Free Thy Neighbor by Norah Vincent

around on his bedside table or on the back of the toilet.
    Fuck me, but I loved the old bastard for his love of learning, even if it was put on. How else? I learned quick enough (or is it quickly?) that learning is putting on, or taking on and then keeping for the times when you find yourself alone in your haunted prison, reciting poetry for comfort.
    He gave me that, the valuation of knowledge for its own sake. I stole a line for every mood to shore me up against the philistine inside me who wanted nothing more than just to
be
in his own gruff body, hanging from tree limbs and raking his toes in the dirt, running wild all day long on a cocktail of breakfast and testosterone.
    That was natural me, and that me took some breaking in the earliest years. But acclimatize the bear to the circus, and he will dance, eventually.
    At first I hated to read, when I was a young boy and Dad and Mom made me do it for an hour each day. Hated it. But then, over time, I came to really love it—slowly, in and after college, when I first learned to savor the pleasure of an idea, rolling it around in my brain, feeling for the first time that you could actually get high, really pleasurably high on thinking.
    But by then, of course, it was too late. The best of me, done for him and courtesy of him, was all dressed up with no place to go. No place to go but a funeral. Oh, well. At least he saw me graduate. At least I made it partway to what he wanted for me.
    That was Dad’s greatest gift. He had worked his way into an education. Earned it for himself. But it was given to me as my birthright from day one, not just in the schooling he paid for but in extras as well. By mandate, he gave me the leisure time and space to learn if I wanted to, and I took it. I came home from school every summer, and Dad said, “Study or get a job.”
    And so, while my friends made cinnamon rolls all day at the mall or mowed lawns for spending money, I chose to study. I took summer school courses, or read on my own from a list that Mom, Dad, or a teacher had given me. I sat by the pool, the pretend gentleman amateur, working on my tan and turning the pages of
The Myth of Sisyphus
, getting maybe every tenth word but feeling really deep all the same for even trying to roll my boulder of a brain up that hill, and then watching it roll back down again.
    Mom assigned me most of the literature, Dad the history, philosophy, and poli sci. True to form, he was big on dates and facts and memorization, she on nuance. All the art genes came from her. She could teach you to feel a sonnet down to the roots of your teeth by way of your broken heart, whereas Dad went at your grammar, hammer and tongs.
    â€œToday, you lay the book on the table and you lie on the couch. Yesterday, you laid the book on the table and you lay on the couch.”
    Right. Got it. First and last lesson learned. A book on the table and a body on the couch. Right here. In this room. Did I say that before? It—the crime—happened here, in Dad’s study, which is now mine.
    Study.
    Study well, boy, and learn.
    And with that, the memories snap shut. The pictures cease.
    I am in the present again, circled back and caught blank.
    Today, which is still so much of yesterday, I lie on the couch beside Monica and I lay what I can of my past out in front of her, telling her all of these things about my parents, my father especially, because she listens, and because lately she asks. It is her asking that helps me to remember, and her listening that helps me to withstand the memory.
    Just barely.
    â€œTell me about your Dad,” she says, whispering, close. And she does it in such a smooth, unassuming way that I am able somehow to answer, even though the same question from anyone else would be grounds for dismissal on the spot.
    She gets away with it, as with so much else, and I let her, because she is my executioner, chosen especially for this. Standing on the scaffold—for what crime? the