Love Letter to Holden Caulfield…..My tribute to J.D.Salinger

This post can also be found Under the Cuckoo Clock

It’s really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Oh Holden!

We meet in Mr. Stough’s English class. You were so real, so jaded, so naughty. You smoked, you drank, you flunked out of school.

And yet we were told to get to know you. It was an assignment! Who was Holden Caulfield? What were his dreams? His failures?

It was the happiest day of my young, English Lit career.

So different from Huckleberry Finn, the sonnets of Shakespeare, you were tragic like Hamlet but so relatable! You Holden, would never wear tights and hold a conversation with a skull. You were way too cool.

Oh Holden! You were nestled in my book bag, with your dog-eared pages I circled quotes where your voice touched my inner teen-angst! I had found my soul mate. If only you had been here as a senior at Bear Creek High School! We would sneak cigarettes in the parking lot, we would wear black, listen to the Smiths and comment that everyone else was a phony and that goddamn money….makes you blue as hell.

It would be perfect.

And then we moved onto Beowulf. A knight, a slimy water monster, 1,000 years ago….nothing to do with teenage angst.

Nothing I tell you.

Sadly Holden, I am now older. Today if I sat with you out in the parking lot, I would tell you to stop smoking, call your parents, stop pissing away their money, buck up and go back to school.

Sadly.