While I was searching our school's online archives, I came across this remarkable history I had not known about Ferry Hall: 


Traditionally at Ferry Hall each graduate chose an underclass girl to escort her down the aisle. After its merger with the Academy in 1974, girls began choosing male or female escorts, usually a relative or a friend. By the 1990s, however, this practice was abandoned for it was thought antiquated that girls needed support coming down the aisle. 


Today the graduating girls at the Academy process with confident independence in their lovely white dresses. 

“Literature is the best way to overcome death. My father, as I said, is an actor. He’s the happiest man on earth when he’s performing, but when the show is over, he’s sad and troubled. I wish he could live in the eternal present, because in the theater everything remains in memories and photographs. Literature, on the other hand, allows you to live in the present and to remain in the pantheon of the future. Literature is a way to say, I was here, this is what I thought, this is what I perceived. This is my signature, this is my name.”

Ilan Stavans, Professor of Spanish, Amherst College

From “The Writer in Exile: an interview with Ilan Stavans” by Saideh Pakravan for the fall 1993 issue of The Literary Review

Amherst gave me five choices. I chose to write about this one. 

I am going to write about Chris, but this is immensely difficult. I failed my first few drafts. I try to imagine Ann writing about Lucy. 

I wish I could say to him, I missed you. Instead of, I miss you. I will never be able to answer Nick's question if dying is hard. 

I have a reason for choosing to do this. In my journal last night I had written, "I want to remember and honor you by writing about you. In language I would like to have you. I would like to keep you." 

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet."

--Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I was watching "The Road" when I thought of these two sentences. Nothing was more alive than the father's language and memory. 

Literature remains. 

Mushroom Man

"The fact that there are people who say this will never work is proof I'm onto something unique and novel." 

--Paul Stamets

Here is a man who believes in mushrooms. He believes they can cure diseases like cancer and tuberculosis, clean up the environment, serve as a potential biofuel, and become an alternative to insecticides. 

So don't give up. 

http://www.conservationmagazine.org/2009/01/the-mushroom-messiah/

The Embrace

You weren't well or really ill yet either,
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace. 


I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out--at work maybe?--
having a good day, almost energetic.


We seemed to be moving from some old house 
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative


by your face, the physical face of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without stain?


So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth 
and clarity of you--warm brown tea--we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.


Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.

Mark Doty, "The Embrace"

Reminds me of Chris. Some nights before I go to bed I think of how he is so there inside my head and why he is not here. There is a picture of him inside my journal. It is black-and-white but I can almost see the colors emerging behind it, as real as life. 

The Rain

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.


What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon 
so often? Is it


that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me


something other than this
something not so insistent--
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.


Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out


of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet 
with a decent happiness. 

Robert Creeley, "The Rain"

In my dorm room the ceiling is rather thin and I can hear the raindrops fall against it. I have always thought that the sound is very poetic, and it reminds me of Jane's poem that starts, "I have fallen / I have fallen in love with rain." After I read this poem during my final week of school, although rain rarely fell and I missed the sound of raindrops, I could almost hear it in this poem. In my imagination of Creeley's voice, the sound of raindrops fall between his words and commas. 

I adore the last two stanzas. To me it is more than love; it is loving. And with the last sentence the rain stops falling. 

PSYC 110: Introduction to Psychology/Yale

One other thing on Freud--just a story of the falsification of Freud. I was taking my younger child home from a play date on Sunday and he asked me out of the blue, "Why can't you marry your mother or your father?" Now, that's actually a difficult question to ask--to answer for a child, but I tried my best to give him an answer. And then I said--then I thought back on the Freud lecture and so I asked him, "If you could marry anybody you want, who would it be?" imagining he'd make explicit the Oedipal complex and name his mother. Instead, he paused for a moment and said, "I would marry a donkey and a big bag of peanuts." [laughter] Both his parents are psychologists and he hates these questions and at times he just screws around with us. [laughter]

--Professor Paul Bloom, Session 4, Foundations: Skinner

It was purely by serendipitous chance I came across Yale's open course lectures. I was actually looking for a free audiobook download online, for something like Jane Austen's Persuasion or Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. Instead I found professor Bloom.

A piece of iceberg. He meant the top part. Daddy was telling me on the phone that what can be seen may be deceptive. This talk was apparently linked to my applying to college, but I don't see the connection. A piece of iceberg--hopefully this is an encouragement.

Dimensions

     I will just say then: I have seen the children.
     I have seen and talked to them.
     There. What are you thinking at the moment? ... But I want to tell you ... they exist. I say they exist, not they are alive, because alive means in our particular Dimension, and I am not saying that is where they are. In fact I think they are not. But they do exist and it must be there is another Dimension or maybe innumerable Dimensions, but what I know is that I have got across to whatever one they are in. 

From Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness

He is not a criminal. Lloyd is only criminally insane. The only mystery I had yet to figure out in the back of my mind was whether he killed the children. 

He did. He used pillows to stifle them. And Sasha--he was a tricky one because was smart--he tried to escape. So for Lloyd to say that he saw the children in another "Dimension"--does that justify anything for Doree?

Doree intended to see Lloyd, to talk to him about the children and their "Dimensions" in her undisguised, truthful self. In the very end, however, she decides not to go to London. She decides to bring a young man's life back instead. Perhaps she finally finds the Dimension she belongs to.  

