BE MINE -- A Valentine from the Heart of Richard Ford

 

Here is an unforgettable Valentine’s card of a novel, particularly affecting for those of us from the boomer years or earlier.  I suppose there are spoilers in what follows, but they wouldn’t deter me from reading this novel if I came across this personal analysis.  At least that is my hope in writing this.

 

Richard Ford does not tilt the windmill into fantasy, but into the realities of aging and dying, the father/son relationship, and the carnival of American culture in, yet, another novel whose main character is his alter ego, Frank Bascombe.  I originally thought his novel, Canada,  marked the passing of Frank Bascombe.  But Frank was not yet down and out.  He came back with Let Me Be Frank With You   so I thought the latter, four novellas, loosely held together by Hurricane Sandy and the theme of aging, might be the last we hear from Frank.  That was followed by his intimate memoir about his parents, Between Them;Remembering My Parents.  Surely that meant Ford was moving on to new pastures.

 

But, no, Frank had more to say through Ford, although Frank is now older, burdened by his own health issues.  More significantly, there is now the major health issue of his sole surviving son, Paul, who at 47 is suffering from ALS, and Frank has chosen to be his caretaker.  This is the same Frank as I described in Let Me Be Frank With You: “it is Frank’s voice, the way he thinks, that connects with me -- plaintive, sardonic, ironic, perplexed, now somewhat resigned, and with a wry wit.”

 

I say “tilting the windmill” into life purposely, as the novel has elements of Don Quixote.  The literary critic Harold Bloom says “Don Quixote is the first modern novel, and that the protagonist is at war with Freud's reality principle, which accepts the necessity of dying…. [A] recurring theme is the human need to withstand suffering.”

 

And there is abundant suffering in Be Mine.  Dostoevsky said once "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."  Frank and his son prove to be worthy.  Ford even indulges in a piece of metafiction to make his point; Dying makes the non-dying feel excluded and shabby, since dying’s struggle is like no other. Long ago, when I was a doomed-to-fail scribbler of mid-century American short stories of the sort that showed up in The New Yorker, written by John Cheever and John Updike (mine never did even once), I practiced the “rule” taught me in my writing course at Michigan, which stipulated that inserting a death into a fragile short story was never permitted, since death must have importance proportional to the life that’s ended, and short stories, my teacher believed, weren’t good at relating the vastness of human life.  (Ford, in my mind, belongs in the company of Cheever and Updike as being astute observers of American life.)

 

Imagine caring for a 47 year old son who has ALS.  Frank’s solution, with the help of Dr. Catherine Flaherty, who we meet at the beginning of the book and whose presence later provides a satisfying denouement, is to get his son into an experimental program at Mayo in Rochester MN.  She had recently stepped down as head of endocrinology at Scripps La Jolla.  Catherine. Light of my life, fire of my loins.  Here was a long story, as there is for everything if you survive.  Since 1983, Catherine (who’s 60) and I have never totally been out of touch.  And since Sally’s departure, she and I have spoken a time or two with a circling, half-suppressed fragrance of possibility scent-able down the cyberlines.  But Catherine had other suitors she never took seriously, a “big doctor” career, and a divorce.  And yet she has never left Frank’s psyche.

 

And so begins the journey, but most of the distance is covered between the 600 mile trek between Mayo and Mount Rushmore, culminating on Valentine’s Day.  Here is a canvas for Ford to paint his themes.

 

I must digress to what I wrote about his deeply affecting memoir Between Them; Remembering My Parents.  I quoted something which I think profoundly influences this novel:  But hardly an hour goes by on any day that I do not think something about my father. Much of these things I've written here. Some men have their fathers all their lives, grow up and become men within their fathers' orbit and sight. My father did not experience this. And I can imagine such a life, but only imagine it. The novelist Michael Ondaatje wrote about his father that ‘... my loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult.’ Mine is the same - and also different - inasmuch as had my father lived beyond his appointed time, I would likely never have written anything, so extensive would his influence over me have soon become. And while not to have written anything would be a bearable loss - we must all make the most of the lives we find - there would, however, not now be this slender record of my father, of his otherwise invisible joys and travails and of his virtue - qualities that merit notice in us all. For his son, not to have left this record would be a sad loss indeed.

 

Be Mine fills in those emotional blanks.  The voice of Frank is clear; you could say being on a quixotic journey.  Paul could be a stand in for the author himself; “making the life” he is found.  I just had an aching feeling that in Be Mine Ford is working out the emotional pain of the absent father. And, as so much of the novel is about aging and dying, what does one value in the decreasing moments left in a long life? 

 

Yet how we chose to deal with our suffering is book-ended by two chapters with the same title: “Happiness.”  Thus, purely on average, I would say I’ve been happy. Happy enough, at least, to be Frank Bascombe and not someone else.  Ford’s acerbic sense of humor comes through: It’s widely acknowledged that people live longer and stay happier the more stuff they can forget or ignore.  That was at the start of the emotional and literal journey with his son.   

