Ladybugs

I went out on the back porch overlooking Rhoads Beach and sat on the wall beneath the windows of the common room. Some one was plaing chopin on the piano, and the closer I listened the farther I drifted away in my thoughts, towards our house in California, picking blackberries around the lake, my dad, and how all the fallen leaves here look like dried orange and apple peels turned in on themselves with the chill.

When the music paused for a moment I came back to myself, realizing that my arms, the book I was holding, (Richard Ford’s “The Lay of the Land”) the wall I was leaning on, was dancing with ladybugs. My mother always told me they were good luck. I didn’t want to disturb them, so I waited until they had all flown off, paper-thin wings beating frantically as they hurtled away, dipping with the changes in wind current and the burden of their own weight, before climbing off the wall and heading back indoors.

The Lay of the Land

“A book’s voice is in the music of its intellect”

After we heard Richard Ford speak on friday night my mom and I escaped the crowds rushing to get their copies of his books signed. We went downstairs to my favorite room where it was quiet and the darkness outside seemed to comfort and enclose, not threaten. We talked about everything and dad, and I think that for the most part we told the truth. There was no great show of mourning, no tearing of the hair or beating of breasts, just a quiet shared grief for what life’s changes had taken away and for the uncertainty over what was to come.

Afterwards she asked again if I would like to get a book and have it signed by Mr. Ford, she was unusually insistin and so I agreed, partly curious over what compelled her to press this, and partly because there was a question in my own mind that I wanted an answer to, especially then, at that moment I needed a reassurance a promise only a stranger could give.

“Mr. Ford, do you write to escape life or to make it more real?”

He signed my book: “For Sarah – on the happy occasion of the beginning of college.” What more he wrote I did not read then, not until my mother and I had left Thomas Hall and were out in the night, headed toward her car and my room and tomorrow and whatever may come after that.

His answer to my question, written on the title page beneath the dedication was this:

“All literature is to make life more Vivid

Richard Ford

2006″

All that is left now is to read the book.