The Catchers

Do you ever get the feeling that people are watching you? Watching and waiting? For you to step out of line? So they can alert the proper authorities? And talk behind your back?

Do you ever wonder if they derive secret pleasure from your pain? Secret happiness from your sadness? Secret success from your failures?

Me neither, just wondering if you ever did.

So you wanna know the first thing you do when you get released as YW Prez, besides take a long hot bath and cry your eyes out? You throw yourself across your bed and read The Catcher in the Rye, because that Holden Caulfield can really pinch a nerve when you're feeling edgy.

And because you're ashamed you've never read it before, being that you spent 16 years of your life pretending to be a literature major slash literature teacher.

And because your daughter checked it out from the library so she could read it.

If there is one thing we moms CANNOT tolerate, it's letting our daughters read Catcher in the Rye before us!

(Too late for you, mom. Sorry. I waited as long as socially acceptably possible.)

Speaking of my mom, and The Catcher in the Rye, yesterday I went to pick her up from the opthalmologist and I pulled out Holden to read while I waited for her eyes to dilate.

"What ya reading?" She askeed. So I showed her. "Oh, that's the book that inspires all the criminals," she told me. And then the doctor called her in.

That really started messing with my head. I mean, I'd always heard it was a controversial book and all, but I thought it was because Holden was a cusser, not a criminal. I was just so worried about him for the rest of the book. He's such a hard-core sweetie pie, and you never know what he's going to do next. I kept crossing my fingers that he wasn't going to rob a bank or kill his sister or something. He loved her so darn much that would have really busted my heavy heart in two.

And then I started fretting about suicide. I just didn't think I could handle it if he knocked himself off like Sylvia Plath did in The Bell Jar. I really got attached to the kid, you know.

Not to be a spoiler, but I am SOOO happy to report that Holden doesn't kill himself OR his sister. He does lose his marbles, but who can blame him in this mad, mad world.

I've decided I'm going to write the sequel. First I'll have Jane break Holden out of the psych ward. Then they'll get married and move to my in-laws magic cabin for some R&R. Then Holden will get his dream job as a catcher in the rye, which is to say he will get paid to stand at the edge of a cliff in a rye field and catch all the children that teeter too close to the edge.

Too bad there were no catchers around when Holden was teetering.

Then Holden and Jane, and all the children they save, will live happily ever after.

The end.