 

And “happiness” at end is another piece of metafiction:  I’d once read in a book about writing that in good novels, anything can follow anything, and nothing ever necessarily follows anything else. To me this was an invaluable revelation and relief, as it is precisely like life—ants scrabbling on a cupcake. I didn’t see I had to speculate about what caused what. And truthfully, I believe it to this day. Witness my son’s relentless assault by ALS, which as far as the best medical science understands, poses a near complete mystery. Yes, we see it happening. But nothing specifically causes it or specifically doesn’t cause it. It just happens.  Happiness = Acceptance.  We are dealt the cards; how we play them is more important that what we are dealt.

 

The journey itself and his observations about the America we are left with is reminiscent of another novel I read which is even more transparently modeled after Don Quixote, Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 

 

A key issue in my reading of that book was the following: “There are pastiches of popular culture the sum of which point the way to the vapid disintegration of values and truth, making it a hallmark work of dystopian literature…. As a picaresque novel it savagely satires the entire America of now, a society gone wild with the self indulgent consumption of popular culture, conspiracy theories, xenophobia, opioid addition, and political polarization.” 

 

Ford’s observations go further into the funhouse of today’s eerie reality; a cartoonish view of what this nation has become, but in black humor lays the truth.

 

While Paul is at the Mayo clinic, Frank has sought out the services of Betty Tran, a Vietnamese masseuse in one of those shopping centers.  He thinks he’s in love with her. Diminutive, smiling, cheerful, with bobbed hair and darkly alert eyes. 4 feet, 10 inches, not a centimeter taller, with pert, friendly gestures that were welcoming yet confident, happy to look me in the eye and give me a slightly unsettling wink. …But sitting, talking two hours with pretty, exciting, vivid, immensely likeable Betty was like a fantasy (I’m told) men my age frequently indulge: the high school girl you should’ve loved but for a thousand reasons didn’t, yet dream you could still love.

 

Apparently she gave “happy endings.” As Frank arrives to give her a “Be Mine on Valentine’s Day” card she is being hauled off by the police, smiling, waving a dainty hand, her slender arm bare, bobbling her head of bright yellow hair in a gesture she’s performed for me other times. “Good-bye, good-bye. Come back, come back,” words I “hear” as if they were booming through a PA. “Good-bye, good-bye. Come back, come back.”

 

Paul wants to rent an RV and travel all over the southwest which given his condition would be challenging for them both.  Frank comes up with the idea of a shorter road trip to Mount Rushmore but rent the RV at the place he wants—A Fool’s Paradise—a roadside emporium we’ve visited once and where one finds for-sale-or-rent golf carts, septic tanks, porta-potties, snowmobiles, cherry pickers, enormous American flags, blank grave monuments, waterslide parts and an array of 25 used RVs set out in rows in the frozen snow. Paul can choose whichever RV rig he wants. And the minute his Medical Pioneer event’s over, we can load up and set off for Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, making stops at whatever loony sights we find.  The only one available is an old Dodge Windbreaker Camper, not really suitable to be lived in during the cold nights, obligating them to stay in hotels along the way.

 

I had to laugh as their first stop is at a Hilton Garden Inn, where we usually stay when traveling along the spider web of the Interstates and, as Frank, specifying a double not by the elevator, the ice machine or the pool, two free bottles of…Dasani water.

 

Then on to the “World’s Only Corn Palace” in Mitchell, SD, where my parents stopped off in our sole transcontinental junket in 1954… which is billed as “Everything in your wildest dreams made out of corn.”  This has elements up Paul’s alley—self-conscious inanity, latent juvenile sexual content and a “life in these United States” down-home garishness. Again, he is hard to predict—which can be good.

 

Frank has hit pay dirt with his son.  Like me, there’s nothing my son thrills to more than the anomalies of commerce….The “Place Corn Boutique” spreads over the entire arena/performance venue/polling place; a Macy’s of corn-themed crapola….All of it precisely what Paul Bascombe is put on the earth to seek, be deeply interested in and mesmerized by. I could not have been more prescient.

 

The banter between Frank and his son is a balance between contentious and affection.  The dialogue is poignant.

 

From there they go to the Fawning Buffalo Casino, Golf and Deluxe Convention Hotel.  Something for everyone!  Ford’s description constitutes hilarious realism:  There’s a “Rolling Stones All-Native” cover band in the Circle-the-Wagons supper club. Exotic Entertainment in the Counting Coup Lounge. Ugly sweater, wet T-shirt and best-butt contests every weekend. A “gigantic” indoor waterslide. A “world famous” Tahitian Buffet. Plus, “Lifestyle Enrichment” classes, a writers workshop, a mortuary science job fair, Tai Chi instruction, and a “How to Live in the Present” seminar taught by Native psychologists with degrees from South Dakota State. Plus, “Loose Slots” and Valentine’s room rates for lovers—which my son and I are not but might pass for. There’s also a free shuttle to the “The Monuments” every two hours, which appeals to me, since I’m not sure the Windbreaker makes the climb if the weather turns against us, which it could.

