When my mother died, I was seventeen. “Tell your father I said goodbye,” she said. Those were the last words she said. She said them to me.

She had taught me to love words. She was Irish, so that made sense.

For years after she left us, I read. Incessantly. Hemingway, Graham Greene, John LeCarre, Katharine Anne Porter, Barbara Tuchman, Richard Brautigan, Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolfe, Ken Kesey, Michener and Rutherford, in their vastness, electric Kerouac, the murderous men and women captured in ways that kept me up at night (Vincent Bugliosi, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote); the science fiction of Vonnegut and Heinlein, the strangeness of Hesse, and all the New Journalism that I could inhale.

But the books I kept turning back to included the Civil War historian Bruce Catton and his three-part study of the Army of the Potomac (“Mr. Lincoln’s Army.”) Many years later, I had read Catton’s books so often—I read them every time I missed my Mom—and so deeply that when we visited Gettysburg with my little boys, we didn’t need a tour guide. At every stop, I knew where we were and what had happened there.

That led, fifty years later, to a book I wrote about the Civil War. Hare are a few passages about Gettysburg.

As disgusted as I am with Steinbeck—recently revealed to have stolen much of his research for The Grapes of Wrath from Sanora Babb, a gifted writer, a woman,—the other book that sustained me when I missed my mother was the ever-so-slight Cannery Row. Mom loved Doc, in real life biologist Ed Ricketts, his politeness toward dogs and the time he ordered, out of whimsy, a beer milkshake.

We took Mission kids on a field trip to Cannery Row when I was a young teacher, to the Aquarium, which I still love despite the fact that they won’t let me bring a penguin home with me, and there was an exhibit that replicated the lab and office of Doc’s Pacific Biological. It would be several years before I’d be as enchanted and as humbled as I was that day. That was when we took AGHS kids to Assisi, and I prayed below St. Francis’s little tomb.

And I am due to take flowers to my Mom.

She would’ve been pleased to know that high-school kids loved to be read aloud to (sorry for the gracelessness of that construction) just as much as little kids do. There’s not much more that I loved than reading aloud to them. Years later, I decided to try it again (below) with the slightest of books, Cannery Row, the book my mother, an incredible woman, loved, and the book that made me love her all over again.