Ronald Ricketts

I knew Ron after he left his music career. That is the big divide defining how I knew him. Except for a few concerts (perhaps three that I remember clearly), listening to music was replaced by talking about music, listening to his stories of playing, or of other musicians and conductors. When I met Ron, as part of the trip to meet Ray's parents for the first time, I called him Mr. Ricketts. He corrected me immediately and proceeded to drive me and my year-long boyfriend to his and his wife's winter condominium rental across a long exotic causeway on Pensacola Bay. It was extremely cold that winter on the Gulf of Mexico but, as is said, I was very warm inside. I loved hanging out and listening to Ron and Shirley, Ray's mother. Even in 1995 when I first met them, Shirley was limited in movement by bone spurs on her spine. I happily kept her company on the sofa. Listening was, after all, my only sense of responsibility in this new environment. I could not have lasted in the Ricketts family if I had not been an avid listener as both Ron and Shirley told so many stories, many of them often repeated over the next 25 years. Some of their stories contradicted each other even at the start of my listening. They would yell out to each other, tell the other they were wrong, each slowly accommodating multiple views or suddenly admitting to particular memory corrections. Or not. I began to accumulate images about Ron and Shirley's youth, their families, the schisms of Jewish/WASP legacies that kept playing out in my ears. The personalities of Ron's and Shirley's parents and siblings were revealed mostly as black-and-white snapshots. The stories they told me began long before their meeting, and then began again in a new series, after their meeting on the beach at Asbury Park, NJ. [This makes me think about the pre-histories of parents, before their children were known to them. We only know this part of them, this time before us, from what they have told us, what they remembered to tell us. We cannot know more about who they used to be-such a long chain back into time. My husband pours over old photographs today. I think, for the fourth time, how the legacies parents leave to their children is made of things we never know, of what they did not say and we did not ask. Now these memories have left with them.] Some stories that came after Asbury Park were ones that seemed glamorous, remarkable even, when I first heard them in Pensacola. In particular, the train ride across the United States with the Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet. They traveled with Margot Fonteyn, Beryl Grey, Svetlana Beriosova, Robert Helpmann and that great company from the mid-1950s-I asked for that story several times from Shirley, trying to find more details beneath the main narrative. There were parties on board the ballet train and dancers surprised Shirley and Ron with a post-wedding reception in a sleeping car. Later, I heard stories about Ron's music training in New York and in Philadelphia, of working in various orchestras, about coming and going between rehearsals and performances with the Minnesota Orchestra; about tours abroad when Shirley would travel with the orchestra; Shirley's story about Isaac Stern. And beyond music, there were stories about Shirley's acting in community theater and her lost "Gypsy" audition, about the Civil Rights protests and trips to Washington, DC. About Hubert Humphrey! There were marathon trips and cars that broke down out west that I stitched into an image reel from the words I heard. There were the hospitals and the caretaking and children becoming parents. These stories from across their marriage became threaded into tales about Irving Avenue before I ever visited Minneapolis: about neighbors living and dead; stories about Ray's brother and sisters and then the grandchildren. All of these figures became part of a mythologized family that I first knew from Ron and Shirley during those first visits to Pensacola. They were obsessive storytellers on one hand but, on the other, spoke with embellished pride about their children's intelligence, even brilliance, of their ability to accomplish whatever they wanted. Ron and Shirley loved their family and they each loved me. After Shirley's death Ray and I visited Ron in Minneapolis as much as we could. I called his living room in his Theodore Wirth Parkway apartment a "reading room"-loving the comfortable silence of reading together at night. Frequently, of course, the silence was interrupted by Ron's urgent questions (or instruction to those who would listen) about something he was reading. Ray and I loved our walks around lakes and at nature centers with Ron in the first years after Shirley's death, of trips to Lake Superior and to bird refuges in Minnesota or during trips to Cape May and South Carolina. He was the star of a party at Ray's friend Tanya's house in Brooklyn for graduate students from Rutgers. Later, when we began driving Ron to appointments by routes that favored the long way around lakes, across Glenwood, up and down Meadow Lane, Ron never failed to comment on the landscape-after he finally reconciled that I was not going the wrong way home. Ron was forever intrepid, engaged with looking and asking questions. He kept walking as long as he could-staying curious and engaged until his body's strain for breath was too much and there was no capacity for more steps. I am sure he is still walking and looking and telling stories about where he came from. We will keep remembering and loving Ron. I am forever grateful for how many of his experiences were shared and are now part of my life. While affirming continuity it also is just so sad to confront how memory is made from loss.