To wait this long to read a book is both sad and the luxury of living a longer life. In my case, The Catcher in the Rye I refer to, J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel that has sat on every American high schooler's reading list probably since the day it was published. It certainly sat there in the early 1980s, when I was in high school. Never read it. Until just now.
What a beautiful book. Well worth the wait, well worth the read. I can't help but feel that Holden Caulfield and Tom Sawyer are in essence the same character, the quintessential American cut-up, half mongrel rabbit, half avian shaman. That they are both white boys is hard to avoid in this day and age. I wonder if that archetype has disappeared in our multi-racial, multicultural world. In Holden's case too, there's a post WWII American depression about it all. A boy who's lost. Gets himself kicked out of Pencey, his private boarding school in Pennsylvania. Because of this, he returns to New York City a few days early for his Christmas break and wants to hide out before he shows up at his parents' apartment to break them the bad news.
He's a boy of 16 or 17, wandering the streets of New York by himself sometime in 1945 or '46, staying in cheap hotels, drinking his face off in bars as he desperately hits on women, thinking of his dead brother Allie often, smoking storms of cigarettes, procuring a whore via the hotel's elevator man which only ends up costing him too much and getting him beat up by the elevator man pimp, no sex. Then getting hit on by a gay teacher whom he confides in. And eventually sneaking back into his parents' apartment to find his baby sister Phoebe before he skips town. The two of them head to the Central Park Zoo where Phoebe convinces him not to go, through her wiles and guile.
They find the carrousel instead. It was a favorite of hers.
This is how he describes the end of that scene:
Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn't get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet especially my neck and pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway. I didn't care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I don't know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could've been there.
I was going to say I wish I could've been there too, but actually I felt as though I was there. In the rain, in Central Park, in 1946 or whenever.
I also can't help but remember this 2011 article in The Paris Review by Blair Fuller regarding Salinger:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/02/07/an-evening-with-j-d-salinger/
Coming Through the Rye by Robert Burns
Jenny's seldom dry:
She draigl't a' her petticoatie,
Comin thro' the rye!
Chorus
Comin thro' the rye, poor body,
Comin thro' the rye,
She draigl't a' her petticoatie,
Comin thro' the rye!
Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?
Chorus
Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the glen
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need the warl' ken?
Chorus
Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the grain;
Gin a body kiss a body,
The thing's a body's ain.