Be Near Me Read Online Free

I've got tasks.'
    She smiled. 'That's right,' she said. 'Tasks. But I'm glad we have time for our wee conversations.' She wiped a spot from the table. 'I won't say I very often agree with you.'

    My father always said one wasn't a man and knew nothing of life until one could read the local newspaper from cover to cover and find every item interesting. Everything from the church news to the prices of used cars, from the legal notices to the births, marriages and deaths. I was very small, but I clearly remember him reading the
Lancaster and Morecambe Citizen
with a bone-handled magnifying glass, enlarging the specimens of print—even in the house he showed his love of science, his capturing eye—to discover the inner pattern and the secret of life.
    Yet I can't quite see his face. It appears to me in dreams sometimes, like my own face but tougher, his high forehead signifying an easy and proud domination of family routines as well as some unspoken understanding of the world's troubles. My father was a surgeon and he took a surgeon's interest in what might be called the near certainty of outcomes. He was an educated man of his generation: more interested in habits than in character, more given to thought than declaration. Such men are apt to remain a mystery to their sons, but I know my father believed in preparation, he believed in the professional approach, and, when it came to the consideration of life's priorities, he liked to quote Samuel Johnson on the notion that there was nothing too small for such a small thing as man. That was his unbending rule.
    He hated chaos and impropriety. People who failed to make their beds in the morning were reprobates to him, and those who failed to pay their taxes were worse than murderers. One had a duty to polish one's shoes and give up one's seat. It was crucial to know when to shut up and when to tell the truth about oneself. His standards were not especially high, just especially precise and rigid, giving one the impression that a netherworld existed beyond shoe-polishing and bed-making, a region he had come to know about in his life's travels, a terrible hell for people who did not know how to live and who had no gratitude. He doubted the arts and anything remotely 'airy-fairy,' content to live, as he did, in a world of concrete objects and brown English likelihoods. I'm sure he would have come to find my mother and me quite intolerable. He wanted simple proof of everything, the weather, for instance, or the existence of God, and my going into the priesthood would have seemed to him, like my mother's novels, a grand and unnecessary bid for an idealism too proud to accommodate the facts.
    Yet he wasn't morose. He was excited by his life. He enjoyed getting up in the morning and kept a woodpecker clock by the bed, a Swiss contraption that shocked him out of sleep at 5 a.m. He had leather carpet slippers ready on the floor, which he wore for the journey to the bathroom, a gleaming place where everything waited in good order, foreign soaps, tooth powder, his shaving things and a bottle of cologne. Every small element of life fascinated him and he wanted to get it right. The kitchen was a laboratory and so was the garden. It was always clear to me, even as a boy, that my father was the type to believe that human beings, even if not capable of it, should be ready to have an influence on everything around them and be conscious all the time of how to live and what to do.
    Once a swallow's nest fell from the eaves of the house. My father gathered us together in the front room. He made us sit quietly by the window, watching the unfolding drama, seeing if the chicks inside the nest would be rescued or abandoned or stolen. In the end it was all too much for him. He brought the nest inside and taught me how to feed the chicks with a dropper. Two of them died, but one survived, and he put everything into the life of that bird. He took a pencil and pointed to the bulging purple skin that