We always celebrated his return at the bookstore, where we bought the next shipment. Because so many lives were at risk, we chose the books carefully. There were classics written in russian--available at many bookstores in America, but so rare in the country which gave birth to their authors. There were books on philosophy, art, house-building, car-repair, history, and poetry of every nation and culture. My father insisted on at least one funny book, one book filled with images, people and ideas which brought laughter from the darkness and into the light. He called this laughter "the breath of life," because to experience it gave you hope, it made you feel from a place beyond the harshness of circumstance. "If they can laugh, Katya, they can feel, and if they can feel, they can fight against the darkness."

But it couldn't be any laughter, any funny story; it had to taste a certain way. It had to take something from real life and show the humor if viewed from an irreverent perspective. It was one thing to read a scholarly and precise description of happiness. It was quite another to portray the scholar as a fool wasting his life trying to define the meaning of happiness.

My father taught me to look for those books, to read them, to help him sew them into linings of heavy wool coats. I can still taste them on my tongue as I struggled with the unfamiliar language. I still remember how they made me laugh with that kind of "ah-ha" laughter which comes from seeing the fool exposed. My father's favorites were the Nasrudin stories and many of Rumi's poems. They were small, did not take up much room in the coat, and were properly irreverent.

Today I know my father would add Tom Robbins to his coat. During the worst of the Bosnian war, I was part of a network which helped war refugees adjust to life in America. I taught them the difference between cans of SPAM and cans of dogfood. I showed them how to use a cash machine, and why it was important to have something in the bank before using it (In English we call these bounced check charges). I also gave them books to read aloud for practicing this new language which made their mouths hurt, and which to some of them, sounded like meowing cats. I always included Tom Robbins in the selection, because many of them had forgotten how to laugh.

My favorite reaction to his books happened when a friend rented a van and took several of these people on a drive to celebrate the first warm day of spring. He asked where they wanted to go, what they most wanted to see in this northwestern part of Washington state. Without even a breath of hesitation, they all shouted out the same thing: "Tom Robbins' hot dog stand!"

Rather than bother explaining this was a fictional creation by a deranged author, he drove them all over Skagit valley in search of the holy grail of hotdog stands. Later, when they returned I asked if they found what they were looking for, and a woman who lost her husband and daughter to one shell in the Sarajevo marketplace, shook her head. But moments later, she began laughing so hard she had to sit down.

"No, no...but we found crow-scarers, those fields with tributes to the dead Christ who was in the book. We stopped and prayed at each one. One of the farmers tried to have us arrested, but the policeman knew about the book and ended up laughing with us."

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