People never notice anything

I can still remember the first time I read it, "Catcher in the Rye." I could hardly believe this was a school assigned book especially when I came across the magic four letter word that Holden tries to protect Phoebe from. Whoa! It wasn't a swear, it was literature. And right at the end of this stunning book that seemed to give voice to every thought I was having (it turned out, to the millions of thoughts that tens of millions of people were having) I realized Holden, "the Catcher", was in a mental hospital. Very much harshed that 'he sounds just like me" buzz.

In the forty-odd (literally and figuratively) years since first reading it, I've revisited J. D. Salinger's book hundreds, if not thousands, of times (it was only a little older than I when both of us were much younger). It, Heller's "Catch-22" and Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" are probably the three books I have returned to more often than all other reading material combined. Heller and Pynchon wrote other books, some nearly as good, perhaps a bit better, and some not so much.

Holden Caulfield's eternal imponderable--"...I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park ... I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away."

I always loved Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and had I been brighter, I might have thought more about that story and its ending while racing through Catcher. As it was, I was breathless from the exertion of reading it as fast as I could. I struggled, and often failed, to keep up with the torrent of words the protagonist used as weapons as he waged a one-man war on everything and everyone 'phony' only to realize he was, himself, one and the same with the thing he despised.

Jerome David Salinger, who turned 91 on the first day of this year, died yesterday after almost half a lifetime spent in reclusive seclusion. Sometimes there's no second act, I guess. There's an ache, a dull one because he was gone long before he left, but the pain of remembrance of what was, and what might have been, remains. 'What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-bye. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse.'

"And a soul that is free can live on eternally." Goodbye Holden. Goodbye J. D.
-bill kenny