Chapter Six

     As much as Lucy liked my friends, it was important for her to know at every moment that she was my uncontested favorite. There was nothing subtle in her methodology. When we had lunch with Elizabeth, Lucy would inevitably leave her chair at some point during the meal and come and sit in my lap.
     ..."Do you love me?" she said.
     "Of course I love you."
     "Best?"
     "Yes best, but you are crushing my thigh."

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Lucy has been frozen in her ten-year-old self; she is like a child even in her mid-twenties. She wants to be loved and she wants that love to be expressed to her directly. She asks for it, too, like a child. 

I used to be like Lucy. Did not want to feel less important. Asked the same question Lucy did to Ann, except I asked mom and hoped and hoped I was far more important and lovable than--well, of course--my younger brother. 

Chapter Five

There on Scottish TV in the dead of night was Allan Gurganus, talking about the publication of his first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Allan had been my most important teacher in college. He was the person who had taught me to write. Now he was there in the living room in Aberdeen, handsome in his bow tie, calmly discussing his life as a writer. ... I decided then and there that I would be like Lucy. I would be like Allan. I vowed that I would write my way into another life. I, too, would try for everything.

--Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Ann says she decided to try for everything by becoming a writer. She doesn't say she would try everything; there is a distinction, I think, that Ann adds the preposition "for." 

I know Ann is not happy on page 71. She has gone through so much with Lucy and without her. She is twenty-five and divorced. She is broke. She is a waitress in Tennessee. She does not write much, save her letters to Lucy. And here Ann decides to become a writer, to "try for everything." For Lucy. 

Chapter Four

     One night after work I was sitting on the edge of my mother's bed, reading her Lucy's letter.
     "Save all of those," she told me when I was finished.
     "I save some of them," I said, but she and I both knew I never was much on saving anything.
     My mother said it again. I was to save them all. "Someday you'll both be famous writers," she said. "And these letters will be very important to you."

--Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I save those long letters from friends faraway. I tuck them inside my journal. They are the extra pages of my book, and the book has become quite thick and ajar since I've tucked them all in. 

I love letters. I love photographs. Anything that contains the essence of a person. I even keep the article about open source with daddy's picture in it, even though I have no technological understanding of what great work he does. I keep your emails too, Mrs. Bell! (I know--this is beginning to sound like some fan letter...) 

I'm glad Ann read Lucy's letter to Mrs. Patchett. I'm glad Mrs. Patchett told her daughter to save them. I wonder how she knew Ann and Lucy were both going to be famous. She was more right than the fortune teller who told Ann she was forever going to be with Dennis (whom she divorced a year after their marriage) and told Lucy nobody's ever going to find her (Ann did!). I should listen to my mom more. 

Chapter Three

Grief isn't something to 'be gotten through.' It has no life of its own like that, it's just plain and simply there. It's one of the things which tells us we're human. It's funny, but I'm always forgetting I had cancer. It seems like a different person that happened to. ...
     It's much the same with my father. Like the chemo he comes back to haunt me all the time, but it's often a detached sort of haunting. Or it is very emotional, very joyous. That might sound odd, but often I feel better able to live and love life through remembering my father. James Tate has a wonderful poem about his father called "The Lost Pilot" (also the name of the book); have you ever read it? It's about the advantages (I don't mean to be crude, using that word) of his father's early death, how now as an adult he realizes his father would already be dead, or very old and decrepit. I have a very pure image of my own father, one that is almost a myth. It has more to do with me than with him. 

--from Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

One of the letters from Lucy that Patchett kept. Or I should call her Ann. Reading her memoir brings me very close to her. Like I've known her at Sarah Lawrence or in Iowa or Nashville or the TGI Friday's she waited tables at. So I shall call her Ann. 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177311 

Probably Ann has already read this poem. I just finished reading it. It's lovely. I'm listening to him now. I think in every person who was once a child there is an image of whoever was dear to him or her kept frozen in time. I'm reminded of this frozen image. 

Chapter Two

     "You girls pick up hitchhikers?"
     "I do," Lucy said, meaning that if she had a car she certainly would.
     He nodded and we watched the back of his head, his long ponytail caught up in a greasy knot. "I tried to hitch from Chicago to Cedar Rapids one time," he told us. "Didn't have enough money for a bus ticket. I started walking on the interstate and not one person stopped for me. Nobody. Ended up having to walk the whole way. It took me three days and I'll tell you, it was cold. Not one person cared if I needed help."
     We were all silent. I didn't know whether or not I should apologize, since I was sure I wouldn't have picked him up either.
     "You got to stop for people," he said, punctuating every word. "That's what you owe me for this ride. You have to pick up somebody else up. Do you understand me? Pick them up no matter what they look like."

--from Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I wonder if I ever picked anyone up. I remember my first time skiing. I was too scared to go down the hill. But then somebody held my hand. He was not like my kidnapper when I was six in any way. (By then I knew how to distinguish a kind stranger from a kidnapper.) He held my hand and went down the hill with me and told me, "this is what it is to ski." That this kind stranger who came to my rescue was a middle-aged African American man contains something anthropologically important. He picked me up.