 

But the Fawning Buffalo is not an inspired choice.  Paul is irate, wheelchair bound, feeling remote from the possibilities the carnival-like atmosphere offers, Frank pressing to get a room, thinking of the buffet and secretly maybe a lapdance when his son goes to bed.  They argue in front of the room clerk   “But we can still get the Valentine’s suite. I’ll order you up exotic room service. I’m sure it’s available.” I mean this. “You’re an asshole.” “Why am I an asshole? Life’s a journey, son. You’re on it.” I’m willing to piss him off if I can’t make him happy. Though I wish I could. He is quite a conventional, unadventurous man when you come down to it. Like me. “It’s not a journey to here,” he says savagely…. Fatherhood is a battle in any language.

 

They leave, but as Valentine’s Day is such a big holiday there, they try every hotel/motel after leaving.  They’re all full. If I’d prevailed at the Fawning Buffalo, I’d right now be in the Tahitian Buffet, a couple of free Stolis to the good. Never let your son decide things.

 

At another Hilton, the clerk knows an out of the way motel where they could stay.  They have to double back to get there.  It is a broken down mostly abandoned place, with aging down to earth proprietors, relics of the past.  In a dank room Frank sleeps in his clothes next to his son.  And Frank thinks.

 

I have said little on the subject; but I am moved by whatever it is my son is at this drastic intersection of life. There should be a word for that—I wish I knew it—for what he is, a word that can be inserted in all obituaries to help them speak truth about human existence. Though whatever that word is, “courage” isn’t it.

 

Finally, the big day, Mount Rushmore, another circus to end their journey, but this time, despite the artificiality of it all, those faces on the mountain, the oohing and aahing, the selfies, etc., Frank and Paul, reconcile a lifetime.

 

“This is great. I love this,” Paul Bascombe—the Paul Bascombe—says. He is craned forward in his chair, fingering his silver ear stud, eyes riveted with all the others of us, upon the four chiseled visages. I cannot completely believe I’ve brought this unlikeliest of moments about, and can be here standing where I’m standing—with my son. How often do anyone’s best-laid plans work out?....I am happy to have done one seemingly right thing for one seemingly not wrong reason. Any trip can be perilous once you commit to the destination, as we have….“Do you know why it’s so great…Why I’ll never be able to thank you enough?” “Tell me.” “It’s completely pointless and ridiculous, and it’s great.” I’m merely happy to believe we see the same thing the same way for once—more or less. It is pointless and it is stupid.  “We’re bonded,” Paul says slyly, “It’s not really like any place else, is it? It’s monumental without being majestic.” There is no trace of disappointment, double or triple meaning.

 

The last chapter, again, “Happiness,” is perhaps the best piece of writing I’ve read in a long time, languid and elegant (Cheeveresque), philosophical but, even what Frank has endured and at his age, hopeful.  Paul would approve.  Now that I’ve read the work, taking notes, I can now go back and reread it simply for pleasure and Ford’s exquisite writing.  Maybe before Valentine’s Day?

 

The Solitary Journey

Last week my long-time college friend, Bruce, wrote “My brother died this morning.  I tell you because you are my oldest friend, and also, because I sat down just now in front of our fireplace with the logs burning and read On Growing Old and remembered that we memorized that poem together.”

My first thought was of Camus’s novel L’Étranger which I read in French in school (alas, no longer have any ability in that beautiful language). But those haunting first words sprang to mind: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.”  There is finality about it.  This is part of life.

I also remember memorizing John Masefield’s great poem On Growing Old with Bruce.  We were romantics back then and Masefield wrote so poignantly about what we thought was the unthinkable in our youth.  I wrote something about that experience on my 70th birthday which is now more than a half decade ago. 

I bring this up because last Saturday night I had to go to the local hospital ER.  I had been on antibiotics and Prednisone for a bronchial infection and late Sat. night I could hardly breathe, persistent uncontrollable cough in the chest in spite of all my medications.   Pulmonary Embolism?  Congestive Heart Failure?  That was the motivation to go.

My wonderful wife, Ann, was with me every step of the way but eventually, when they get you in that ER bed, everything is out of your control and even trying to explain my complicated health history seems of little interest except for recent medications. 

She was exhausted by midnight and as our home is five minutes from the hospital, I asked her to go.  And so, alone.  Then I was sent off for tests, x-rays, CAT scan, blood tests, finally being admitted to a room at 3.00 AM.  Indeed, a solitary journey.

