On Father's Day
My father, Jim Burton, was not a reader. In truth, neither of my parents were bibliophiles. The bookshelves in our family room contained a complete set of Collier's Encyclopedias, a huge unabridged dictionary (both handy when we asked a question so my mother could point and say, "Look it up!"), a medical dictionary left over from Mom' s nursing days, and a literal handful of novels. After my siblings and I moved beyond the collection of Dr. Seuss, A Child's Book of Verses, and the complete Junior Classics, the only ever-expanding library in the house was mine. Dad was an aeronautical engineer, and while reading and engineering aren't mutually exclusive, in our household the only reading material other than the newspaper Dad perused (in the bathroom, where the magazine rack was installed) was IEEE (an industry pub) and Popular Science . Therefore, when I began to write seriously, the process wasn't something we could discuss. Oh, he'd listen, with a