John Updike Died Today

John Updike died today.I know where his house is and just how it sits on his lot.I know the route I could drive to get to it. I know all this because I loved him. I read Rabbit Run in the summer of ‘62 as an 8th grade girl. Three times in my adult years I wrote him and all three times he answered me in his courteous way: with typed postcards, hand-signed in the same blue ink he used to correct the mistakes and always with his own true street address, just as if he weren’t a great man and the best writer of our time who influenced so many of us, writers and non-writers alike.He honored the whole created world just by describing it so exactly and anyone could see his talent. Once I was crossing the street in downtown Boston when a letter carrier coming the other way saw a copy of his Self Consciousness tucked under my arm. “John Updike’s memoir, I read that!” he gaily called. “The guy can even make psoriasis interesting!”I want to say more tomorrow but for now all I can think to do is worry if I ever really told him how much I loved his work - for the way it helped me to see, and feel, and accept my own bumbling humanity and the humanity of others.“Thank you, Ms. Marotta, for your ever so encouraging letter,” he graciously wrote me last June.“Never stop writing,” I had written to him three days before.He seems to have stopped now and some would say for good, but ah, here’s the magic of all art: in his more-than-50 books he is talking to us still.