I always have to stop and think about how to spell Foreword. But strangely, I think it applies either way. A Foreword should propel you Forward,
This is the Foreword/Forward to my collection The Mind of a Writer and Other Fables:
When we moved from Washington DC to Minneapolis in the early 1990s, my wife moved first. I drove up after.
My little Mercury Tracer did not have cruise control and I had two bad ankles from basketball injuries my senior year in college. So my father went with me, driving most of the way, and telling stories the whole way.
I spent three enthralled days on the road listening to him tell tales of growing up in Iowa: how he got his nickname (Trapper); every job he ever held; how he met my mother; his time in the Navy during WWII. And how he wanted to be a writer.
This was a surprise to me. I learned that after he got out of the Navy at the end of WWII, he enrolled at George Washington University to study journalism. But eventually, he had to drop out to support his young family.
Years later, after I had moved back (alone) to DC, he finally showed me a story he had kept for over half a century. It’s not finished, and not anything I would have expected him to write. I don’t know if there is a genetic component to writing, but his style reminds me a little of mine—quirky, fast, funny.
For most of his life, my father was a constant and intrepid reader of anything from English history to Louis L’Amour to Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series. We shared a special passion for adventure stories from the Forties by authors like Frank Yerby and Edison Marshall, Rafeal Sabatini ,and Harold Lamb. I would comb used bookstores and bring them to him like the lost treasures out of the tales themselves.
Some years before my first novel The Marriage of True Minds was published in 2008, he began a long slow descent into dementia. He was not able to read my novel, though he seemed so proud when I showed him the published volume. Reading was a great loss to him I know. It had been so much of his life in his long retirement: golf, cards, reading, and my mother—not in that order.
Dad went into the hospital for the last time the day after Thanksgiving in 2009. By that time he had lost all his words. One moment when we were alone together in the hospital, I showed him a page in a book I was writing called A Transcendental Journey. The dedication was to him. He made no sound, but his eyes went wide and I truly felt he understood. It was such a small gesture for all he had given me, but I’m glad I was able to do it.
From time to time over his last few years, we talked about writing a book together, about his boyhood days in Iowa. He even started making notes. As I look at them now, the handwriting reflects the slow decline in his condition. I can’t make out the last few words. The letters are too shaky.
I would have enjoyed writing that book. And I would have enjoyed reading it. He infused every tale with his sly humor and deep joy in the telling. I imagine he could have been quite a writer. Instead he gave me the chance to be one. I guess that’s what being a father is all about.
This collection includes his story along with some pieces of mine. I hope it will stand in for that book we wanted to write together, at least until I can finish the story he started.
