In 1966, when I was a girl of 15 growing up in Central Pennsylvania, I wrote a letter to J.D. "Jerry" Salinger. It began a correspondence and friendship between us that spanned in all about 10 years. In 1970, my junior year in college, I visited him for about five days at his home in New Hampshire.

Until now, I never disclosed my relationship with Jerry Salinger except to family and some close friends. Jerry was distressed by the attention that celebrity thrust upon him, and I respected his desire for privacy. Also, I didn't welcome the attention myself. How and when do you ever so casually mention that you know J.D. Salinger without coming across as a name-dropper eager to impress?

With Jerry's death last month, I feel a little differently. In the words of his character Holden Caulfield, "Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them ..."

I'd like to clear up a few things right from the start:

• Jerry and I were strictly friends, so if you are someone with "gusto for the lurid" (a memorable phrase from his "Seymour: an Introduction"), you've come to the wrong place.

• I am today, and was as a kid, just another "amateur reader still left in the world ... who ... reads and runs" (as Jerry wrote in that book's preface). I'm not an author, intellectual or literary critic. I don't know what Holden Caulfield's red hunting hat symbolizes and can't help you with your thesis on the topic of Salinger's legacy in the canon of postwar American literature. Fortunately, none of that has ever been an impediment to my immense enjoyment of his work.

I grew up in a family of serious card-carrying library patrons with a houseful of books shelved and stacked everywhere. My parents never censored my reading. The first of Jerry's work I read were the co-published novellas "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters" and "Seymour: an Introduction," which I read aloud in installments over a few weeks to my mother while she took her evening bath. (In my family, just about any setting was conducive to reading.)

I was simply stunned. Jerry broke all the rules about fiction I had inferred up to that point and, in just two short works, detonated my preconceptions about the boundaries of imagination and creativity. No fiction I had read before made me feel so simultaneously entertained, provoked and inspired. I realize how hyperbolic this sounds, but, seriously, I was never the same person afterward.

In time, I got around to reading "The Catcher in the Rye." Although the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, took his rightful place in my personal pantheon, it was primarily Jerry's "prose home movie[s]" about the fictional Glass family I fell in love with. I knew the layout of the New York apartment the Glass brothers, Buddy and Seymour, shared. I actually looked up the recipe for a Tom Collins in a bartender's guide just to have a better idea what the characters were drinking in the aftermath of Seymour Glass' aborted wedding. I obsessively read as many of the references in Jerry's stories as I could lay my hands on.

If still among the living, the librarian at my small-town public library in Huntingdon County surely remembers the odd, lanky girl who asked for assistance in locating R.H. Blyth's translations of haiku and anything at all by Swami Vivekananda.

At 15, I regularly wrote letters to people I admired -- former presidents, National Geographic writers, the actor George C. Scott. My first (gushing) letter to Jerry was, of course, to tell him how much I loved his books, but, also, I solicited his opinion about something that troubled me. I knew a family that had a very large print of Picasso's "Guernica" hanging in their dining room. I wrote that it was beyond me how anyone could actually eat dinner in the same room with a painting that depicted such horrific suffering from war, and, moreover, I didn't even think it was a very good painting.

Jerry wrote back to thank me for my letter and told me he enjoyed it, which made it "only fair if you've enjoyed my books." He agreed with me "wholeheartedly about Picasso," and it seemed to him "that a bright and really smart boy or girl might have shown a much less sophomoric bent for red-hot satire."

He closed the letter with a statement that elated me for months: "You're not a fifteen-year-old girl to worry over, and I take a certain amount of cheer from that. ... I mean that you sound fine, and better than fine. ... Hurray for that."

Thus began our correspondence.

The subjects of Jerry's letters ranged from the prosaic to the sublime. He wrote about the weather ("the roads beginning to turn to Chekhovian mud"), his garden ("I covered up the lettuce, beets, peas, and turnips with hay ... I think they're safe"), and foraging for wild mushrooms and greens ("I'm lying in wait ... for the first dandelion greens to show. The fiddlehead ferns come soon, too"). He told me about purchasing farm tools and pieces of furniture at local auctions.

J.D. Salinger with his daughter, Margaret, in the late 1950s.

Nearly every letter included affectionate references to his young children, Matthew and Peggy. In one letter, he wrote that Matthew was sleeping in Jerry's room "because ... he asked ... about time and space ... and when I told him that neither were absolutes ... he felt a little spooked." He related his travels with his children to Block Island, Montreal, London, New York.

Like those of his character, Buddy Glass, also a writer, Jerry's letters were often "teaching, repetitious, opinionated ... [and] ... remonstrative ... [but] ... filled ... with affection" (from "Zooey"). He could be unflinching in his honesty and never shrank from sharing his intense likes and dislikes or telling me when he felt I strayed off course. As a teenager, I was hypersensitive to criticism from any adult, but remarkably accepted Jerry's criticism in stride, I think, because his need to be honest was a matter of personal integrity, and for that, he commanded my respect. In other words, he was no "phony."

The Joni Mitchell album I sent him, "Ladies of the Canyon," he loved ("extraordinary and original, and no bogus passion or 'soul' shoved in"); the John Groth drawings I sent, he detested ("They're so line-y, so hoary. ... The same old Arts League hippy broads with their arms and joined hands raised overhead in prayer ... to Harper and Row for more books for the artist to illustrate"). When I wrote that I had gone to hear an author lecture, he wrote back, "I don't lecture ... or talk anywhere, thank God. I despise talking writers."

In response to my description of one of my first boyfriends: "[He] doesn't really sound like too much. ... It may be he'll improve with age, but I wouldn't bet on it."

