I wanted him to feel that he had something worthwhile to share with his daughter.
For every day the next seven months, I visited him and brought books.
My tote bag became a little library.
I brought James Baldwin, I brought Walt Whitman, C.S. Lewis.
I brought guidebooks to trees, to birds, and what would become his favorite book, the dictionary.
On some days, we would sit for hours in silence, both of us reading.
And on other days, we would read together, we would read poetry.
We started by reading haikus, hundreds of haikus, a deceptively simple masterpiece.
And I would ask him, "Share with me your favorite haikus." And some of them are quite funny.
So there's this by Issa: "Don't worry, spiders, I keep house casually." And this: "Napped half the day, no one punished me!" And this gorgeous one, which is about the first day of snow falling, "Deer licking first frost from each other's coats." There's something mysterious and gorgeous just about the way a poem looks.