'Stranger in Strange Land'

When I first starting dating the woman I would eventually marry, her paternal grandmother had just died. She lived in house in South Dallas. Several months after her death, the family began assessing the items in the house — what to keep, what to giveaway. Who wanted what? In the living room were several built-in shelves stacked with books — old Reader’s Digest condensed editions, encyclopedias and old science fiction and spy novels which had belonged to my girlfriend’s father.

Having no place for it and knowing I liked old books, I was offered them and I took them. Having read a number of them, after I had married his eldest daughter, my father-in-law gave me his first-edition copy of “Stranger in a Strange Land” by his favorite author Robert Heinlein.

It’s a fine novel — although defintely not polished, as the dialogue is that of a 1960s detective film (see: stilted, raw) — which takes on the mores and culture of modern America and their ideas about religion, philosophy and sex.

Particularly sex.

I’ll never look at my father in law the same again.