for uncle wiggily

if you haven't spent any time with any of j.d. salinger's characters, the people and what they say and do in his books, or if it has been a long while since you met holden maybe, go out and get yourself a book or two. read. be glad you did.

mrs. walther gave us all a list in our english class. this was 1985, maybe. titles. authors. names we'd heard, some of them, but not many we'd really read. they were books, she told us, that we owed it to ourselves to read. she used the word obligation. and i read. catcher in the rye. and i did what plenty of teenagers do when they read it. i fell in love. with holden. with the words. with the prettiness and ugliness. i swooned.

and then a few years later a man named art stood in front of my very first college class and rambled off a new list. new names. ray carver. flannery o'connor. john cheever. robert coover. eudora welty. and then one i knew. j.d. salinger. not a novel, though. short stories. and i fell in love. with the lostness. the words. i wanted to break into the words on the page and rescue just about all of those people.

and all those folks simmer there in words that are, no matter what you like to read, just some mighty fine words, the way he puts them on the page. none of them fancy sitting there alone, but you just pick a page and say a line or two out into the world and you will shake your head and smile at the way the sound of them hangs in the air.

surely there is plenty to say about the man who wrote them, but i will leave most of that to others. i am sure they will say much. i can't say what drove him to bring us these few words or what made him turn away and keep all the rest of his words to himself. but i surely do thank him for sharing what he felt he could.