I'm Blaming the Snow

We had us some weather in these parts over this past week, and I'm not pretending to not still be feeling a little bit of that as I've been shoveling snow in my sleep which is sort of funny since when I was awake I looked about the same way as I was actually shoveling.

Nevermind.

You had to be there. 

I fell across something I wrote a few days more than eleven years ago that surprised me because I was so pleased with how it turned out. And because of that, I've decided to offer it again in this space and if it inspires/encourages/incites you to revisit a book that you remember from your own youth, perhaps a book that has caused some well-meaning parent somewhere to feel so threatened by that they'd like it removed from your local library, then by all means go and read it again, preferably aloud.

We certainly don't need to get into book-banning or burning because it's too short a walk to then doing it with people. At the time I called this minor opus:

People never notice anything

I can still remember the first time I read "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 fifty-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 died 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 goodbye or a bad goodbye, 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. 
-bill kenny