1964–2011

      The plot of the Odyssey is not long in the telling. A man has been away from home for many years; Poseidon is always on the watch for him; he is all alone. As for the situation at home, his goods are being laid waste by the Suitors, who plot against his son. After a storm-tossed journey, he returns home, where he reveals himself, destroys his enemies, and is saved.

      —ARISTOTLE, Poetics

      One January evening a few years ago, just before the beginning of the spring term in which I was going to be teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey, my father, a retired research scientist who was then aged eighty-one, asked me, for reasons I thought I understood at the time, if he might sit in on the course, and I said yes. Once a week for the next sixteen weeks he would make the trip between the house in the Long Island suburbs where I grew up, a modest split-level in which he still lived with my mother, to the riverside campus of the small college where I teach, which is called Bard. At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen who were enrolled in the course, seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home.

      It was deep winter when that term began, and when my father wasn’t trying to persuade me that the poem’s hero, Odysseus, wasn’t in fact a “real” hero (because, he would say, he’s a liar and he cheated on his wife!), he was worrying a great deal about the weather: the snow on the windshield, the sleet on the roads, the ice on the walkways. He was afraid of falling, he said, his vowels still marked by his Bronx childhood: fawling. Because of his fear of falling, we would make our way gingerly along the narrow asphalt paths that led to the building where the class met, a brick box as studiedly inoffensive as a Marriott, or up the little walkway to the steep-gabled house at the edge of campus that for a few days each week was my home. To avoid having to make the three-hour trip twice in one day, he would often spend the night in that house, sleeping in the extra bedroom that serves as my study, stretched out on a narrow daybed that had been my childhood bed—a low wooden bed that my father built for me with his own hands when I was old enough to leave my crib. Now there was something about this bed that only my father and I knew: it was made out of a door, a cheap hollow door to which he’d screwed four sturdy wooden legs, securing them with metal brackets that are as solidly attached today as they were fifty years ago when he first joined the steel to the wood. This bed, with its amusing little secret, unknowable unless you hauled