Life with father.(In real life: first-person America)

My father never tossed a softball with me. He never took me hiking. He never taught me how to start a campfire.

Thank goodness.

Had he been the type of person to do those things, he wouldn't have been the exceptional force in my life that he is. My father was the 14-year-old kid who spent his allowance on a record player and classical LPs, making him an outcast and bona fide nerd. Later, despite looks that put Cary Grant to shame, he was still a loner, swimming against the tide, devouring records and books along the way.

Since I was little, we listened to music together, and do so to this day. My father opened the glorious world of classical music to me, but that's not the only music we listened to. It was not at a party at a friend's house, but on the sofa in our living room, sitting next to my father, that I first heard Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, and The Alan Parsons Project.

Our huge living room was essentially a library with a couch, television set, and a (superb) hi-fi set-up, including a subwoofer that my father built himself. The walls were lined with the bookshelves and record cabinets that my father designed. My friends were in awe of the sheer volume of books and records that filled the room, and I pitied them when I thought of their barren homes, with not much more reading material than a TV guide and the perfunctory Bible.

At our house, my atheist father stocked the library with multiple Bibles, one of his many intellectual pursuits being Biblical scholarship. Always one to share the delights of his mind with his daughter, he read me bedtime stories from the Old Testament.

When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to go to Sunday school, and my father drove me every week. He once told me, as a thought experiment, to consider that there are two things God cannot do: He can't make a square that's round; and He can't make an object so heavy that He can't lift it. I blabbed that witticism to my Sunday school teacher, sweet-hearted Mr. Hall, who worried for my soul, convinced I was ...