by Brendan Cavanagh
When I was thirteen years old, I was a wide-eyed, optimistic eighth grader.
I knew nothing about dating a girl, I was happily dependent upon my parents for everything and there was literally only one person in the world that I disliked (and, incidentally, I passionately hated this person for good reason). I was a clean-cut, studious, fairly pusillanimous child, just beginning to learn the ropes of being a teenager on the precipice of graduation from top-dog status in junior high to subservient freshman. My favorite book was Harry Potter (all of them), I dug "classic rock" and I wanted to be a lawyer. All of this, as well as my general worldview, was changed the day my mother decided to once again intervene in my literary affairs and make a novel suggestion, no pun intended (yes it was). She politely asked me to set down my copy of the Half-Blood Prince and recommended that I try out J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, saying "I read it when I was your age, as everyone should, but it's really more of a guy book. I think you'll appreciate it." Little did she know that the book would shape many subsequent aspects of my life and ultimately influence the way I understand people and situations today.
For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of reading Catcher in the Rye, the novel focuses on the opinionated and profane Holden Caulfield, a cynical sixteen year old who has just been expelled from yet another school. He's too ashamed to go home and face his parents, who will soon be notified of his expulsion, so he rides a train on over to New York where he wanders aimlessly for a few days prior to his return home.
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
What I love about Holden, despite his nearly unbearable, self-righteous (and often incorrect) attitude, is his ability to assess people's character and how they interact with others.
"People never believe you."
"People never notice anything."
"People always think something's all true."
Usually these viewpoints are highly negative, but he really showed me how pretentious, asinine, arrogant, conceited and (his favorite word) phony people can be. However, he also has an eye for the good in people, regularly referring back to his younger brother, Allie, whose death a few years ago still haunts him. He describes the inherent goodness in people, like the innocence in his sister, Phoebe, or the simplicity of the second-graders he witnesses at his favorite childhood haunt, the city museum (you know, where like here in Springfield, you can see visually-appealing displays of Native American life, displays that are always consistent and dependable, remaining the same no matter how old you are, when you inevitably come back).
Over the course of the few days in the book, Holden narrates simultaneously his time spent wandering New York in search of fulfillment and inner peace as well as some of the significant experiences of the last few years that have cultivated his identity. His brother's death, the douchebags and phonies at prep schools and the idiosyncrasies of girls in his past all play out in his affairs in New York. He gets more and more depressed- depressed by the significant (death, sex, etc.) and the insignificant alike. This is what really resonated with me.
You see, Holden allows all the little things in life to bother him. It's a terrible outlook, but it made so much sense to me, as did everything else he said. So let's say, for instance, this one time I was at Buffalo Wild Wings, and as my friends and I watched SPORTS! and ate wings, I watched a young boy playing arcade games nearby. As soon as he'd finish a game, he would run immediately back to his mother and beg for more money to let him play "just one more game," but then he'd just do it again. Of course, this is not that big of a deal- kids like playing games and parents are naturally obliging, and it's just some spare change. But to me, it was the most depressing thing I had seen in a while. I took Holden's mindset way too far. I painfully thought back to when I used to do that, and believed I was wasting my parents' money and just taking them for granted, and I also lamented for the video game-obsession of today's youth, and all this stuff mixed together and hit me like a freight train. I would see stuff like this and feel like crying. And I saw these situations all the time.
It was a crazy way to live. Over the next year and a half I read and reread Catcher in the Rye as if it was a Harry Potter book. It immediately overtook HP's spot on my list of best books I've read. Now don't think I just walked around depressed all the time, but reading this book like a Bible further solidified Holden's philosophies within my mind and I began to associate more and more with him. I became a bit more edgy: I considered myself an optimist no more- not a pessimist though, but a "realist." I started to weigh in the bad with the good. I occasionally got down about things. I started judging people for being too "phony" and considered myself right about everything. I was okay with spending time alone and engaging in a lot of self-reflection. Yet, I became more confident in myself, in what made me different than others. Rather than admiring the legal profession, I realized what I liked best was to reflect on myself and others and make commentaries, so I decided to become a writer. However, because I let the "phonies" bother me too much, I started to dislike anything that I considered "overrated," even if it was something I used to like.
For example, in seventh grade I began to give Green Day's
American Idiot a serious listen. Although it came out in 2004 (that being a year or so prior), it was not very popular in my school and my buddy and I were among the first to get into it. Then after a while, after I really began to appreciate the album, EVERYONE started to listen to it, and everywhere I went I heard "
Boulevard of Broken Dreams" or something- the radio, peers' mp3 players and even at junior high dances. This frustrated me so much because I saw these "fans" as posers who were just jumping on the bandwagon, mindlessly raving about American Idiot as if they were long-time fans. I neglected to recognize that I was one of the posers; I just happened to jump on that bandwagon a little earlier than my peers. But because so many people liked the album, I promptly cast aside the CD and focused on other music, music I could call my own. I did stuff like this all the time. It was stupid, I realize, to reject music, movies, ideas I previously liked just because people I disliked appreciated them, too. Yet, in a way, I suppose it was somewhat beneficial in that I actively pursued new things in hopes of cultivating my own personal identity. I can attribute a lot of my interests today to my post-Catcher pursuits.
