with love and disappointment

J.D. Salinger passed away last week, at the age of 91.

It hurt my heart to read the news, and even the affectionate (and unaffectionate, mostly snarky) wave of come-backs and quotes people posted online hurt to read.

J.D. Salinger meant a lot to me. His writing was close to my heart because he deeply inspired me, he chose his words carefully and intelligently, his snark was forgivable and his angst was deeply heartbreaking. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" hurt me all the way down to my cells-- I was speechless after reading it, alone in my living room in the house where I grew up. I remember not being able to talk to anyone that day, and the day after, feeling like something in my life had actually changed because of the content of that story. Years later, I would write about Bananafish in a college essay that may have been the deciding factor in my admission to that college.

Even more personally, Salinger's books filled a void for me when I felt lost at home. My father used to tease me, and then seriously say, that I would grow out of my Salinger phase-- that my teenage years would be Salinger-ized while I read him, and I would look back with annoyance at his work someday. But it wasn't the teen angst that I clung to, it was the quality of his writing, the delightful stories about the Glass family's genius children (that Wes Anderson would later rip off disgustingly for his own films), the clawfooted bathtubs, the wintry backdrops, and most of all, the deep loneliness that comes with being a child who is smarter than the educational system that they're trapped in. The loneliness that comes with depth of understanding, depth of emotion... insight... at any junction in life.

I know my father would understand this because he loves reading Salinger for the same reasons, but those years were often tense for other reasons, and we found ourselves communicating unfairly and untruthfully to each other. Salinger became my respite and my sanctuary when I needed to be elsewhere in those years, when I needed to patiently wait out circumstances that I didn't like, and still find something to deeply love at the same time.

Cynicism has been unfairly attributed to much of Salinger's writing, I think... there is a thin but firm line between the camp of viewing the world through eyes of cynicism, and viewing the world through the eyes of a sensitive lonelyheart.

The thing that makes me mourn his loss the most is the conversation I've had so many times with my parents-- the one about authors and artists being betrayed by their families after their death. Frank Herbert specifically said that he did NOT want his family to allow sequels to his bestselling novel "Dune" because it was an original work that was complete unto itself. His son dodged the legalities by making money writing prequels to Dune. And on and on, the families turn their loved ones over in their graves by cashing in on an empire that was not theirs to recreate.

Salinger could not be any more clear that the novels he wrote in his seclusion were his own, and not for the public's eye... not under any circumstance. I have very little doubt that these novels will be ready for public consumption in the future, and this breaks my heart.

We're just so obsessed, the human race, with feeling entitled to someone else's art. It's for us, never them. Put the cameras in Angelina's bathroom to see if she wears more mascara than Brad and her 20 children thinks she does. Splash it in tomorrow's news.

Maybe this is cynicism spilling over-- I hope it isn't. I'm just concerned for his wishes, and sad that someone who wrote books that meant a lot to me--books that helped me get into college, books that kept me company, books that helped me fall in love with the person I love so dearly-- is no longer here.

I'm seeing the world through strange glasses today--maybe I will feel less forlorn about things tomorrow. It's so odd how various factors affect your feelings about everything* (*and yet another reason why his work speaks to me so much). The exhaustion of hating my work environment and loving my job for so many years has finally hit me, like a huge, murky wave carrying sand and seaweed and trash, and my brain has become incredibly foggy.

The stress is really starting to affect me... stress from the unemployment debacle, infuriating circumstances with withheld wages and state investigations of past employers, not having an income for the first time in 8 years. I have found a way to push the stress out of my mind, and honestly thought that I was in "a good place" emotionally with everything, until the nausea arrived that didn't leave for three weeks. Then the nausea started attacking my chest, my lungs, and I realized that it's a large daily dose of acid reflux. My voice started to squeak from the internal chaos-- to break and crack, and talking made me feel more nauseous. Then my body said ENOUGH, J.Lo style in a martial arts outfit, and retaliated with a truly painful sinus infection.

It was enough to knock me on my ass for a few days, to keep me curled up on the couch unable to go too long without pushing a hand or a blanket or a bag of frozen peas over my throbbing sinus cavities or my aching neck. It's pathetic enough to make me feel like a put-upon Glass child, a Salinger story he wouldn't want to publish. It's making me really sit still, and examine what needs to happen. I'm hopeful, I'm scared, I'm new to this, but I'm in a hurry. My confidence has been run over by a herd of reindeer wearing lead boots; I've planted seeds for a new confidence that has no other choice but to bloom in the spring.

Change... I need so much more life experience to gracefully and effortlessly deal with change. It's still clunky for me to maneuver between dramatically different lifestyles... I still make mistakes when trying to negotiate change. It's frustrating, especially because the only way to get more experience is to have even more life-altering changes come along. I'm doing my best.

It's not easy when your feeling of 'center' changes... I'm off-center, and everything from my dreams to my routine has changed. Instead of starting the day at 8am pouring a cup of coffee and talking to Robin while ice melts off the tops of my boots, I start the day alone in my apartment, staring at the cursor on my laptop, wondering if I could trick myself into leaving my silent home for an hour or two. I feel so relieved to not be in a situation that was causing me extreme frustration and sadness, and so freaked out to be staring at a blank page. It's like leaving college all over again, staring at the commencement speakers with a pounding heart and puffy bags under my eyes, slowly realizing that there was no more syllabus in my life. There was no more built-in social network. Just me.

It's my job to find the means and the luck required to turn this new year into a new adventure. With meaning and substance, with gravity and a center. With love, and always, above everything else, with squalor.