Fog's Posthumous Writings As we noted in another section, in early 2004 Frederick "Fog" Horne passed from this earth at age of 89. His beloved cat had died about five months earlier. Some time after this, Fog's sister, Irene, contacted me from Arizona and said that she collected all of Fog's belongings from his Florida sea-side trailer. Before she disposed of his old Mac and the many floppy discs of his writings, she invited me to come to Arizona and see if there was anything of value that I wanted. Apparently at the onset of his illness Fog mentioned that I could be entrusted with his files. I recalled that Fog had told me at one point that he had written many things that "people weren't ready for." It took me a while to schedule the trip, but with Irene's permission, and after a lot of Mac-to-Windows transfer experimenting, I was able to copy all of his files onto my Fujitsu laptop. After I got back to California, it was some time before I had an opportunity to sort through things, but, finally, I was able to spend a whole weekend going through Fog's writings and correspondence. During that weekend I learned far more about Fog than I had found out in the several years we corresponded. The first thing that hit me was how humble Fog had been about his experiences. Although he tried to come off as a "lowly, beleaguered small-town newspaper reporter," I found that he had corresponded with some of the "movers and shakers" of our world. In his files I also found lengthy and rather esoteric correspondence with two notable religious thinkers of our time. Under various names Fog had written pieces for some of the country's top publications. Fog undoubtedly made a bit of money doing this, but Irene said that he died with only $382.00 in his bank account. In going through his computer files, I found out why. There were many entries for significant donations to charities.
In exploring the content of the files, I found that Fog, being a typical never-quite-satisfied-with-what-you-write writer, had made some changes in the columns that had already been posted. In the coming months I will try to revise his original columns accordingly. There were also some complete columns in the same unique format that he had been using. Some were dated after he announced his last column. We assume "momentum" just kept him writing. Some pieces are obviously not finished and we assume he intended to come back to them at some point. Making decisions on what should and what should not "see the light of day" from all these files has troubled me for some time. However, as time allows, I plan to make this decision on a case-by-case basis and add writings to this site. I trust that Fog and his old cat, who are "up there" together somewhere, will approve.
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