underneath a score of previous crooked due dates that belonged to other people, other times.

Those visits were dreamy, frictionless (没有摩擦的) periods that held the promise of leaving me richer than I'd arrived. It wasn't like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library, I could have anything I wanted.

After we had finished checking out the books, I loved being in the car and having all the books we'd gotten stacked on my lap, pressing me under their solid, warm weight, their Mylar covers sticking a bit to my thighs. It was such a thrill leaving a place with things you hadn't paid for; such a thrill expecting the new books we would read. On the ride home, my mother and I talked about the order in which we were going to read our books, a serious conversation in which we planned how to pace ourselves through this charmed period of grace until the books were due.

When I was older, I usually walked to the library by myself, lugging back as many books as I could carry. Occasionally, I did go with my mother, and the trip would be as engaging as it had been when I was small. Even when I was in my last year of high school and could drive myself to the library, my mother and I still went together every now and then, and the trip unfolded exactly as it had when I was a child, with all the same beats and pauses and comments and daydreaming, the same perfect rhythm we'd followed so many times before. After my mother passed away two years ago, I plunged into a deep shadow of grief for a long time. When I miss my mother these days, I like to picture us in the car together, going for one more magnificent trip to Bertram Woods, during which we talked, laughed — as if she were still in my company, giving me inexhaustible strength.

When I went off to college in the fall of 1991, I was an 18-year-old man whose favorite letters were the ones on the sports sweater. Four years later, I was crazy about the letters of the poet Keats, but one author’s penned letters stood out above the rest. You see, my father wrote me one letter per week from the time I left home.

In an age before email, these letters seemed too ordinary. But they arrived. Each week. One after another. Again and again. In snowstorms. On holidays. From foreign countries. They detailed what Dad referred to as “the week that was”—a day-by-day description of my father’s life.

In 1995, I graduated from college, like many 22-year olds, with plenty of uncertainty. Some of my questions were pretty typical: What was I going to do? Where was I going to live? When was I going to apply for graduate school? But one question was more vital than any other thing. What would happen to the weekly letters? Would they continue? To my surprise, the letters kept coming, more heartfelt and emotional than before and always on time. I mean the guy never missed.

As much as I enjoyed my father’s weekly letters, I didn’t fully appreciate them all those years when they arrived like clockwork. And I never fully understood why my dad would always ask if I’d received the letter when we spoke.

But now, as I pen my first official letters to my own sons Jackson and Cassius, it all seems clear. Although our boys have yet to leave for college, I have to accept that day will soon come. Just the idea of their leaving from our home makes me ache with sadness only a parent can know.

I am writing about “the week that was” with my daily details. With a box of over 500 of Dad’s letters nearby and his pen in hand, I write a letter, fighting back the tears I make it to the end and sign it just as he did. All my love, Dad.