Richard Ford - Let Me Be Frank With You

FOR A TIME, I HEARD MS. PINES — MOUNTING THE stairs, the risers squeezing, the floor joists muttering as she stepped room to room. She emitted no personal sounds I could hear via the registers or the stairwell. I’d already read the Times . So, I sat contentedly at the breakfast table, meager snowfall cluttering the back-yard air, caking on the rhododendrons and the Green Egg smoker. On a legal pad, I’d begun jotting down some entries for the monthly feature I write for the We Salute You magazine, which we hand out free of charge in airports to our troops returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or wherever our country’s waging secret wars and committing global wrongs in freedom’s name — Syria, New Zealand, France. We Salute You contains helpful stateside info and easy how-to’s — in case a vet’s memory’s been erased — along with phone numbers and addresses and contact data that the troopers, swabbies, airmen, and marines might need during their first critical hours back in the world.

My column’s called “WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS?” It contains oddball items I glean out of “the media” that don’t really approximate fresh thought — that in fact often violate the concept of thought by being plug-obvious, asinine, or both — but that still come across our breakfast tables every morning or flashed through our smartphones (I don’t own one) disguised as news. Veterans often come back after a year of dodging bullets, seeing their pals’ limbs blown off, enduring unendurable heat, eating sand, and learning to trust no one — even the people they want to trust — with a fairly well-established sense that no one back home, the people they’re fighting, dying, and wasting their lives for , knows dick about anything that really matters, and might just as well go back to the third grade or be shot to death drive-by style (which is why so many of our troops are eager to re-up). My column tries to take a bit of the edge off by letting soldiers know we’re not all as dumbass as newts back home, and in fact some of the idiotic stuff in the news can be actually hilarious, so that suicide can be postponed to a later date.

One item I’m including for January is a study up at Harvard that found a direct correlation between chronic pain and loss of sleep. If you hurt twenty-four hours a day, sleep’s hard to come by — the Harvard scientists detected. WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS? These things aren’t difficult to find.

In November, I included one from a top-notch sports medicine think tank in Fort Collins, where kinesiologists noticed that running slowly and not very far was much better for you, over a ten-year period, than running forty minutes or farther than eight miles — which, it turns out, increases the likelihood you’ll die sooner rather than later. WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS?

And one I’d seen just the day before, and was noting at the breakfast table, was out of the Lancet in the UK and represented a conclusion drawn at the Duchess of Kent Clinic in Shropshire (the same person who hands over the Wimbledon trophy, though she always seems like someone who couldn’t care less about tennis or even understand it). The doctors in Shropshire noticed that in cases of repetitive thought patterning leading to psychic decline, lengthy institutionalization, and eventually suicide, the most common cause-agent seemed to be not trying hard enough to think about something pleasant. WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS?

My pen name — it seemed appropriate — is “HLM.” The magazine often forwards me letters from vets who say that these squibs — which I include without comment — have brightened their first hours back and taken their minds off what most anybody’s mind would likely run to, if twenty-four hours before you’d been pinned down by enemy fire in Waziristan, but now find yourself in the Department of Motor Vehicles, trying to get your driver’s license renewed, and are being told by a non — English speaker that you don’t have the six pieces of ID necessary, plus a major credit card with your name spelled exactly like your passport.

Mayhem. That’s what you’d be thinking hard about. And no one would blame you. Statistics, however, show that great cravings of almost any nature, including a wish to assassinate, can be overcome just by brief interludes of postponement — the very thing no one ever believes will work, but does. That IS news.

Ms. Pines had been up above for almost five minutes. I heard her begin stepping heavily, carefully down the stairs — as if she were descending sideways. “Umm-hmmm, umm-hmmm.” I heard her make this noise, one “umm-hmmm” per step, as if she was digesting something she’d just taken in. I swiveled around in my chair so I could see to the front door, wanting her to feel at home and recognized when she came back into view. Maybe she’d want to sit down in the living room and watch The Price Is Right while I finished up some chores. Later, I’d heat up last night’s lasagna, and we’d get to know each other in new and consequential ways.

Ms. Pines — small, red-coated figure, boatish purse, green tam, shiny boots — appeared at the bottom of the stairs. She did start to walk into the living room, then realized the hall was beside her and that “a presence” (me) was twenty feet away — watching her. “Oh,” she said and flashed her big, relieved, but also embarrassed smile. She set her shoulders as she’d done before. “I guess I entered a dream state for a while up there,” she said. “It’s silly. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not silly,” I said, arm bent over the chair back Our Town style — our conversation being carried down the short hallway as if we were communicating out of separate life realms, which possibly we were. “It’s too bad more people don’t do what you’re doing,” I said. “The world might be a better place.” Almost all conversations between myself and African Americans devolve into this phony, race-neutral natter about making the world a better place, which we assume we’re doing just by being alive. But it’s idiotic to think the world would be a better place if more people barged uninvited into strangers’ homes. I needed, though, to say something , and wanted it to be optimistic and wholesome and seem to carry substance — even if it didn’t.

“Well,” Ms. Pines said. “I don’t know.” She’d recovered, but didn’t appear to know what to do. She wasn’t tacking toward the front door, but wasn’t advancing toward me in the breakfast room/sunporch either. Poise had given way to perplexity. “Is that still the door to the cellar?” She was eyeing the basement door halfway down the shadowed hall between us. Her eyes seemed to fix on the glass knob, then switched up to me, as if the door might burst open and reveal who knew what.

“It is,” I said over my chair back. “It’s full of spooks down there.” Not ideal.

Ms. Pines pursed her lips, exhaled an audible breath. “I’m sure.”

“Want to take a gander?” Another phrase I’d never uttered in my life on earth — but wary not to say something to make the world an even less good place: “It’s black as coal down there… dingy as hell, too… venture down there, and the jig’ll be up.” Words were failing me more than usual. Better to use fewer of them.

“There’s probably some places one oughtn’t go,” Ms. Pines said.

“I feel that way about California,” I said over the chair back. “Colorado, too. And Texas.”

Ms. Pines cast a patient-impatient smile toward me. She seemed about to say something, then didn’t. And by refraining, she immediately took command not just of me and our moment, but somehow of my entire house. I didn’t really mind.