So until March of 2008, I was doing okay. I was still an active, generally happy guy who just had a weird penchant for challenging conventions. But then what I mentioned earlier, the depression, soared (or should I say plummeted?) when I picked up a job at Cold Stone. Yeah, partly it's like what I've said in
blogs past, the management was less-than-desirable and borderline tyrannical, but my Catcher-induced depression about little things joined in to make my six months there miserable. As I daily submitted to the harsh conditions put in place by the owner and his wife, I also got a very real sense of the kinds of people that frequented the shop. Most people were normal, but there was still a sizable number of the most wretched, pathetic, sad people I had ever seen.
One guy came in almost every day. He was a creepy bloke, so we called him Creeper. Creeper wore the same rainbow belt everyday, had a very soft voice and softer hands (they appeared to be over-scrubbed, which we attributed to obsessive-compulsive hand washing). He moved slowly and liked to deliberate heavily before ordering his outrageously-mixed ice cream- which he did twice each time he came. And now for the cherry on top- Creeper ONLY paid with a Cold Stone Creamery gift card. And when he ran out of money on his card, he simply asked us to put more money on the card and then he would use that same card to pay for his ice cream. It was the most bizarre thing we had ever seen. It was hilarious, but I just felt so bad for him, too.
Then there were the homeless people. "Meth Lady" and "'Can I Borrow Your Phone? ('Can I Steal Your Grab N Go Ice Cream While You Retrieve the Phone?') Lady" and the like. I hated seeing them come in and beg for money and harass us and the customers. I didn't think about the plight a lot of people live in until I experienced it firsthand.
And then just a variety of customers: the obese, who often greedily bought ice cream, the blind, who just made me sad for no reason (and one time the guy gave me the wrong bill, and I had to correct him), and so on and so forth.
Ultimately, I wasn't depressed about the people so much as the harsh conditions at the shop, and after I spent a grueling summer there, I quit to engage in healthier and happier pursuits- school and cross country. And you know what? I became a happier person. I learned how to disregard a lot of the erroneous things Holden said in The Catcher in the Rye and I learned how not to let stupid daily things bother me. I realized I was just being, once again, super-impressionable and reading (no pun intended) into the text too vigorously.
But one of the single most uplifting experiences that allowed me to see the good in my life and the injustice in Cold Stone, what put my gears into motion into quitting my job and becoming a happier man, was a note my mom gave me. That summer I had lent my copy of Catcher to several of my brother's friends, who essentially mutilated it with their greasy fingers and general disregard for others' property. It's understandable. But it killed me because it was MY copy, MY Bible, it was so important to me. So out of the blue one day, my mom bought me another copy- the copy I still use today- and presented it to me with her St. Agnes teacher's business card inside, on the back of which was written,
"7. 16. 08
B.-
be yourself
because that
is a GREAT
person to be.
J.D. & I
both think
so.
<3 Mom"
I felt so happy reading that. I realized sad was no way to go about life (what's messed up is I used to like being sad about things, I felt like it enriched my character and allowed me to see things as they really were).
All in all, Catcher in the Rye has been a most influential book. Despite the slight negative influence it had on my early high school career, I was never really in that bad of shape. I just liked sitting on a world-weary pedestal. But honestly, I agree with a lot of what Holden has to say. I think a book like that could only be written by a genius, someone like J.D. Salinger. Turns out the guy shut himself up after a while, living his life in seclusion for years until he died this year (incidentally, Walter Kirn wrote a FANTASTIC tribute to Salinger for Rolling Stone, check it out
here). He hasn't released much material, but Lord knows he probably has myriad other works hidden away in his house. At any rate, I don't think I could ever really enjoy anything else by Salinger. Catcher in the Rye is just too perfect for me. I won't say I'll never relate to another book like I have with this one (I said the same thing when reading HP), but I just don't know that another book can hit me at the right time like Catcher did and subsequently influence so many things about me. Holden's got it right again:
"What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."
I hate writing this. It's making me too sentimental. Not about all that mumbo-jumbo with Cold Stone and "depression" and that, but of all the times I read this book initially. The last five years of my life. My "formative years." Holden's stuck around my side for a while now, giving me advice here and there (but as much as I love the kid, I have to ignore him quite often). But he closes the novel with a beautiful line, one that's resonated with me since the moment I read it:
"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
I really hope this influences you to read Catcher in the Rye, too. It's never too late. And even if you have read it, I hope you can now reexamine what you read and maybe recognize the Ward Stradlaters, the Jane Gallaghers, the Ackleys, the Phoebes, and the Holdens in your life.
To those of you who HAVE read it, please, let me know what your favorite part about it is. We can all learn a lot from each other from our favorite sections. Personally, the scene Holden recounts about a rainy day with his old love, Jane Gallagher, in which he plays checkers with her as she begins to cry because of the way her father treats her. It's so poignant- Holden describes looking at the checkerboard and witnessing a single tear drop fall from ol' Jane's eye onto a square. He starts to comfort her, kissing her everywhere but the mouth. God. "Does she still keep her kings in the back row?"
I could write a better ending to this blog post, but I'm slowly gravitating towards my copy of Catcher in the Rye...