I am quite certain that even the most strait-laced parents would approve of the counsel Jerry gave me over the years -- some of the best a young person trying to navigate the tricky passage from adolescence to adulthood could hope to receive.

On the subject of marriage, he wrote, "Marry up with no one whose collective and single parts don't give you peace, pleasure, and comfort like nothing else" and "Listen for coughs, too ... [his coughs should go] ... through [you] like a knife ... . Anything less than a knife-thrust, I'm certain, isn't important or for-real." On the subject of recreational drugs, he was firm and consistent: "I take a very dismally dim view of dope ... it riles and grieves me inordinately." At one point when I was thinking about dropping out of college, he wrote unequivocally that obtaining my degree was a "practical means to some sort of end" and to walk away would be "unworthy, stupid, an invitation to dark forces to multiply."

He concluded most letters with a bit of endearing advice: "Don't fail to take the most thoughtful care of yourself" and don't be afraid to undertake "the uphill loneliness of individuality."

A few times he signed his typewritten letters with amusing pseudonyms, "Charles F. Wood" or "Ronald F. Grinzing" or just plain "Bert."

Many of my exchanges with Jerry were, naturally, about books.

Brad Gooch, in his biography of the writer Flannery O'Connor, wrote that the boundary between O'Connor's personal life and her writing life was "porous." I think the same was certainly true for Jerry, at least when it came to the literature he loved best, whether fiction, poetry or religious texts, much of which showed up in his fiction: Chekhov (Jerry closed one letter with "I love, love, love Chekhov"), Rilke, Ring Lardner, Thomas Hardy. Jerry wrote about Emerson: "I prefer him to any other American writer ... [but] ... I hate to mention Emerson, or any other writer I really care about, for fear that extended mention might help to make him popular."

Readers of Salinger who know of his long-standing interest in Eastern philosophy and literature won't be surprised to learn that he steered me to D.T. Suzuki's work on Buddhism, James Legge's translations of Taoist texts, and R.H. Blyth's translations of haiku.

I know from Jerry's letters that he continued to write fiction during the years he and I were in touch, because he mentioned it frequently in his letters.

"I'm excited about work. I think I have about fifteen years' more work to do, and it's the kind I've been waiting for," he wrote in one letter; in another, "I'm going to use part of this setting for a block of fiction that came in, hit me hard, a couple of years ago, some stuff that seemed to me really funny and happy. Perfectly unreal, but up my alley." He shared his distress about being pursued by the media: "One of the Boston newspapers, evidently hard up for news, is poking into my life up here ... . How I hate it, and how it brings out every asocial and murderous instinct in my head ... it's all so hideous, embarrassing, interruptive, incursive and rotten."

He also reacted strongly and negatively to the speculation regarding which people in his personal life served as models for his characters. "One or two or several magazine pieces said the original... [for]... one of my characters, was this or that girl, woman, in my personal life. How little they know about the abnormalities of fiction-writing. If ... [that character] ... was anything but an aspect of myself, I'd have known it."

After Jerry and I had been corresponding for a while, he invited me to visit him when he learned that I was going to travel to Williamstown, Mass., to visit a friend who was a student at Williams College. He wrote, "We'll watch movies ... and eat good stuff ... and loaf around the place." Although my parents were aware of my correspondence with Jerry, I knew they wouldn't approve of my visiting him -- at least not unchaperoned. Although a college junior, I was 19; he was 51 and divorced.

Committing the sin of omission, I caught a bus from Williamstown to Windsor, Vt., where Jerry picked me up at the station.

During all of the years that I was in contact with Jerry, that initial face-to-face meeting was the only time I can remember feeling a hyperawareness that this person I knew was someone famous. I felt apprehensive.

That was quickly dispelled after a few minutes of chatting with him in the car on the way to his house. He was the same warm, quirky and refreshingly candid person I knew, and liked, from his letters.

His house was relatively small, comfortable and, like Jerry, very unpretentious. He was companionable, and we had a relaxed and easy visit together. We took walks on his property, prowled through bookshops (he bought me a used copy of short stories by Saki), had lunch at a Howard Johnson's, dinner at a local Italian restaurant. One evening we played a game of Clue with his son, Matthew, who was 10 at the time; another evening Jerry set up his movie projector, and we watched the old Alfred Hitchcock film "The 39 Steps" (the favorite film of Holden Caulfield's little sister, Phoebe, by the way).

At times we talked nonstop -- about books, films, music, gardening, natural foods, our families -- and other times just sat quietly together reading.

He bought me a plane ticket to return to Pittsburgh; he said he didn't want me to have to endure the long bus-train trip back home. When he saw me off at the airport, he told me to be sure to tell my parents to stop by for a drink when they made their spring trip to New England. (The cocktail never happened.)

I didn't see Jerry again. We continued to correspond until 1976, but I don't recall who wrote the last of the 40 or so letters we exchanged. The relationship just ran its course.

When, as an adolescent, I first read Jerry's work, a passage in "Seymour: an Introduction" made a lasting impression on me. It is an exchange between Jerry's character, Seymour Glass, and Seymour's father, Les, a former singer and dancer in vaudeville.

Les asks his son if he remembers the time in his childhood when Joe Jackson -- another vaudeville performer whose act included a "nickel-plated trick bicycle" -- gave Seymour a ride on the bicycle's handlebars. Seymour replied that "he wasn't sure he had ever got off Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle."

Farewell, Bert. I bid you adieu, Ronald F. Grinzing. Goodbye, Jerry. I hope you're in heaven riding on the handlebars of Joe Jackson's beautiful bicycle.

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