In my mid-twenties I was offered a job as companion to my friend Richard’s grandmother. She wanted someone to take her to the symphony and the ballet, to read with and talk to her. She lived in an extraordinary house — a white mansion in a park, with apple orchards, a carriage house and tree-lined drive, wild fields of grass. Inside, the house was lovely, cool and quiet. My main memories are of the huge bowl of lavender by the door, and of the remarkable library: original Morris and Rackham books, and vellum-bound miniatures. It must have been from his grandmother that Richard got his acute sense of the magical, of the beautiful and invisible. Both she and her house were anomalies in the Oregon where I grew up. They had the flavor of another time and place altogether.