Hospital life: constant interruptions, no rest with nurses and Doctors (most of whom I don’t know) popping in unexpectedly at all times.  Nighttime is the worst.  TV is useless of course so I brought one book in particular that turned out to “save” me.  It calmly and poetically put living (and dying) in perspective.

It is a recent book by one of my favorite writers, Richard Ford.  I wish I was writing this blog when his earlier Frank Bascombe novels were published, but I covered his last, Let Me Be Frank With You,which is actually a collection of novellas.  As I said in that entry: “I feel I know this person as I knew Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.  Frank is four years younger than I and Rabbit ten years older.  But the times recounted by these characters are of my era.  No wonder I’m so familiar with the landscapes of their lives.” 

I also loved his last novel, Canada, which was not from the Bascombe line, but Ford’s voice is unwavering.  I thought it one of the best novels of the year.

His latest work is essentially a memoir Between Them; Remembering My Parents.  It was particularly affecting reading it in my hospital stupor and I felt that Ford drew me away from the illness into the very private lives of two ordinary people, who did the best they could, swept along by the rivers of time and chance.  Edna and Parker marrying early in life, both from the deep south, building their lives as a partnership, accustomed to living on the road together as he was a salesman, even successfully surviving the depression.  It was just the two of them until later in life (in their 30s) along came their only child, Richard Ford.  The title of the book is particularly revealing.  It was in effect a life separately lived by the parents, and then Richard coming between them.  It changed the formula and as life dishes out the unexpected, so we make our adjustments.

Parker, Richard, and Edna

For Richard, this meant having a part-time Dad, who, even when he was in Richard’s life, wasn’t particularly interactive with him.  Neither was my father, who I loved dearly, and although he returned from work each night, he lived in a marriage which was essentially unhappy.  At the end of this entry I am pasting the brief essay I wrote about my own father.

What stunned me about Richard Ford’s sparse lapidary memoir is he poses as many questions about the multitude of blanks, things he could not even conjecture at, regarding his parent’s relationship.  Here he shines as a creative writer, while this blog, which is fundamentally an ongoing memoir, is the work of an essayist.  Ford engages the reader to think about those blanks as well, whereas I’ve tried to define some, probably woefully incorrectly.  Memory is so faulty, so fungible.

My mother carried most of the fury of my parent’s marriage.   My father was the “beaten” one emotionally. One neatly fed into the other.  But Ford’s memoir, reading it while I lay vulnerable in my hospital bed, reminded me there was another side to her.  The loving one.  Memories swelled, one’s I’ve forgotten. 

Silly ones, like the time we were driving back from my cousin’s house in New Hyde Park to our home in Queens one late Sunday night and my mother and I asked my father to stop at a drug store as we both were dying of thirst.  We jumped out of the car and in the paperback rack I saw one of the then best-selling books, Don't Go Near the Water, a 1956 novel by William Brinkley.  I showed my mother the cover as we were asking for water and we began to laugh so uncontrollably that those in the drug store probably thought we were wacky.  Funny how a memory like that, unlocked for years, could be unleashed in a hospital bed in the middle of the night while reading about someone else’s parents. 

In Ford’s skillful hands, the very ordinariness of these two forgotten people, his parents, is elevated to a kind of tribute to the human condition: the solitary journey we’re all on.

Some other writer’s memoirs emphasize how they developed as writers, influenced by parents, particularly mothers.  Ironically, I read the late Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life after emerging from open heart surgery now seven years ago.  His mother used to read him Gone With The Wind, instilling a love of reading.

Richard Russo also was influenced by his mother in that regard.

I had no such mentoring and apparently neither did Richard Ford, although Ford supplies a teaser on that subject.  One day the young Richard and his mother were shopping at the “Jitney Jungle grocery,” and his mother asked him to look at a woman in the store.  Richard looked and saw “someone I didn’t know – tall and smiling, chatting with people, laughing." His mother said, "‘That's Eudora Welty. She's a writer,’ which was information that meant nothing to me, except that it meant something to my mother, who sometimes read bestsellers in bed at night. I don't know if she had ever read something Eudora Welty wrote. I don't know if the woman was Eudora Welty, or was someone else. My mother may have wanted it to be Eudora Welty for reasons of her own. Possibly this event could seem significant now, in view of my life to come. But it didn't, then. I was only eight or nine. To me, it was just another piece in a life of pieces.”

In Ford’s Acknowledgements at the end of the book he gives thanks (among others) “to the incomparable Eudora Welty, who in writing so affectingly about parents, have provided models for me and made writing seem both feasible and possibly useful.”  So there is an arc there, from that vague memory of being with his mother to becoming a writer.  Although in the Afterward he says something that Updike might have said as well about writing: “Mine has been a life of noticing and being a witness.  Most writers’ lives are.”

