Randy Ford Author, I’M NOT DEAD YET, a new novel, first installment

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I’M NOT DEAD YET

      I’m not dead yet, and to reassure people of that fact I occasionally write.   I’m one of those people who have never settled down, but I also like to think I’m deeply routed in America, where I was born and raised, the names of the places are identified by my name and my accent.   I relish making people guess, and the game is rewarding to me because most of the time people guess wrong: never guess where I came from…and that suits me fine.   I began playing this game after I had been out of the States for a very long time (I won’t say how long) and lived in such divergent places as Manila, Bangkok, Vienna, and Dallas (as in Texas).   One whole year I worked beside my future wife before I really saw her.   She had seen me way before then and labeled me weird; she says that now sometimes.   She met me before she knew anything about me, and considered it prudent and appropriate to keep me at a distance until she could understand me, a difficulty because I mumbled.   I would learn that her parents had warned her not to have anything to do with unintelligible people, particularly men, on the grounds that life was too short to spend a great deal of time with a dullard.   Of course such shortsightedness was deeply shocking to me.   My merit should never have been judged in that manner or based on someone’s opinion, and I’m not surprised that Susan’s parents were at first opposed to our marriage, not the least bit surprised, considering how different Susan and I were; and I can understand why they were horrified when they learned the seriousness of my proposal and why it didn’t make sense to them.   If for over a year they had endorsed their daughter’s outright rejection of me, then it was perfectly understandable why it took them so long to turn that page and accept me in their home as a son-in-law.

      I don’t follow one particular philosophy.   I don’t really know the meaning of Existentialism and how it relates to our present-day world, and to be absolutely frank, I don’t give rats-ass about it, and indeed my use of the term “rat’s ass” should give people a clue about where I grew up.   However, just reading samples of philosophical work in my college introductory philosophy class has given me a better appreciation of ideas that I would later encounter in the world.   Now I recall that we covered the religions of the world in two or three sessions (even classifying religion under philosophy was a novel idea to me then), Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam (the main four listed here in alphabetical order to avoid accusations of prejudice), a home for each I found in my brain, so that when I first encountered Buddhism in Thailand, Christianity in Calcutta, Hinduism in Bali, and Islam in Pakistan I felt  reasonably intelligent.   The notion that Christ possibly or even probably traveled to India fascinated me, so much so that I dashed off a letter to my Southern Baptist brother-in-law informing him of that fact.   His communication with me since has been very sparse.   Oh, well, and you can’t win them all.   The most important spokesman for existentialism was that playwright who wrote the play The Flies.   “The Waste Land,”   Sartre!   And all that goo.   Wrong!   Wrong!   My favorite was Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, his autobiography, excuse me.   No wonder some of my relatives have had a hard time understanding me.

      The potshots have never stopped.   A sixty-six year old writer, out of step with his old classmates, can look back with some satisfaction, and few of them have seen the world.   The first time Susan and I flew west over the Pacific we lost a day we never recovered.   If the naysayers had his or her way, they would’ve argued that we would live to regret that loss (for we abandoned our country), for if we had used the day we lost we might’ve accomplished something great.   They could’ve also scored a point or two in this ridiculous game of theirs by reminding us of all the time we spent on an airplane.   They too must’ve been on God’s side (it’s a good side to be on), assuming they were right.   There was also a tearful letter from my parents, in which they too took the better-than-thou road. “  In this time of war,” they wrote, “to abandon, to flee, even to renounce your country is…is…”my mother couldn’t come up with a big enough word to express her disappointment.   She was a patriotic soul.   One could’ve scarcely believed that something like that would’ve come from my parents, from such good Christian people, but I’m confident that my mother did write it.   I was delighted that my father didn’t and that his actions were limited to his signature at the bottom of the page; naturally my mother insisted that a good letter should never be longer than a page.   This entire hubbub, of course, occurred when it was too late, and after we were on the plane that cost us a day.

      On the day we landed in Manila, I found my parents’ letter waiting there for us.   Her letter, I couldn’t get over her writing such a letter, didn’t deserve a reply; replying to her, I wrote, “do not accuse me of being unpatriotic.”   These words didn’t occur to me just once, but a hundred times, even maybe a thousand.   It did attack my integrity and my honesty, and not just mine, but also my wife’s, poor Susan, forget me, I was still alive and well.   And there we went.   Her claim didn’t require any thought on her part.   I was sorry to see her resort to the extremes that she did; the rhetoric she used to criticize me, her own son, was inflammatory to say the least.   It left me baffled.   Angry.   I’m still wondering who got to her.   My wife shared my disappointment, privately and opening, whenever she had a forum.   Susan has always defended me.   Ridiculed by my own mother, she used ridicule as a weapon, but yet I found her less guilty because I knew she loved me.   Speaking no doubt from her heart she no doubt remembered my father’s wounds from World War II, and his bravery in Europe, Normandy, Omaha Beach, and then to have a son runaway from Vietnam.   However, I think my dad, who lived through all of that, may have agreed with me, but he just wouldn’t stand up to my mother.

Randy Ford

 

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