Between Them by Richard Ford

In his memoir Between Them, the writer Richard Ford attempts to describe the lives of his parents Edna and Parker Ford both born in Arkansas in the first decade of the twentieth century. It is gripping to see a writer of Ford’s talents string together words that so vividly bring his parents’ lives into focus. In two different essays written thirty years apart, Ford seeks to make a permanent acknowledgment of his parents’ time on this earth and through his writing better understand them. He says, “The fact that lives and deaths often go unnoticed has specifically inspired this small book about my parents and set its task. Our parents’ lives, even those enfolded in obscurity, offer us our first, strong assurance that human events have consequences.”

Ford’s parents’ lives were ordinary by most measures, but of course, they were the center of Ford’s identity. He describes their outward lives almost as a timeline filled in with dates and places. Yet, he is interested in their inner lives, elusive to him then and elusive still in this 2017 book. They had both lived and died and Ford was left to consider all he knew about them and all that he did not. And isn’t that true for all of us: we have incomplete knowledge of our parents’ lives. As a way of explanation, Ford says, “There had already been so much important life before me –of which I knew little, and that to them did not bear talking about since it did not include me.”

Ford’s parents fell in love. They married in 1928 and did not have him until 1944. As he grew up, Ford felt loved by his parents yet peripheral to their deep connection. During those prior fifteen years, Ford’s mother traveled with her husband from town to town while he made sales calls selling starch for the Faultless Company. When Ford was born, his parents decided they needed a home base. They chose Jackson, Mississippi, the center of his father’s territory. In a very poignant passage, Ford imagines the loss his father might have felt after his wife stopped traveling with him. “And how was it for him? Driving, driving alone? Sitting in those hotel rooms, in lobbies, reading a strange newspaper in the poor lamplight; taking a walk down a street in the evening, smoking? Eating supper with some man he knew off the road? Listening to the radio in the sweep and hum of an oscillating fan. How was it being a father this way – having a wife, renting a house in a town where they knew almost no one and had no friends, coming home only weekend, as if this were home?” And what of his mother, this dramatic change to her life? When Ford became an adult he never asked them.

Ford’s book spoke to me. In our busy modern lives, we avoid asking meaningful questions of those we love until it is too late. His book speaks to his parents’ external lives while longing to understand their inner lives. His analysis is beautifully written, but not psychologically penetrating. He doesn’t seem to probe too deeply about the effects of Edna and Parker Ford in shaping who he grew up to be. Yet, in the afterword, Ford summarized, “I was fortunate to have parents who loved each other and out of the crucible of that great, almost unfathomable love, loved me. Love as always confers beauty." Whatever distance Ford felt towards his parents, he felt sustained and supported by their imperfect love.