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Celebrity
- University of Michigan Press
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Celebrity twenty years ago my father attended the Swan Ball, a dance held to bene‹t Cheekwood, a center for the arts in Nashville, Tennessee . Arriving shortly before Father, a newspaper reporter and an accompanying photographer settled into place at the foot of the long spiral staircase near the entrance to Cheekwood. “When anyone important appears, I’ll tell you,” the reporter told the photographer just as Father started down the stairs. “I took my time on the steps, and the girl looked at me,” Father said later, “but the camera didn’t click.” Rarely has a Pickering been thought newsworthy, and although I have written hard for ‹fteen years, few cameras have pointed my way. What attention I have received has usually been inaccurate or embarrassing, lending itself more toward notoriety than importance. Last fall I spoke at a potluck supper sponsored by the Friends of the Mans‹eld Library. The crowd was large, well over a hundred people, brought out in part, I am afraid, by a ›yer announcing that the speaker was the author of children ’s books and a religious novel. When my mother died two years ago, her obituary stated that she was a native of Hanover Courthouse, Virginia, the daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. John L. Ratcliffe, the wife of Samuel F. Pickering, and then, horror of horrors, “the mother of the noted essayist Samuel F. Pickering, Jr. of Storrs, Connecticut.” My God, I thought, what will people think? I imagined old friends at breakfast tables ›ipping through their papers and stopping to read Mother’s obituary. “Jesus, Varina, look at this,” I could hear Jeffrey saying; “Sam’s trying to sell books on his mother’s grave.” “Huh, that doesn’t surprise me,” Varina would answer, taking the paper away to read it; “he always was a scoundrel. He may have fooled you and those friends of yours for a long time, but he never fooled me.” In February I received a letter addressed to “Samuel Pickering, Jr. writer,” writer being printed in red and circled by two black lines as thick and gloomy as mourning bands. Inside the letter was a note reading , “God loves you very much. You are precious to Him” and then a 13 tract entitled “A Rock Through The Window.” “Your heavenly Father,” the tract stated, “wants to deal with you as His beloved child, not as a guilty delinquent.” I had spent a quiet, and in this world what passes for the same thing, a moral winter, indeed a quiet last decade and so I paid little attention to the tract. Still, the sender might have known me better than I knew myself. In April I traveled to a conference in Arkansas to discuss “Parents and Children in Southern Autobiography .” The conference was solemn, and the talks and audience thoughtful , at least they were until I spoke. As I climbed the stairs toward the stage, a noisemaker began wailing, the sound rising shrill then snapping off in a cackle of laughter. For late morning the audience seemed oddly alert, and I wondered why until I reached the lectern. Spread open on the lectern was a Playboy magazine, the centerfold pink and creamy and looking like a mound of overly ripe cantaloupes. For a moment I paused, taste buds pricking delinquently; but then buckling appetite about with thought, I closed the magazine and began lecturing. In truth I did not pause long, for at forty-seven I was not the trencherman I once was, the boy who long years ago ate seventeen ears of corn at one sitting . Indeed since marrying Vicki I have bought groceries at Shop Rite, avoiding natural food stores and in matters personal preferring the institutional and the packaged to the organically grown. Recently attention paid to my writing has changed slightly, becoming at times almost serious. In an article a writer mentioned my “aristocratic impulse.” “Too bad,” Vicki said when I read her the phrase, “too bad it’s only an impulse.” In March the wife of the president of the University of Connecticut interviewed me for a newsletter published by the regional arts council. At the middle school one Saturday morning we met in her new silver Subaru station wagon, and she taped our conversation while our children practiced soccer on a nearby ‹eld. Last winter Bill Berry, an old friend, wrote an essay recalling his days in the graduate college at Princeton. He sent me an early draft in...