Viewing entries tagged
The Catcher in the Rye

CAUTIONARY TALES

CAUTIONARY TALES

When I was just seventeen years old and a freshman in college, I pledged a sorority.  I was only on campus for about a week before Rush started – by the following year, the university decreed that Rush become a second semester event so impressionable freshmen girls could focus on shit like passing Finance 101 instead of on how to best decorate bottles of Boone’s Farm Wild Cherry Wine with puffy paint – and after dozens of parties populated by clapping and singing girls finally ended, I was given a bid. 

My days became jam-packed with sorority events:  Mai-Tai Mixers, Dressy Date Parties, Make Your Own Sundae With Your Purchased Sisters.  Most of it was pretty fun, but for me the most exciting night of all of those many exciting and exhausting nights was the night I got my Big Sister.  

THE THINGS I CARRY

THE THINGS I CARRY

If I have ever truly cared about you, at some point I gave you a copy of The Things They Carried.  

I’m not really a mixed messages kind of girl.  You can literally weigh my devotion to you based on whether or not I ever handed you that book.

My devotion to that novel is intense, but it’s not one that stems all the way back to my childhood.  I actually never even heard of the book until I became a teacher and realized I was expected to teach the thing after I finished The Catcher in the Rye, an experience that did not end well.  I had to calm my students down when they became furious by the book’s somewhat ambiguous ending that refused to lay everything out neatly and then tie the strings of the narrative into a sweet bow.  Something I’ve learned over the years?  The average reader wants to be left with absolutely no questions – the average reader wants to have everything resolved perfectly.