Dear Readers,

Today is the��official launch of ��Prodigal Father Wayward Son, and it is also April Fools Day – which seems somehow appropriate. So to celebrate this confluence of events I am posting a chapter from the��from the book entitled ���The Keen Way��� which recounts a spattering of my father’s most foolish and endearing foibles.

Hope you like it,

Wayward Son (Gifford Keen)

THE KEEN WAY

Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all��� is not to have one.

��� Nikos Kazantzakis

Dear Father,

When I was a boy, you used to tell me, ���There���s the wrong way, the right way, and then there���s the Keen Way.��� I didn���t have to ask, not even the first time. It was obvious: the Keen Way was superior. Because we, the Keens, were doing it, whatever it was, it was even righter than the right way.

As a child and then later as a teenager, I often found your unconventional behavior mortifying. Apparently the Keen Way included changing your swimsuit in the parking lot at the beach in front of God and everybody. When chided, you would laugh and say, ���If they���ve seen one before, it���s nothing new; and if they haven���t, it���s about time they did.���

You used to rummage through the neighbors��� garbage, dig through dumpsters, and retrieve furniture, clothing, or household goods in various states of disrepair. And you didn���t even try to hide it. Far from it! In fact, you loved to boast about your finds. Standing astride a massive trash pile, holding some prize above your head, you would call across the street in a booming voice to wherever we were cowering in embarrassment that some idiot (obviously not a Keen) had thrown out a perfectly good toaster.

You were famous for rescuing ���road kill.��� This had nothing to do with dead animals (thank God), but rather with retrieving ���useful��� items from the side of the road. In the dog days of summer, you used to pack the family into the back of a green-and-white VW bus and take us on long trips to various semi-exotic locations. (If you live in the suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky, almost anywhere else seems exotic.)

At least once a trip, sometimes once a day, without warning, you would jam on the breaks and swerve precipitously to the side of the highway. Then, cackling in maniacal glee, with your head stuck out the open driver���s-side door, you would back up along the shoulder at full speed, the engine whining, oblivious to the honking horns and stiff, middle-finger salutes of other drivers. And there, in the middle of the road, would be some wondrous treasure. You would dart out into the highway and retrieve the item, perhaps a suit jacket. Upon returning to the car, you would dust it off and proudly display the booty. ���Pierre Cardin,��� you would announce, fingering the material with a show of judicious approval ��� and somehow it would be relatively new and always your size.

Your acuity for finding road kill appeared, at times, almost supernatural. Once, on a trip from Prescott, Arizona to Southern California, you announced as we pulled out of the driveway that you were going to find a Navy pea coat. Even for a man of your well-documented talents, this seemed to border on hubris. At the time I was twelve, pissed off about the divorce, and not inclined to forgive your foibles. So as the miles wore on and no pea coat appeared, I ribbed you mercilessly. But you took this in stride, insisting with good-natured assurance that the trip wasn���t over. And damned if after two days of travel, not ten miles from our destination, you didn���t let out a war cry of triumph and slew the car to a stop, half-blocking one lane of a busy highway. You popped out of the driver���s seat, went running back along the median, and when you returned ��� cocky bastard ��� you were holding��� yes, you guessed it, a brand-new, navy-blue pea coat ��� the kind with a double row of shiny silver buttons down the front. Just what you had ordered. My only consolation was that in this one rare instance, as I recall, it was slightly too tight in the shoulders.

When I was seventeen, we were riding along Interstate 80 somewhere between Berkeley and Oakland, one of the most heavily traveled roads on the West Coast, and you saw a logging chain in the median. You swerved to the shoulder; and a second later, I was watching in horror as you dodged and across five lanes of thick, fast-moving traffic to retrieve the chain. It took you twenty minutes and a dozen tries to make it back to the car; and twice I was sure that you were going to be mashed to a pulp by an oncoming semi-truck.

Okay, it was a nice length of chain ��� but really?

