In the morning, I woke up and casually checked my phone. It wasn't my week to abstain from Facebook, so I checked that, too. And that's when I read Pat Conroy's announcement:
Hey out there,Dear Internet: I do not know how to express my actual, real-life devastation. Pat Conroy changed my life. I never met him, but I fully intended to. I thought I would fly to Minneapolis if I had to the next time he went on tour (his tour for The Death of Santini didn't bring him to Seattle but it did take him to St. Paul) and I would tell him this. And then I would have him sign a book to one of my truest and dearest friends, a coach, because Pat Conroy made the word Coach so beautiful to me...
I celebrated my 70th birthday in October and realized that I’ve spent my whole writing life trying to find out who I am and I don’t believe I’ve even come close. It was in Beaufort in sight of a river’s sinuous turn, and the movements of its dolphin-proud tides that I began to discover myself and where my life began at fifteen.
I have recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. With the help of the wonderful people at M.D. Anderson I intend to fight it hard. I am grateful to all my beloved readers, my friends and my family for their prayers. I owe you a novel and I intend to deliver it.
Much love,
Pat Conroy
...but that day I handled the news by hunkering down in a coffee shop and writing him a letter while Matt took the kids to the park. I'm thirty-seven years old, yes, and I am writing a love letter to a man I will likely never meet. I sat in a coffee shop and wrote and wrote and wrote, sipping my little almond milk latte. I didn't pause until a young woman sitting near me said, "Excuse me, but do you mind if I ask what you've been writing?" And that little exchange launched an entire conversation about literature and death and philosophy. It turns out this woman was a former IB student from Quebec who is currently studying in Ontario. We talked about writers and exchanged book lists. She left a note in my journal.
Pat Conroy died three weeks later. I thought I'd have time to mail him my letter, as silly as that might sound. I even wrote it in my planner, for God's sake--to remind myself to do it. But last Friday night, on March 4, he died. And I grieve his loss.
During the summer of 1994 I was fifteen years old, staying with my grandparents in Gildford, Montana for a few days. One stifling afternoon, we drove to Havre, the strange little town in which I was born—it’s about 30 miles east of Gildford, and my grandparents did all their grocery shopping and errands there. Somehow, my grandmother and I wound up at a used bookstore downtown. I'd never known it was there; I didn't think Havre had any bookstores. As a matter of fact, the only bookstores within a hundred miles were B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in the Holiday Village mall in Great Falls. I can still smell both of those bookstores; they were all I knew for years and years. But somehow, we found this little bookstore, and my grandma asked if I'd like to stop. She knew I would; she still likes to tell the story about how once, when I was a little girl and she came in to say bedtime prayers with me, she asked if there was anything in particular I'd like to thank God for. According to her, I just gazed at the bookshelf in my room and said reverently, "My books.”
I've never been back to that bookstore. Sometimes I question whether or not it really existed at all; I wonder if we wandered through some mysterious door that no one else could see, like Narnia through the wardrobe, and we wouldn't be able to find it again if we tried.
We went inside. The bookstore was cramped and musty, thick with the smell of old books. There was no particular organization that I could follow, but my grandmother is unfailingly patient, so we just wandered slowly through the crowded stacks. Both of us discovered plenty of treasures that afternoon. My grandmother ended up buying a sackful of old books simply because she thought the covers were elegant and "someone might like to have them someday," and I ended up with two ratty old paperbacks that took root in my heart that summer.
The first one was Ordinary People by Judith Guest. I wouldn't see the film starring Donald Sutherland for another fourteen years, and I'd never heard of the book, but something about it grabbed me. I read most of it on the way to a family reunion in Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan -- a little oasis of trees and a lake in the middle of the prairie, a place my relatives still gather every few years. I still remember specific passages from that book, and it's still tucked in the closet of my bedroom at my parents' house.
The other one was The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy.
That book started a sacred commotion in my heart that changed the way I read, the way I looked at the world. I count that day as one of the most significant of my life. While I have been a voracious reader since I held the barest awareness of language, that was the day I began to understand the power of discovering and choosing books on my own, books that led me away from those chosen by my teachers or selected under my mother's eye at B. Dalton. I picked up The Prince of Tides and flipped through the pages. It was a tattered, mass market copy--the one with Barbara Streisand and Nick Nolte on the cover. It would require a few glue jobs in order to keep it attached to the binding.
I landed on the part of the story where Lila Wingo has given birth to her yet another stillborn child, and she calls her children in, one by one, to tell them that they alone are the only ally she has. She is utterly broken, and in her brokenness, she still manages to manipulate and confuse her children, perpetuating that grand Wingo tradition of telling lies and keeping secrets. Standing in that quiet, still bookshop, surrounded by thousands of dusty pages, I realized the power of perfectly crafted sentences. It is no exaggeration to say that falling in love with Conroy's has been one of the most important driving forces of my life.
