Trisha Ricketts
My mother ruled over our home with unusually high energy, unfiltered opinions and unbridled passion for the arts, music and books. Passion, like where you are swept into the flow of something much grander than you knew before. We were swept away daily by the strains of Gershwin and Vivaldi, by the classics of Flaubert, Austen and Shakespeare. However, we learned not to be swept into the passion of laying on the couch watching black-and-white Shirley Temple movies on Saturday mornings, or else we’d hear from the kitchen, “Turn off that TV! I have a job for you.”
One gloomy summer morning when I was eight, I made the mistake of saying “I’m bored” within mother’s earshot. I realized, too late, that I was doomed for a dust rag and a can of Pledge. But instead of saddling me with an arduous chore, she encouraged me. “Go get a book.” Then she added, “Find Beautiful Joe.”
Well, I was that bored.
So, I found it, headed to my pink-and-white bedroom, and started reading. It was my first real experience being swept away by a book. Oh, sure, I’d read the Dick and Jane series and many of those orange-covered biographies in school libraries, but this was different. Beautiful Joe introduced me to the horrors of abuse. Through this story, I was swept into a world of sorrowful love and redemption. As I recall, I finished it by nightfall, sobbing at the ending.
Perhaps reading Beautiful Joe was my introduction to the wonder of the eternal through the eyes of another.
A few years later, when I was thirteen, I became bored. Again. This time it was my sister Sally who encouraged me to read Gone with the Wind. While the book was 1000+ pages long, I trusted Sally’s advice, so I slogged through the fifty-page rationale of the Civil War’s genesis, thinking this could never be Beautiful Joe.
But then she came on the scene dressed in a small-waisted frock and a picture hat. I was hooked. Rhett’s arrogance, Scarlett’s pomposity, Melanie’s kindness, even Ashley’s old-South civility were captivating. Reading Gone with the Wind, I understood the initial excitement, then the horrific carnage, a battle cry brings on in war. I didn’t emerge from that stuffy third floor bedroom until Rhett’s caustic farewell left me understanding heart-breaking love and an ever-changed era.
Through the years, many books have captivated me, but I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. Conroy’s artful use of language had me howling with laughter and pain. His novel, which I first read when I was in my late thirties, carries me—body and soul— every time I read it from the salt flats of the Low Country to the busy streets of Manhattan where the urbane hubris of the North clashes with the tattered soul of the South. It’s so moving that I used to read its Prologue to my AP classes, saying, “Sit down. Close your eyes. I’m going to read you something that will blow you away.” Fortunately, before he died, I got to tell Conroy at a last book reading in Winnetka how powerfully his writing impacted me.
I am forever thankful for my mother’s encouragement and for books—too many to name--but these three are hallmark and sit together in my bookcase.