Unfortunately for me, I did not come from a reading family.  My father read Reader’s Digest Condensed books.  I can’t remember my mother reading anything but magazines.  But Ford and I share the fact we were poor students in high school.  He refers to a disability.  I had several, one an emotional one coming from a troubled family, feeling shame, and I was a small kid, trying to make up for it by excelling in baseball, and even basketball to a degree, anything to fit in.  But I also think I had a form of dyslexia.  My mother interpreted my disability as the need for speech therapy, which was also embarrassing as the speech therapist worked at the high school and I was still in elementary school, and had to walk through the halls with the high school kids, standing out as any young kid would.  I hated it.

And that of course was not the only problem.  My spelling was atrocious.  And as I said although my parents generally did not read to me as a kid, I do remember one that was read.  I loved to look at the pictures.  It was probably their sense of well-intended therapy: Boo Who Used to be Scared of the Dark.  I had reason.

In school I read only what was assigned and it wasn’t until I came under the influence of two great teachers in my life while a senior in high school that I discovered the joys of reading.   After publishing thousands of books in my publishing career, I guess I learned to compensate, word processing being a good crutch for poor spelling. 

Ford does not deal with the leap from his hardship in high school to his days at Michigan State to writer.  Not appropriate in this work as it is about THEM and less about HIM.  And there is yet another ironic thing we had in common.  He first thought of going into Hotel Management.  It is no wonder; his parents frequently took him on his father’s road trips, living in hotels all over the Deep South.  No such explanation for me other than Kent State had such a program and I vaguely thought of that as an escape route from my family (this plan did not work out thankfully).  I was flotsam in the tide of life.

Between Them is really two separate works, one about his mother which he wrote soon after she died, and the other about his father, which he recently wrote.  But you wouldn’t know it, as it flows with such continuity.  His prose is breathtaking.  Here is one paragraph that was particularly affecting (to me), about his father:

“But hardly an hour goes by on any day that I do not think something about my father. Much of these things I've written here. Some men have their fathers all their lives, grow up and become men within their fathers' orbit and sight. My father did not experience this. And I can imagine such a life, but only imagine it. The novelist Michael Ondaatje wrote about his father that ‘... my loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult.’ Mine is the same - and also different - inasmuch as had my father lived beyond his appointed time, I would likely never have written anything, so extensive would his influence over me have soon become. And while not to have written anything would be a bearable loss - we must all make the most of the lives we find - there would, however, not now be this slender record of my father, of his otherwise invisible joys and travails and of his virtue - qualities that merit notice in us all. For his son, not to have left this record would be a sad loss indeed.”

Yes, a sad loss, especially from such an exceptional writer, Richard Ford.  The book was a gift from my wife for my birthday and the coincidence of it landing in my hands while in the hospital, helped deal with the travails of my setback, and even more so with the ultimate philosophical question I’ve quoted many times before by Eugene Ionesco: “why was I born if it wasn’t forever?”   

I got to know two perfect strangers, now memorialized, and appreciate Ford’s writing even more.  I will always look forward to his next work 

As to my own brief essay about my father, I reprint it below as an appendage.  

An Unspoken Obligation

Up Park Avenue we speed to beat the lights from lower Manhattan in the small Ford station wagon with Hagelstein Bros., Commercial Photographers since 1866, 100 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY imprinted on its panels. The Queens Midtown Tunnel awaits us.

It is a summer in the late 1950s and, once again, I’m working for my father after another high school year. In the back of the wagon I share a small space with props, flood lamps, and background curtains. The hot, midtown air, washed by exhaust fumes and the smoke from my father’s perpetual burning cigarette, surround me.

Me and my Dad

My father’s brother and partner, my Uncle Phil, occupies the passenger’s seat. They have made this round trip, day-in and day-out since my father returned from WWII. They speak of the city, its problems, the Russians, and politics disagreeing on most matters. Meanwhile I sleepily daydream about where my friends and I will cruise that evening in one of their cars, a 57’ Merc, probably Queens Blvd., winding up at Jahn’s next to the RKO on Lefferts Boulevard.

The family photography business was established right after the Civil War, soon after my great-great grandfather, Carl, emigrated from Cologne, Germany with his brother, settling in New York City.  Their portrait photography business at 142 Bowery flourished in the 19th century.  The 20th century brought a new focus: commercial photography which necessitated moving to a larger studio, better located, at 100 Fifth Avenue on the corner of 15th Street.  There the business remained until the 1980’s, occupying the top floor.

My father took it for granted that I was being groomed for the business, the next generation to carry it on. Uncle Phil was a bachelor and since I was the only one with the name to preserve the tradition, it would naturally fall to me.

