Today is Valentine’s Day so let me tell you about my son and his love, Jamie.

They had been constant companions for almost five years. They lived together, worked together and spent every waking moment together.

Andrew was a difficult person at times, and that is an understatement!

He was so passionate about his beliefs and would argue his point to the bitter end. Jamie was his balance. For the most part she seemed to support him unconditionally while ignoring his rants. She loved him and by his own admission she took excellent care of him.

I never had to worry while he was with Jamie. She watched his health, monitored his medicines, interceded on his behalf with doctors and kept him fed and watered and pruned him when nessacary.

But it was so much more than that. She loved him, she put up with him, she argued with him and she laughed with him. She made his family hers and made her family his. But most important to me was the fact that my son loved her. End of story – all the other aside, what mattered most is that my son loved her.

And I love her.

I miss my son, he was good company.

Andrew was an avid reader from the moment he could hold a book in his hands. Ironically it was his ability to read at a college level that caused him to not qualify for the help he needed in school. It was only when an astute diagnostician said she could see his learning disability but the standard tests are unable to measure it due to his unbelievable reading ability.
This same woman located a seldom used test to identify the problem and he was diagnosed as having a learning disorder. This was supposed to allow him to have the help he needed to complete high school but it never quite worked out that way. He continued to struggle and academically crawled to graduation. Not that it mattered to him; school was only the place Andrew went to try out his new material.

Still, I think of his voracious apatite for books, his constant need to absorb information.

Many times we disagreed on the books he was reading but he was undaunted, determined to read for himself and make his own decision on whether a piece was edifying or detrimental.

Once during his junior year in high school his teacher called me to ask permission to let Andrew read a certain book. She said he had ability to “handle”…yes, now that I think of it, she did use the word handle…weightier books. The asked permission to let him read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and made a point of mentioning that some of the story would not be suitable for most of her students but she felt Andrew possessed the maturity to handle it.

Sometime after that he picked up a copy of On The Road by Jack Kerouac. After he left us Jamie told me that he made a practice of reading this book at least once year. I found a copy on audio tape and began listening to it as I commuted back and forth to work. It was a very weighty piece of work. Exhausting for me. Many times I had to rewind the tape and listen to a passage over and over in order to absorb it. I consider myself a very good reader but I must admit I struggled with this piece of literature and I only had to listen.

Although it was not my kind of book I regret that I never read it (or listened to it) while Andrew was here. It never crossed my mind. And now its too late to tell him that it blew me away that he read stuff like that. I could totally see that he would identify with the mad pace of the book. Not that he imitated it but rather that he would appreciate the manic speed with which the characters led their lives. It was so him that I dreaded coming to the end. As a side note, with irony that befit Andrew's life I finished the book
(tapes) on the same day his death certificate arrived in the mail.

On the day he died I found a copy of Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground on the bathroom vanity that he had been reading. Jamie told me that was also a book he read often as well as Orwell's 1984. In fact she told me that it was common for Andrew to be reading five books at the same time. How come I didn't know this?

I always bought Andrew books. I might have said no to a toy or a game but I never said no to a book. As a child I watched over what he read. As he grew older and began reading things I might have wished he didn't I always tried to discuss the material with him. As a young adult he liberated himself from this practice.

I always gave him books and when he came to visit he would raid my own library promising to return the books but never bringing one back. Before he died I was at Barnes and Nobel and I saw a book that I thought would make a great Christmas present. I bought it and hid it under my bed. At Christmas I wrapped it up and put it under the tree. It's February and the tree is long gone but the book with its silver holiday paper and fluffy bow are still sitting on the foot stool. Each day I walk past it and think about how this last gift will go unopened. It makes me sad and yet its a sweet reminder that we shared a love of books. It also reminds me of his love of learning, his romance with words and the rare ability to see with his mind beyond the horizon.