Dad's Lists

A son turns a page after unearthing his father's notebooks

- BY Robert Muldoon Jr. FROM NEWSWEEK

MY FATHER KEPT lists. He listed the 539 books he read in his last 25 years. He listed every C-Span Booknotes episode he watched religiously every Sunday night for almost seven years (322 shows). Oh, yes, he loved books! He kept shopping lists for his small fridge in his man cave (Pepsi, hazelnut coffee, heavy cream), and long lists of daily tasks.

He recorded them in pocket-sized notebooks kept close by his reading chair. He never stopped writing lists until 5 p.m. on 31 December 2004, when the cancer finally stopped him.

After his death, I scooped all his little notebooks into a box. Besides the book list (recorded in what was reverentially called “the green book”), I rarely perused the other notebooks. The pain of his death was too raw, and then the business of living interfered.

Dad was born in 1927 in Lowell, Massachusetts. His father worked in a tannery that turned cow carcasses into leather. His Irish immigrant grand-father rose from the wool mills to a city job as a ‘sparrow man,’ cleaning Lowell streets by shoveling horse manure. (To those who disparaged Lowell, he cracked: “You'd never call Lowell a one-horse town if you followed me around on my daily rounds!”)