This was such an understood, implicit obligation, that nothing of a formal nature such as a college education was needed to foster this direction. Simply, it was my job to learn the business from the bottom up, working first as a messenger on the NY City streets, delivering glossies to clients for salesmen’s samples, or for catalog display at the annual Furniture Show. As a youngster, I roamed NYC by subway and taxi with my deliveries without incident – after all, this was the innocent, placid 50’s.  Eventually, I graduated to photographer’s assistant, adjusting lamp shades under the hot flood lamps so the seams would not show, and, later, as an assistant in the color lab, making prints, dodging negatives of a clients’ tables, lamps, and sofas to minimize any overexposures.

I see my father through the lens of his working life, revealing a personality normally invisible to me. At home he was a more contemplative, private person, crushed by a troubled marriage. My mother expected more, often reminding him of his failures. But strolling down the halls of his photography business he is a transformed person, smiling, extending his hand to a customer, kidding in his usual way. “How’s Geschaft?” he would say.

His office overlooks the reception area and there he, my Uncle, and his two cousins preside over a sandwich and soda delivered from a luncheonette downstairs. I sit, listen, and devour my big greasy burger. They discuss the business among themselves. Osmosis was my mentor.

In spite of the filial duty that prompted me to continue learning the photography business, I inveigled his support to go to college – with the understanding I would major in business. By then I think I knew going to school would be the first step away from the family business, a step, once taken, would not be taken back. The question was how to reveal this to him.

However, as silently was the expectation that I would take over one day, my retreat was equally furtive. We both avoided the topic as I went to college and yet continued to work there during the summers. Once I switched majors from business to the humanities, we both knew the outcome of the change, but still, no discussion. This was territory neither he nor I wanted to visit at the time.

My reasons were instinctively clear to me, in spite of the guilt I often felt. In the studio he was larger than life, the consummate photographer, but he was also provincial in his business thinking. He had bet the future on producing those prints for salesmen, discounting the impact of the developing mass media.  My opinion on the matter would mean little. After all, he was my Dad and I was his kid. So I kept my silence and progressively moved away.

Why he never brought up the subject I will, now, never know, although I suspect he understood I wanted to find my own way in life. Ultimately, I married and found a job in publishing with an office, ironically, only three blocks from his studio. I still occasionally joined him for that greasy burger at his office during those first few years of my publishing career, his greeting me with a smile when I arrived, “so, how’s Geschaft?

Perfectly Frank

Richard Ford is one of the few authors that’ll I’ll buy any book he writes as soon as it is published in hardcover. I’m particularly fond of the Frank Bascombe novels, Ford’s protagonist from The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land, written in the first person by a “familiar old friend” from New Jersey.  I feel I know this person as I knew Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.  Frank is four years younger than I and Rabbit was ten years older.  But the times recounted by these characters are of my era.  No wonder I’m so familiar with the landscapes of their lives. And it is interesting that both Updike and Ford had declared the end of their Angstrom and Bascombe novels with the completion their trilogies, only to come out with one more, as if the character told the writer he had something else to say.  I certainly thought the Bascombe works had come to an end when he wrote Canada, a fine novel.

But primarily it is Frank’s voice, the way he thinks, that connects with me -- plaintive, sardonic, ironic, perplexed, now somewhat resigned, and with a wry wit. 

The hardcover edition of Let Me Be Frank With You is also a treasure to hold, a three piece binding, nicely designed  including the jacket, printed on an off white stock, with headbands and foot bands, but as with most hardcover editions nowadays, no longer smyth sewn – instead it’s a “perfect bound book” in a hard case.  In my book production days, this would be library-unacceptable, but I suppose we should be grateful that the hardcover book still hangs on, pre-digital-historical relic though it may be.

I confess I ordered this as soon as I heard about it without knowing the details.  It’s by Richard Ford and it’s another Frank Bascombe book.  That’s all I needed to know.  It turned out not be a novel but instead four lengthy short stories, loosely held together by Hurricane Sandy and the theme of aging. 

The leitmotiv of the Hurricane is actually central to the first story, “I’m Here.” At the request of an old real estate client, Arne Urguhart (Frank became a real estate agent after he was a sportswriter and an aspiring novelist), he goes to the Jersey shore to see what’s left of the house he sold Arne, actually the house that Frank lived in with his ex-wife Ann. 

In the second story, “Everything Could Be Worse,” he is visited in his present home in Haddam, the town where Frank began his journey in the The Sportswriter, by a Mrs. Pines, who has become displaced by the Hurricane, and injured as well, a cast on her arm, and has an unexpected urge to see the home in which she grew up and in which a terrible crime was committed.  Frank invites her to tour the house and her story unfolds.

From there we segue to “The New Normal” where Frank goes to visit his ex-wife who is now a resident of a high-end retirement community, with progressively deteriorating Parkinson’s disease, one she even blames on the Hurricane as a “super-real change agent.  It was in the air. 

The concluding story says much about the underlying theme of the entire collection, “Death of Others.”  Here he goes to visit a friend who is literally at death’s door, living in a home he’s occupied for scores of years, being attended to by hospice.  Frank was once his neighbor.  The dying man, Eddie Medley, makes a startling confession to Frank. The Hurricane in this story hangs in the background on Eddie’s silent TV, a program surveying the damage.

