Holden Caulfield has a dream in which he catches children running through the rye before they fall over a cliff. I don't remember if I started having the dreams first or if I read Catcher in the Rye first, but they've always been with me.
Young Presidents Organization is a club for men in their thirties who either start a business that catches on really quickly, like John Palmer, or whose father dies too young and they inherit the family business, like Leland Speed and my Father, although it was my uncle who died.
My father made some of his closest friends in YPO. When he died, they all came to Jackson from Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta, and more to form a sort of protective cocoon around my mother, who was still in shock.
I was in shock, too. Daddy died without ever being sick a day; he never had a moment's pain, not from what killed him anyway. One day, he was dictating a letter, and his heart just stopped, and that was that.
They used to have summer meetings in YPO, to which the family was invited. The meetings were usually held at a beach location, such as Ponte Vedra or Hilton Head. They had all these organized activities for the children and teenagers. As a child and as a teenager, I really hated organized activities. I was content with reading and swimming in the surf. I usually took a sketchbook and a movie camera.
The family trip usually happened in the middle of June, which also happens to be my birthday. There were a few times when June got so busy that we just didn't have my birthday. I always laughed about that and acted like it didn't bother me, but it probably did.
I think both my mother and my father were overwhelmed by their lives. They had all these things they wanted to be involved in and so many things they wanted to develop, but there were four of us kids and a grandmother living with us, and there were only so many hours in the day.
In my dream, at least the one last night, it's dusk. I'm a teenager, and all the teenagers go off to do teenager things, which usually mean something like a 16-mm movie and a luau, although one time they had fireworks and circus performers. That was cool.
All the teenagers are leaving, but there are all these babies, maybe a dozen of them, some in bassinettes and some who can toddle, but the parents have hired one tired little old black lady to watch over them all. They're off at some organized event that's much more fun than what they had for the teenagers.
Everyone tells me to go with the other teenagers. The tired little old black lady tells me she's fine with all the babies, but I just can't do it. I tell everyone to leave me, and without hesitation, they do, so I'm alone with a tired old woman I've never seen before and enough crying babies to make a football team.
And then, I wake up. Holden Caufield again. I think Salinger meant the dream to represent something different from what it means to me. I've seen interpretations where Caufield is protecting children from having the kind of sexual experiences he was having but felt guilty about. That might have been true for Holden Caufield, but for me, the Catcher in the Rye dream was more about how life can be really painful, and there are all these innocent people heading as fast as they can for the cliff they don't even know is there.
Last night, on another part of the internet, a man asked me why I wasn't offended by drag performers. He asked if I was something, and he used a word that describes a sex act between men and is used when the speaker intends to be as hateful as possible.
I just thought, are you the cliff? Are you the child going over the cliff? Are you some new element of someone pushing the children over the cliff?
I always had this propensity to protect the weak. It happened, I think, because I was always so much bigger than anyone else. I can't recommend it, though. You end up absorbing a lot of pain meant for other people, and you have to pretend like you don't feel it because that would make the people you're trying to protect feel bad, and that's not the point.
No one will ever really understand what you're doing or why, and then there are the dreams. They never go away.
