{"id":1227,"date":"2010-01-28T14:35:25","date_gmt":"2010-01-28T14:35:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/28\/so-long-mr-salinger-and-thanks\/"},"modified":"2014-08-04T05:41:56","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T05:41:56","slug":"so-long-mr-salinger-and-thanks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/28\/so-long-mr-salinger-and-thanks\/","title":{"rendered":"So Long Mr. Salinger, and Thanks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Salinger<\/a> <\/span>\u00a0All I wanted when I was a kid was to be Franny Glass<\/a>.\u00a0 To be part of the Glass family<\/a>, intellectual, quirky, and with lists of beautiful quotes on a poster board on the back of their bedroom door.\u00a0 They were sad and weird and wonderful.<\/p>\n

And now, today, we lose their creator, most beloved for Holden Caulfield, the eternally adolescent hero of Catcher in the Rye<\/a>.\u00a0 Holden is worthy of every affectionate word written about him, and his palpable pain is familiar to those who’ve journeyed through the teen years, but the Glasses — well\u00a0 — they were a different kind of lovely.<\/p>\n

They are all the children of one man, and he died today<\/a>.\u00a0 I wish I could tell you what it felt like to read Catcher in the Rye at 13.\u00a0 I can remember where I was sitting as I read it – how I felt – and the deep sadness that accompanied Holden’s story.\u00a0\u00a0 It must have been traumatic though, because later, when my son and I read it together, I was shocked to learn that Holden’s brother had died.\u00a0 I had jammed that fact someplace hard to reach, which means it was even more disturbing than I remember.\u00a0 Reading it with my own child was a beautiful experience to share with a young man of deep compassion and great sensibility – a memory I cherish.\u00a0 So Salinger gave me that, too.<\/p>\n

(I’m not mentioning Joyce Maynard here.\u00a0 She had a right – but sheesh!)\u00a0 And I really don’t have much to say about the quiet recluse in the hills of New Hampshire. \u00a0\u00a0 Farewell to him, yes, but also to yet another connection to the days when I was young – and more like Holden than like women of a Certain Age.\u00a0 The passions, the pain, the poetic anger at people for not being what we expect them to be and the desperate longing to rescue the imperiled and the lost.<\/p>\n

Anyway,
\nI keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of
\nrye and all.\u00a0 Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big,
\nI mean – except me.\u00a0 And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy
\ncliff.\u00a0 What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go
\nover the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re
\ngoing I have to come out from somewhere and <span>catch<\/span> them.\u00a0 That’s all I do all day.\u00a0 I’d just be the
\ncatcher in the rye and all.\u00a0 I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing
\nI’d really like to be.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess those who don’t dream of being the catcher long
\nto be the one who is caught.\u00a0 And those longings don’t go away whether you’re 13 or
\n63 (right – I first read it FIFTY years ago!)\u00a0 Imagine.\u00a0 No, it
\ndoesn’t go away, but your perspective changes.\u00a0 The loveliness of that
\nkind of protecting — or being protected – it isn’t around much in the real
\nworld.\u00a0 All the more reason to be grateful for the rare observer who can remind us of its sweetness, and of what we are capable of aspiring to.<\/p>\n

And grateful I am.\u00a0 For Franny and Zooey and Seymour and all their craziness and for Holden, what he gave me then, and what I remember, even today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0All I wanted when I was a kid was to be Franny Glass.\u00a0 To be part of the Glass family, intellectual, quirky, and with lists of beautiful quotes on a poster board on the back of their bedroom door.\u00a0 They were sad and weird and wonderful. And now, today, we lose their creator, most beloved … Continue reading So Long Mr. Salinger, and Thanks<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,3,4,5,6,2764,7],"tags":[192,251,248,250,247,244,249,242,241,252,253,246,243,193,245],"class_list":["post-1227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2","category-aging","category-baby-boom","category-books","category-culture","category-i-seem-to-write-a-lot-of-obits","category-life","tag-aging-2","tag-books-2","tag-catcher-in-the-rye","tag-death","tag-esme","tag-franny","tag-franny-and-zooey","tag-holden-caulfield","tag-jd-salinger","tag-literature","tag-new-hampshire","tag-seymour","tag-the-glass-family","tag-time","tag-zooey"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-jN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1227"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1795,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions\/1795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}