I was prepared to be disappointed by this book as it is not another FB novel.  Independence Day, the second FB novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is probably his best.  Just the opening sentence of that one expresses his love of the geographic territory: In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems.  In his new short story collection, such a sentence would seem to be impossible.  Why?  Because FB has aged.  He sees life and Haddam differently now.

So, while being disappointed that this was not another novel, if one concentrates on “the voice” and the themes, perhaps it actually works better as a number of loosely connected short stories.  I think that genre feels so natural for what Ford has to say.  What Frank says about “love” could be said about his life — Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.  And so these stories represent single acts, making up Frank as he enters old age.

When you grow old, as I am, you pretty much live in the accumulations of life anyway.  Not that much is happening, except on the medical front.  Better to strip things down.  And where better to start stripping than the words we choose to express our increasingly rare, increasingly vagrant thoughts.

It's not true that as you get older things slide away like molasses off a table top. What is true is I don't remember some things that well, owing to the fact that I don't care all that much. I now wear a cheap Swatch watch, but I do sometimes lose the handle on the day of the month, especially near the end and the beginning, when I get off-track about "thirty days hath September ... " This, I believe, is normal and doesn't worry me. It's not as if I put my trousers on backwards every morning, tie my shoelaces together, and can't find my way to the mailbox.

And I was also amused by Frank’s description of the dangers of falling as a senior citizen.  I’ve been warned as well because one of my so-called “necessary” medications has the side effect of thinning bones. They even wanted to give me other medication to combat those side effects, but that one has its own likely side effects (I refused). Pick your poison I’m told, although as one doctor empathetically told me, “it’s not your bones that’s gonna get you, it’s something else.”  I could not have said it any better than Frank, though, and reading this book should be required as one enters the final stage of one’s life.  As Bette Davis said, “growing old is not for sissies.”

Here’s Frank’s take on it: I'm also concerned about stepping on a nail, myself And because of something Sally said, I feel a need to more consciously pick my feet up when I walk-"the gramps shuffle" being the unmaskable, final-journey approach signal. It'll also keep me from falling down and busting my ass. What is it about falling? "He died of a fall." "The poor thing never recovered after his fall." "He broke his hip in a fall and was never the same." "Death came relatively quickly after a fall in the back yard." How fucking far do these people fall? Off of buildings? Over spuming cataracts? Down manholes? Is it farther to the ground than it used to be? In years gone by I'd fall on the ice, hop back up, and never think a thought. Now it's a death sentence. What Sally said to me was "Be careful when you go down those front steps, sweetheart. The surface isn't regular, so pick your feet up." Why am I now a walking accident waiting to happen? Why am I more worried about that than whether there's an afterlife?

He somewhat reluctantly, but obligingly, goes once a month to visit his ex-wife (his present wife, Sally, is fine with this) Ann who now lives in cutting edge senior care center, one in which there is progressive health care, right to the grave. At Ann’s new home, Carnage Hill (love the name of the place), being sick to death is like a passage on a cruise ship where you’re up on the captain’s deck, eating with him and possibly Engelbert Humperdinck, and no one’s getting Legionnaires’ or being cross about anything.  And you never set sail or arrive anywhere, so there’re no bad surprises or disappointments about the ports of call being shabby and alienating.  There aren’t any ports of call. This is it.

Ann get’s under Frank’s skin. And she has a knack of getting me under her magnifying glass for the sun to bake me a while before I can exit back home to second-marriage deniability.

He handles his visits by displaying his “default self.” The Default Self, my answer to all her true-thing issues, is an expedient that comes along with nothing more than being sixty-eight - the Default Period of life. Being an essentialist, Ann believes we all have selves, characters we can't do anything about (but lie). Old Emerson believed the same. " ... A man should give us a sense of mass ... ," etc. My mass has simply been deemed deficient. But I believe nothing of the sort. Character, to me, is one more lie of history and the dramatic arts. In my view, we have only what we did yesterday, what we do today, and what we might still do. Plus, whatever we think about all of that. But nothing else - nothing hard or kernel-like. I've never seen evidence of anything resembling it. In fact I've seen the opposite: life as teeming and befuddling, followed by the end.

His move back to Haddam -- where he originally began as a sportswriter aka aspiring novelist – gives him both a sense of place and an opportunity to express his sense of change.   Wallace Stevens commented “we have lived too shallowly in too many places.”  Not Frank Bascombe. 

Our move to Haddam, a return to streets, housing stocks and turbid memories I thought I'd forever parted with, was like many decisions people my age make: conservative, reflexive, unadventurous, and comfort-hungry - all posing as their opposite: novel, spirited, enlightened, a stride into the mystery of life, a bold move only a reckless few would ever chance. As if I'd decided to move to Nairobi and open a Gino's. Sadly, we only know well what we've already done.