I read it a month or so later. I started it in the backseat of a mini-van, on a roadtrip with my mom and two family friends—a friend of my mother's and her daughter, who was one of my best friends. We drove from Montana to Minnesota and spent a week there, and while I remember so many things about that trip, right down to my badly-permed bangs and green plaid Union Bay shorts that haunt me from the pictures my mother took, I can't think about it without remembering what it was like to look up from my book and see the fields of sunflowers in North Dakota or the bridge between Mandan and Bismarck. I finished the book shortly after we returned to the northern Montana hi-line, deep in August harvest. When I read the ending of the book even now, Tom Wingo's journey over the bridge above the Charleston harbor, his whispered "Lowenstein, Lowenstein," is superimposed over the way the fields look at dusk, the blinking lights of town two miles south of the farm, the heavy sweet smell of freshly-cut grain on the air, and the sound of the freight trains that pass through up to thirty times a day. There is nothing, really, that should connect these images, but there they are, no matter how many times I read the book. (I usually don't read it straight through; it's one of those books I turn to when I need a quiet moment, or an inspiration, or comfort. I used to carry it around in my backpack at school sometimes, and I'd pull it out and read random passages if I had a moment during Algebra class.)
My parents traveled to South Carolina a few years ago, and my father managed to get me an autographed hardcover copy of The Prince of Tides. It was one of the best Christmas gifts I've ever received, and that's the one on my shelf now, but my ratty old copy still resides in my old closet in Bozeman. Almost every time I'm home, I find myself pulling it out and flipping through it. Sometimes I need it for the beauty, sometimes for the catharsis that comes with raw pain, sometimes for the humor. The scene with the Wingo kids and their grandmother Tolitha? At the funeral home, when she insists on trying out the caskets because she's sure her death is imminent? One of the funniest passages in any book I've ever read. Other parts I read through pain, through anger and loneliness. That book cleanses me every time I read it, and never have I known a book as intimately as I know that one.
I devoured Beach Music in my dorm room at Concordia a few years later. I read The Water is Wide the next year as I began my teaching program. Ron, my fabulous mentor from my first year of teaching, has said more than once that it should be required reading for any first-year teacher.
I read South of Broad during the last days of my pregnancy with my second child. I read My Losing Season halfway through my pregnancy with my daughter, my firstborn. If The Prince of Tides serves as a foundation for everything I believe about literature, about why we write, why we read, and the power of language to connect us, then My Losing Season serves as the foundation for one of the most important friendships of my life. My father read it first (side note: I have always though my father looks like Pat Conroy) and passed it along to me. By then I was a few years into my career as an English teacher, and one of my favorite colleagues also happened to be a basketball coach. I thought he might like it as well, and I wasn't wrong. The following Christmas, I gave him The Prince of Tides, and when we returned to school in January he simply said, "Winslow, Winslow, Winslow," echoing Tom Wingo at the end of the novel--that gorgeously heartbreaking "Lowenstein, Lowenstein." Sometimes I think ours is an unlikely friendship. He's a coach, and now an assistant principal and athletic director. I'm the mother of two young children, and I like basketball because it's a big deal in small town Montana, but I mostly don't follow or understand sports. But Coach and I taught English together for awhile, and we share a love of sentences. He still texts me when he reads something that stirs him. We've shared other others--John Updike, Richard Ford, Frank Deford, Brian Doyle--but I really believe Pat Conroy is at the core of our friendship, which has become one of the best and most important of my life.
The day after Pat Conroy died, Coach sent me a long text message. He'd been at the high school basketball championships with some coaching friends, and one of them is a writer who has connections to Conroy as well. He forwarded that friend's text about Conroy's passing, and ended with this: "And Winslow, it puts you, by association, connected to our coaching fraternity." I love that so much.
And then Ron and I wrote back and forth a bit. Ron said, "Oddly...it feels good to know that this day sucks for someone OTHER than me."
(I believe it is no coincidence that the universe sent me a mentor who also loves Pat Conroy. Or that two of the best, most important men who've shaped my life read Pat Conroy.)
Sometimes Conroy's sentences are so perfect they almost hurt to read. His gift is using language to carry the reader through the entire spectrum of human emotion. I’ve never read one of his books without laughing hard, and not one has ever failed to move me to tears. I knew somehow, even at fifteen, that I was reading perfect sentences, that I would learn something about the art and necessity of storytelling and the sheer power of language, both to hurt and to heal—even if I couldn't articulate that at the time. That's what Conroy has always been about for me.
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