For two weeks you have been teaching the freshmen about Hitler and the Holocaust. Your whole life, or at least since first grade, you have known about these things because your dad had a deep interest in them. You are certain that, in some alternate universe, he became a professor of them. In this one, he just read many books.

You first heard of Adolf Hitler because Dad was reading a thick paperback biography with a white cover. The title might have been something so original as Hitler. You can still see it in your mind, the spine creased and beaten, sitting on an end table, on a shelf. (Was that the book that your youngest brother, maybe two years old at the time, tossed into the creek on a vacation in Colorado and you all had to fish it out and dry it on the generator of the camper you were borrowing from your grandparents?) It was a big book to your little kid eyes, and you asked who the funny man on the cover was. Dad answered you pretty honestly, telling you all about the evil man who made speeches and tried to take over Europe and kill millions of Jews. That may also have been how you, living in the seemingly uniformly Catholic New Orleans, learned about Jews. (But that’s all part of another story.)

Teaching about this part of history now, nearly six months to the day since his death has perhaps contributed to your deep, existential funk. You want to talk with him about the rise of the Third Reich and World War II, ask him questions about details and events. The worst came yesterday when you got to the war and the Battle of Britain. You had to take a moment because the memory came back to you so viscerally it might well have been a vision.

Your ninth grade history teacher was the worst of the worst sort of stereotype of the Texas football coach teaching history. Your high school’s architecture was a product of some late-1960s or early-1970s idea that allowed neither windows nor walls. Your history classroom had one of the only windows in a classroom in the whole building, and the window looked out over the football field. The coach assigned to babysit the class positioned his desk at a right angle to the window so that he could look out onto the varsity team’s practice while also seeming to oversee the classroom. Meanwhile, his captives copied the terms he wrote on the blackboard and found their definitions in the textbook.

Yes, this asshole was probably the reason that other assholes came up with No Child Left Behind within the decade, thus leaving all the childs behind. But you digress.

Anyway, during that semester your family went to Chuck E. Cheese for your younger brother’s birthday. All through pizza, you bitched about this horrid method of teaching history and how your class had reached World War II, which should be so exciting but the dumbfuck coach just sat there watching the team practice. Well, the absence of proper instruction on World War II had your dad worried and got him talking. Your mom took your brothers to play the arcade games, which she, truth be told, wanted to play, too; and you and your dad kept up this conversation about history. Not about the crap teacher, but about the subject. Of that shitastic semester, that shitastic class, that awful semester, this is the shining gem of a memory.

You and dad sat in that booth and he told you the story of the Battle of Britain. He told you about the Luftwaffe Messerschmidts launching attacks on England. He told you about the brave RAF pilots in their Spitfires who fought them off at all hours. He told you how those English pilots had so little sleep, how weary they became. He told you how a fog came up over the channel one night and gave them a much needed respite. He told you how that rest allowed them to come back hard. He told you how they repulsed the Luftwaffe and force the Nazi to back off and give up the plan to invade. His admiration and awe at those pilots still shimmers around him, in his voice, in your memory of that evening. He transfixed you with that story.

You feel a warm, molten ball of love move from your chest out toward him, for being wholly himself right there and then. Just him, a person nerding out over the thing that he adores and sharing it with a willing audience.