Indeed, neighborhoods change and new neighbors are remote….  

In the eight years since Sally and I arrived back from Sea Clift, we haven't much become acquainted with our neighbors. Very little gabbing over the fence to share a humorous "W" story. Few if any spontaneous invitations in for a Heineken. No Super Bowl parties, potlucks, or housewarmings. Next door might be a Manhattan Project pioneer, Tolstoy's grand-daughter, or John Wayne Gacy. But you'd hardly know it, and no one seems interested. Neighbors are another vestige of a bygone time. All of which I'm fine with”

Code variances have led to such unpredictable changes, especially for Frank’s neighborhood which has been recodified as a “mixed use” neighborhood, the end of life as we know it.  Though my bet is I’ll be in my resting place before that bad day dawns.  If there’s a spirit of one-ness in my b. ’45 generation, it’s that we all plan to be dead before the big shit train finds the station…..How these occurrences foretell changes that’ll eventuate in a Vietnamese massage becoming my new neighbor is far from clear.  But it happens – like tectonic plates, whose movement you don’t feel ‘til it’s the big one and your QOL goes away in an afternoon.  From my own experience, Amen to that.

The last story seems to tie everything together.  It carries the ironic title of “Death of Others” as if it can’t happen to us, something we all secretly believe, even knowing intellectually it will.  If we didn’t hold on to that fantasy, perhaps we’d go crazy.  In this regard, I envy religious people who actually look forward to the “afterlife.”

In the mornings as he has his breakfast Frank listens to the local call in radio station, a program called Yeah?  What’s It To You?  Most of the discussion lately has been about the “killer storm.” He enjoys listening to his fellow Haddam citizens, their views and personal life evaluations…as nutty as they sometimes are.  For a man in retirement, those brief immersions offer a fairly satisfying substitute to what was once plausible, fully lived life.

He also reads the local obits to honor the deceased, but also quietly to take cognizance of how much any life can actually contain (a lot!), while acknowledging that for any of us a point comes when most of life’s been lived and there’s much less of it than there used to be, and yet what’s there is not to be missed or pissed away in a blur.”

On that radio program he hears the labored voice of Eddie Medley, ex neighbor, and a Michigan Wolverine alumnus as Frank.  An old friend.  A dying friend.  Eddie also leaves a message on Frank’s answering machine.  Something in his voice…frail, but revealing of an inward-tendingness that spoke of pathos and solitude, irreverence and unexpected wonder. More the tryer than I'd first thought, but caked over by illness and time. Even in a depleted state, he seemed to radiate what most modern friendships never do, in spite of all the time we waste on them: the chance that something interesting could be imparted, before-the-curtain-sways-shut-and-all-becomes-darkness. Something about living with just your same ole self all these years, and how enough was really enough. I didn't know anyone else who thought that. Only me. And what's more interesting in the world than being agreed with?

Frank really doesn’t want to see him, a dying man.  He tells him on the phone he’s too busy.  Eddie replies: I’m busy too.  Busy getting dead.  If you want to catch me live, you better get over here.  Maybe you don’t want to.  Maybe you’re that kind of chickenshit.  Pancreatic cancer’s gone to my lungs and belly…It is goddamn efficient.  I’ll say that.  They knew how to make cancer when they made this shit.

At his advancing age Frank has also been trying to jettison as many friends as I can, and am frankly surprised more people don’t do it as a simple and practical means of achieving well-earned, late-in-the-game clarity. Lived life, especially once you hit adulthood, is always a matter of superfluity leading on to less-ness  Only (in my view) it’s a less-ness that’s as good as anything that happened before – plus it’s a lot easier. 

Although Frank does volunteer work, reading for the blind and welcoming veterans back home, he leaves 60 percent of available hours for the unexpected – a galvanizing call to beneficent action, in this case.  But what I mostly want to do is nothing I don’t want to do.  Nonetheless, as he has the time for the “unexpected” and he goes to see his old friend.

He finally gets to Eddie’s house and is admitted by the hospice worker to the bedroom. Eddie looks like a skeleton, has trouble even talking, breathing, but he is trying to tell him something. Frank bends down to listen ’That’s what I’m here for.’ Not literally true.  Eddie may mistake me for the angel of death, and this moment his last try at coherence.  Death makes of everything in life a dream.  Eddie reveals an old, dark secret, one impacting Frank.  No spoilers here.

The take away of this splendid collection of FB stories is if you are planning to grow old, or if you have already joined our group, this is a primer of what is in store.  But it’s more than the content, it’s the unique voice of Frank Bascombe, and hopefully there will be other such works from Ford in the future.  And remember, there’s something to be said for the good no-nonsense hurricane, to bully life back into perspective.