Read Me Forever

During the past couple of months my mom has been doing some major house cleaning.  She's been emptying shelves and clearing out closets full of my dad's stuff.  He was a secret hoarder.
Today Dave and I did a little house cleaning too, preparing a spare bedroom for office space.  A stack of my dad's forgotten books caught my attention mid-clean.
His copy of of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "John Carter of Mars" (now a major motion picture) and a worn out copy of J.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" caught my attention.
My parents have instilled in me a love of literature. I remember my mom and and my dad reading to me at night or during the day.
At night my dad used to tell stories, some were true but most of them were fiction--stories he read and condensed for my child ears. It was a big shocker when I was in high school and learned that the story he told me about a boy playing a video game that destroyed an alien race and saved the world was actually "Ender's Game". My favorite stories were about the Little People, Tarzan or Toy Stories.
Since I could read, I considered books to be fond treasures but my dad's books are especially priceless. When I pick up those old books from my childhood, I feel as though I have a physical manifestations of my childhood.  As Cameron gets older, I'll read them again so she can have moments like that to carry with her forever. It's as though some books live on forever.