Once, we were in a high-class restaurant in Sausalito, and you were sitting right in front of the dessert table. All through dinner, you kept turning in your chair and eyeing the cakes. There was one particularly delicious-looking chocolate cake that had been completely consumed ��� with the exception of a single tall, triangular piece with a three-inch mound of crumbs and frosting heaped to one side of the platter. As I knew you would, after the waiter had cleared our plates and we were waiting for the check, you leaned back, pinched up a big mound of the crumbs, and ate them. ���Delicious,��� you pronounced.

I hissed at you to mind your manners, and you just laughed ��� a big, self-assured laugh ��� and said in a booming voice that carried throughout the small room, ���You think that���s bad, you should have seen my father.��� Everyone in the restaurant was watching; they���d all seen you. I was hiding my face in one hand, melting into a puddle of embarrassment under the table. And what did you do? Yep. You reached back, scooped up a fat slab of sticky chocolate frosting, popped it into your mouth, and licked your fingers.

The ���Keen Way��� was not confined, however, to the simple acquisition of questionable items by dubious means. Later in life it included activities like stowing away on a cruise ship (just to see if you could do it) and bringing a gram of hash back from Turkey (this must have been just for ���fun,��� because as far as I know you never ever smoked it).

And what boggles my mind now is that never once did it seem to occur to you that there might be anything even slightly suspect about your actions. Quite to the contrary, all of these incidents were carried out with loud, bombastic pride. But see, the thing was, you were big ��� big faults, big virtues, big voice, big personality, big smile. You had such charisma, such easygoing charm, that often while my sister and I were cringing in the wings, wishing the ground would swallow us up, other people were captivated by your offbeat behavior.

Your brash self-confidence, unsurprisingly, did lead to some truly boneheaded screw-ups. And the consequences of some of your thoughtless acts could have been disastrous ��� I mean, didn���t you see Midnight Express, for Christ���s sake? But even when some monumental mistake came crashing down around your ears, were you repentant? Hardly! ���Often wrong, but seldom in doubt,��� you���d laugh. ���It���s the Keen Way, son.���

This didn���t always make you easy to live with, but it let you live life on your own terms. You took chances; you didn���t give a good goddamn what anyone else thought, and you didn���t care who knew it. When I was little, you used to question me, sometimes harshly, and more than once I justified my actions by saying, ���Well, all the kids at school do it,��� to which you would invariably reply, ���If all the other kids jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff too?���

From the moment I could think, you taught me to think for myself. You demanded I question authority ��� although you might have wished I hadn���t applied that principle to you quite as assiduously as I did. You insisted I strive for excellence and were adamant that I value my own judgment over that of the herd. In college, Socrates��� perennial question, ���Which do you value more, the opinion of one wise man or that of ten thousand fools?��� settled into my heart like an old friend.

At least some of your self-assurance and don���t-give-a-damn attitude rubbed off on me. From an early age, I had a strong sense that normal societal conventions simply didn���t apply to us Keens. What my peers perceived as hard-and-fast rules that had to be obeyed, I viewed as artificial constraints to be examined and, based on my own judgment, be accepted or rejected without regard for what other people might think.

This didn���t make me particularly popular in school. Nor has it always made life easy. But it has made it interesting. The way you lived, your example of the Keen Way, gave me a sense of freedom, the confidence to step outside the lines, the conviction to do what I thought best even when my friends (and sometimes you) thought I was nuts.

Without that, I wonder if I would have had the courage to build my cabin, go back to college as an older student, quit a high-paying corporate job, or homeschool my children. So��� even though I was embarrassed by your quirky habits when I was a kid, resentful of being so different as a teenager, and more than once just plain pissed off at you as an adult; despite the fact that when I read this to my wife, she guffawed loudly at the thought of me chiding you for a lack of manners (as she maintains I have none), looking back, I wouldn���t have it any other way.

And I suppose this is my own expression of the Keen Way.

Prodigal Father Wayward Son

http://amzn.to/1zeaKO8

http://divineartsmedia.com/ProdigalFatherWaywardSon

http://facebook.com/ProdigalFatherWaywardSon

http://ProdigalFatherWaywardSon.wordpress.com

http://amazon.com/author/giffordkeen