“Guess who was at the church supper last week,” my mother said, during one of our phone conversations while I was away at college.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Who?”

“J.D. Salinger,” she said, delighted.

J.D. Salinger at a church supper? It was the sort of news that could make you feel ... like going to a church supper. I was away at college then, and never did get to see J.D. Salinger on the few occasions when he stopped by our church for a meal. But I always heard about it.

In the region of New Hampshire where I’m from, the Upper Valley, Salinger sightings were not infrequent. The girl who sat next to me in my high school biology class casually told me that her older sister had once stacked wood for Salinger with a friend. After he died, some of my high school classmates posted their memories of him on Facebook. “I loaded birdseed into his car once at Longacre’s,” someone wrote. Someone else wrote, “R.I.P. J.D. Salinger. You wrote my favorite book ever, and I will always have a fond memory of when I sold you that cookie at the July 4th parade in Plainfield many years ago.”

Of course, it went without saying that if you wanted J.D. Salinger to drop by your church or buy birdseed from your nursery, you’d best leave your dog-eared copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” at home, and refrain from saying something like, “Holden Caulfield was right! The world is full of phonies!” and asking him for an autograph.

Much of the commentary on Salinger talks about how he shut himself off from the world and what a recluse he was, but the truth, it seems, is a little more complicated. My favorite articles feature the voices of the residents of Cornish, N.H., a small town of about 1,600 about 18 miles from where I went to high school. Salinger, these people say, was a private but involved citizen, who bought the newspaper at the general store, visited the library at Dartmouth College, ate lunch at a local diner and attended town meetings. Apparently, he really loved church dinners. A New York Times story (click here) includes a quote from Cornish town selectman saying Salinger “loved church suppers,” and notes: “Mr. Salinger was a regular at the $12 roast beef dinners at First Congregational Church in Hartland, Vt. He would arrive about an hour and a half early and pass the time by writing in a small, spiral-bound notebook, said Jeannie Frazer, a church member. Mr. Salinger usually dressed in corduroys and a sweater, she said, and would not speak. He sat at the head of the table, near where the pies were placed.” (No, that’s not my church.)

It’s been a long time since I thought much about Salinger’s work, and so this weekend I pulled “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Nine Stories” off my bookshelf. I flipped quickly through “Catcher’s” first chapters, but didn’t feel all that compelled to re-read it. “Catcher” is very much a book that speaks to teenagers; I was 12 or 13 when I first read, and I re-read it several times. Holden’s outlook was bleak and pessimistic; he seemed closely related to the gloomy protagonists in other books I loved, such as Robert Cormier’s “The Chocolate War” and Judy Blume’s “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t.” Now, looking back at Holden, he seems less a rebel than a seriously depressed and screwed-up kid, although many of his insights and ramblings remain curiously moving, and the final sentences of “Catcher” really made me smile: “... D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about. I didn’t know what the hell to say. If you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I think about it. I’m sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

This is true — once you start talking about people you’ve known, it’s easy to start missing them — even if it comes from a seriously depressed and screwed-up kid. Salinger’s writing is like that — it’s lively and vivid and full of character, but full of sorrowful truths that are so sad they can take your breath away. Unlike “Catcher,” I had no memory of “Nine Stories,” which my friend Kori was a big fan of, but I didn’t quite get when I finally got around to reading it late in high school. Now, however, these stories seem as beautiful and brilliant as anything in “Catcher.” “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is, if not a perfect story, a perfectly titled story, with moments so sad and funny I almost cried while reading it. Salinger’s ear for children is, as always, spot on, as is his sense of how the tragic mixes with banal. The stories in “Nine Stories” are more adult than “Catcher,” more imbued with adult feelings of regret and brittleness, and more concerned with the haunting effects and lasting scars of death and suicide and war. (Although Holden, still mourning the loss of his younger brother Allie, is very much struggling with issues of grief and loss.)

Kori has been dead for a long time, but while paging through “Catcher” a note she wrote to me in 1993 fell out of the pages. Weirdly, Kori had read “Nine Stories,” but never “Catcher,” and so I’d loaned her my copy of “The Catcher in the Rye.” She wasn’t, to say the least, very impressed. “I strongly recommend you lay (“Catcher”) down and instead read ‘Nine Stories,’” she commanded, in her note. “Exceptionally well written, which is more than I can say for this curiously classic Salinger.”

It seemed somehow appropriate, to find correspondence from a departed friend in a book by Salinger, who seemed to have an unusually keen sense of the ways in which death can haunt us and mark us. Although I disagree with Kori — I think “The Catcher in the Rye” is a great book. But she’s right: “Nine Stories” is well worth discovering. Each story really is great, a glittering little jewel.

Earlier today my editor turned to me and said, “Why do you suppose Salinger loved church dinners so much?”

“It’s a mystery,” I said.

Not that I don’t like a good church dinner — the pie really is good — but apparently Salinger was one of those people who arrived at church dinners “more than two hours early for the first seating,” according to the Rutland Herald (click here), which is something I’ve never quite understood. (In the Rutland Herald story, former Hartland Congregational Church pastor Bob Moyer offers this insight: “No one ever bothered him at the suppers. I think many, many people knew exactly who he was. Had he been bothered, I don’t think he would have returned.)

What’s most interesting to me is how Salinger decided to shun his WASPy New York City background and retreat to rural New Hampshire — to an existence and a way of life that so many of us were so determined to escape, at least when we were in high school. But Salinger seems to have decided that attention and celebrity aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and the older I get, the less weird his desire for a quiet and private life seems. The big question now, of course, is whether new works will be discovered, and whether we’ll get to read them. I’m hoping yes on both counts.

Got a comment? E-mail me at sfoss@dailygazette.net.