When I was about 13-years-old my dad’s old Toyota caught fire. I’ve told this story a hundred times, for different reasons and in different ways. This time though, it’s all about a book. Yes, a book of course, as this is a books and reading and writing blog. See, the day this event occurred, I’d brought my favorite copy of Calvin & Hobbes: Something Under the Bed is Drooling with me.

It was an old copy that I’d dug out of piles of junk my parents had collected over the years, and it smelled like moldy paper. I loved it. I read it over and over again, especially because when I rediscovered it my dad had gotten really excited and said, “Hey, I remember that! I loved that comic. It was my favorite.” It became my favorite, too.

The day the car caught fire, I ran out of the vehicle, not thinking about anything other than not getting burnt to a crisp. My dad, brother and I stood to the side of the highway watching the fire build from the bottom, slowly, and heard the glass pop as the windows got blown out. That’s when I gasped and uttered in a small voice, “My book.”

My brother Daryl heard me, and he tried to run back to the car to grab it from the backseat, but my dad pulled him back. See, he’d just run back a few seconds before to grab his CD case (music is no joke in my family). He said, “C’mon I’ve still got time. I can get her book.” My dad stood firm, saying it wasn’t worth the risk and that he shouldn’t have run back the first time for the CDs.

I nodded in agreement with my dad. No object could be worth risking your life to a fire. An explosion, really, that could happen at any moment. I still swallowed down the lump in my throat, though. My dad’s old copy of Calvin & Hobbes was forever lost to ash, and there was no replacing it. Though my brother did offer to buy me another Calvin & Hobbes book for Christmas (and he kept that promise).

I think Daryl knew what the book meant to me. He never quite shared my attachment to books, but he knew that they were important to me. And even though I’m sad I lost that old original copy, I always remember how my big brother was willing to run into a burning car to grab a book for me. But truthfully, I wouldn’t trade my brother for any number of books. Not even for my old, original copy of Something Under the Bed is Drooling.