Too Much Happiness

In the bookstore I considered buying Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness. It was on the top of a very tall shelf. I  reached for it on the ladder and carefully considered the weight of its pages. There on the ladder I read the first pages of the last chapter. Of course I could tell it was going to be a good story. But I did not buy it and I did not regret it. Because three weeks ago I got it from my favorite teacher.

Last

"Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts."

Philip Roth, The Human Stain

Chapter Eighteen.

     After I hung up the phone, it rang a minute later.
     "You think I'm talented, don't you?" Lucy said.
     "Of course I think you're talented."
     "Okay. I was just checking. Good-bye again."
     And then she was gone.

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

The last chapter. The last words Ann exchanges with Lucy. I can't remember what my last words were to Chris. It was a Thursday evening the last time I saw him. I wish I had been a better friend. 

Is it okay to write letters to a dead person? One reason a letter can be mailed back to you is the recipient's death. I don't know if that's right or fair. But I guess you can't do anything about it. 

Written in my journal a week ago. Because I don't want to fail my memory. 

Chapter Seventeen

     "Don't stop loving me."

     "I'm always going to love you."

     "Don't stop taking my calls."

     "Lucy," I said. "Check your answering machine sometime. I call you every day."

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Chapter Sixteen 2

"I have the most extraordinary friends. I've never really understood why everyone has been so good to me, and now I can interview them, talk to them and see." Then she added as a gift, "I'll write a whole chapter about you."
     "I could write an entire book about you," I said, and laughed.

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

She did. Beautifully. 

Chapter Sixteen

     When we were walking home, she softened and maybe felt a little sorry for making a scene, if only because she knew I hated scenes. She twisted her arm around mine. "Don't listen to me," she said. "I just get going sometimes. You know that."
     "I do."
     She pushed her head into my shoulder. "And you still love me?"
     I was still mad at her, furious with her, but that wasn't the question. The question was did I love her. And I always loved her.

--From Ann Pathcett's Truth and Beauty 

Such friendships are rare. The kind you always love and understand and forgive. The kind you see each other in years at a restaurant and slip into a conversation so easily. A first and singular and irreplaceable kind of friendship.

I pride myself in having one. And one is enough because Lizzy is brilliant and funny and of course, the only person I know who has read almost every Russian author's thick and impossibly long books. The letters and phone calls cover our fourteen-hour distance and although I have not seen her in--I lost count--six years, I know she's always there for me. 

Chapter Fifteen

Dearest Anngora, my cynical pirate of the elusive heart, my self winding watch, my showpiece, my shoelace, how are you?

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Lucy's letter to Ann. One beautiful way to ask Ann about the depth of her life. 

Chapter Fourteen

"What happened?" was the first question. ...
     "Hives," I said. I was getting used to them.

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I completely understand Ann. I imagine her million red blotches, constantly imploring to be scratched.  I remember when I had hives all over me--I was utterly shocked by the fact that I was, in fact, allergic to something in this world, for the first time in my life. I stopped using shampoo, body wash, lotion once at a time but even after three immensely long months, could not determine what I was allergic to. I rubbed all kinds of skin ointment, scrupulously medicated myself Benadryl, and tried very hard to resist the urge to give a little scratch. So after five months, I was on the verge of giving up. 

In the end, it turned out to be my laundry detergent. I therefore immediately banned my use of All and bought Tide--the one that's fragrance-free, colorless, and most importantly, dermatologist-tested. My hives began to disappear. You don't know how liberating that felt--to not have any more red blotches that became bumps that eventually bled and finally left scars. To not be sleepy and tempted all the time. To not be asked questions. 

Chapter Thirteen

Then she got a note from George Staphanopoulos. 
...
Of course that must have been the thing that everyone was thinking, everyone she told the story to. Did you tell him about your face?
     After that she asked me constantly, "Why didn't he call me again?" 
     "You said that he wouldn't. You said mutually no sparks."
     "It's because I'm ugly," she said. "I know why."

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Poor Lucy. Mr. Staphanopoulos should have known better. Lucy was a brilliant writer--successful, famous, adventurous. Perfect, except she thought of her small defect called a face too much. She needn't.

Chapter Twelve

     "You're a poet," I said when she read me everything she had.
     "I want to be a novelist."
     "You're a novelist, too. Don't worry about that." I believed at that moment there was nothing to worry about. Her writing was gorgeous. She could write a novel as long as she could find a way to stay in her chair.

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I wish I could be a poet and a novelist at the same time like Lucy. 

I read a very worthwhile passage in the SAT yesterday. It said that one needs 10,000 hours of practice to become an eclat professional in whatever skill one wanted to perfect. 20 hours a week for 10 years. I think Lucy became one in less than 10,000 hours. 

Chapter Eleven

      Lucy knew which cat wanted to be held and which one wanted to be smacked. The weight she put on things so often struck me as backwards, but in some ways she had a deep understanding of the logic of the world. I would have thought that the prospect of getting teeth after twenty years spent without them would have been thrilling or daunting, but she shrugged it off. She had no interest in obsessing over possible outcomes. She would simply go and see what they had to say and that was all there was to do. And she was right.

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Getting teeth. Most of her teeth was gone because of radioactivity since she was ten. So chewing and swallowing was a very strenuous undertaking for Lucy. She was humiliated lest anyone see her drooling, unclosed mouth. She was embarrassed to eat in front of people. So getting teeth was supposed to be exciting for her. After talking with good doctors who suggested her nearly impossible options, she cried. But Lucy didn't lose hope. Perhaps she was so hopeful that she chased after even the most impossible.