“Before we pray, we always make the sign of the cross, like this…” he tells me, and demonstrates, and then adds “…unless you live in the Brave New World, then you make the sign of the T, like this…” which he also demonstrates.

“The brave, new world?” I ask. “What’s that?”

My dad then explained every aspect of that book to me, in lurid detail. I was four. Because of this, I can’t remember the entire ensuing diatribe, just a few points that stuck with me.

“It was a book written by an Englishman…” said my dad.

“Like Jack the Giant-Killer?” I said.

“Yes! Exactly! Except his name was Aldous Huxley. In his book, people didn’t worship God, they worshiped Henry Ford, and the measured years in A.F. — After Ford, and not A.D., like we do.”

“Why did they worship Henry Ford?” I asked. “Who’s Henry Ford?”

“Why, he invented the assembly line! He’s the reason that we have all the things that we do!” Realizing that I was only four, he explained to me how consumer goods used to be individually manufactured in toto in a slow and inefficient process by skilled craftsman, and Ford came up with the notion of having legions of unskilled laborers working specializing on one small task of a larger project, lowering the cost of production, and therefore the cost of the overall product such that they could be afforded by all. I was four.

“Henry Ford came up with this idea to build cars. That’s why they make Ford cars, like your uncle has. The Model T was the first car to be built this way, so they make the sign of the T,” said my dad.

There was a minute of pure silence.

“So why don’t we do that?” I ask.

“Because, it was just a book, and we don’t follow that,” said my dad.

“What do we follow?” I ask.

“We follow a different book, called The Bible.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because,” said my dad. “We’re Catholics.”

Fast-forward twenty-three years. My dad has passed on, and I’m a grown man who decided to lift his ten-year moratorium on literature to research dystopias for my book. I checked Brave New World from the library, and as I read it, I thought to myself: “This all seems eerily familiar.”

Then, from the deep recesses of my brain, this story emerged, and I laughed, and laughed, and laughed.