Good Night, Gorilla

My dad has a small office in our house that's crammed full of books. He buys them secondhand, all genres, anything that looks interesting. He added a shelf around the ceiling, and still they are stacked up everywhere imaginable, overflowing - one day his office will explode, its door coming off its hinges, texts pouring from their hidey-holes and his desk will drift away on a sea of books. Once he went to NAPA to buy some car part for my Dodge, and when he got home he told me I owed him $30.

-What?! How do I owe you $30?
-I went to NAPA which is right next to Value Village, and I ended up spending $30 on used books, and it's your fault!

He spends a great deal of time in there, and doesn't like for people to bother him, especially little kids. My mom used to babysit this little boy in our ward, who would always go up to the door of my dad's office and see him in there reading. One day he went to the door, but my dad wasn't in there and the kid was shocked, and asked "Where's the man who lives in there?!" He had never seen my dad out of his office and was surprised to find him missing from his "home".

Whenever we were bored we could go to our dad's office and ask for a book, and he wouldn't respond for a minute or so, because he'd be reading a book, but if you stood there long enough he'd look up and you could ask again, and he'd scan his shelves and say "Ooh. How about this one?" and hand you something he thought was interesting.

I looked at them today and made a list of titles that I found interesting for various reasons, but mostly because I felt they explained a lot about who my dad is.

The Bible as History
Man vs. The Welfare State
The American Short Story
A Simple Plan
The Outline of History - H.G. Wells
A Book About A Thousand Things - George Stimpson
The Dictionary of Cliches
The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
A Field Guide to the Insects
A Layman's Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis
A G-Man's Journal
Comedy Writing Secrets
Red Square
The Book of Mormon
Scarne's Complete Guide to Gambling
Chilton's 1968 Auto Repair Manual
Masterpieces of Mystery and Suspense
Typee - Herman Melville
Deepest Thoughts - Jack Handy
Crime as Work
Home Food Dehydration
It Didn't Start With Watergate
Hollywood vs. America
The Charlotte Armstrong Festival
Functional Human Anatomy
Occidental Mythology
Understanding Broadcasting
The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
The Book of Rifles
Torture Through the Ages
The Last of the Mohicans
A Treasury for Word Lovers
Miracles -C.S. Lewis
The Collector's Guide to Antique Radios
The World Encyclopedia of Modern Guns
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

As you can see, his tastes are varied - books on religion, guns, government, conspiracies, classics, comedy, "how-to" type books, and a lot of books about word origins and literature. Missing from this list is a large book of photographs containing all the different breeds of dogs that exist. I couldn't find it, but I remember looking through that one as a kid - also missing were the Gary Larsen books that always occupied the southwest top shelf corner.

Also on the list were the following 5 books that stood out to me, and helped me to realize that I truly am my father's daughter:

Longman Crossword Key
How to be a Stand-up Comic
Under the Black Flag: the Romance and the Reality of Life Among Pirates
Cocaine: Its History, Uses and Effects
Good Night, Gorilla

Most of them have an obvious explanation, except maybe Good Night, Gorilla . It's the book H and I got for our dad last Christmas. It's a children's story that's in the nursery at church, and apparently he's been known to go in and read it to the kids. I think this has nothing to do with being kind to children and everything to do with the fact that he finds it funny and wants to read it himself. It's about a gorilla that goes around with a stolen set of keys unlocking all the cages in the zoo at night. The copy we bought him even came with a little plush gorilla doll. I find this childlike streak of his very funny, but I understand it as well, because I see it in me.

There are so many things about my dad that don't seem to fit, like the fact that he loves both guns and musicals, and knows all the rules of football and basketball but prefers to play tennis because it requires grace. Not that he should have to choose, but I see in him the two extremes and little middle ground. Perhaps he's just incredibly well rounded, and I don't know but that everyone in our family hasn't turned out to be a lot like him in some way or another. We all have:
- weird senses of humor
- good taste in films (an opinion, but still true)
- a love of thrift shopping

We're all very different yet very alike at the same time. M-Lite made a face the other day and I told her she looked just like dad. I like to grab leaves off of bushes, tear them up into small pieces, and then scatter them on the ground - and when I'm done with an orange peel I cut it first into strips and then into tiny pieces. I don't know why this is, but my mom saw me do this once and said I was just like dad. Apparently, and unbeknownst to me, after he's done eating his chocolate covered raisins in the movie theatre he tears the box to bits and leaves it on the floor.

It's incredible how much influence your family has on you, your habits, the way you turn out, the way you think and view the world. It's the fact that you've been hanging out with these people for the last 20 years that shapes you; of course you act the same, find the same things funny, like the same people, and share a dislike of cats and communism.

This was from looking at my dad's shelves (which I have done countless times), seeing the eclectic nature of the things he reads, and wondering at, but not being at all surprised at seeing, The Book of Mormon, Scarne's Complete Guide to Gambling, and Cocaine: It's History, Uses and Effects all in one library.

*Editor's note: Not 5 minutes after posting this I told my mom she was sitting in a highly trafficked area. She told me I sounded just like my dad.