Jesus Is the Real Catcher in the Rye

Thinking about my earlier post concerning my defense of Holden Caulfield's bad language back when I was at Whooping Jesus Bible College where words were things (and don't you forget it), I realize I missed something. The memory was incomplete.

When I defended HC, I am proud to say I did not mention in passing, as a good WJBC student might, that Holden's real problem -- once we'd cleared away all the literary rubbish -- was that he had not accepted Jesus Christ into his heart. I certainly heard that kind of comment about all sorts of people, real and fictional, during my college days. Sometimes I think the bad students did it as way of distracting their teachers.

Even though I still had a kind of "half faith" early in my college days, I did understand that in J.D. Salinger's world there was no saving Jesus, that it would have ignored the implicit nature of his fictive universe to push Jesus into it. He just wasn't there, and it would have been stupid to bring him up.

I will give credit to English professor Herbert Lee, who liked my Catcher essay and who always respected the text and always approached the books we studied on their own terms. Nor did he ever step back from the works and suggest that their fictional universes were inauthentic in that they created from a flawed premise in that their writers were not (as they should be) fundamentalist Christians.Without ever saying so, he was pretty much telling us that there was more than one way to look at the world, and more than one way to deal with its problems or to despair at dealing with them. He did not allow us to condescend to the secular world. We did not smugly read.

He was, of course, an Episcopalian. I never risked asking him how he ended up at WJBC. I guess he needed the work.

He was somewhat short on charisma, and I hadn't thought of him in years, but I am reminded that he was no fool. He didn't play at being a teacher. He really was one. If 50 years from now one of my students remembers me with just such a momentary simmer of regard, that would be pretty good. You don't know. You just keep plugging. That's what Herb Lee did. That's what it looked like, anyway.

A Classic Post from Yesteryear: Hitching Home for Thanksgiving

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Thumb Riders

This is the day before Thanksgiving, and I remember certain days before Thanksgiving more vividly than most iterations of the actual holiday. All of those recollections come from college days when I was a student at Whooping Jesus Bible College in the Indiana barrens, location as metaphor but also literally far away from my home in Old Virginny.

God, I was a homeboy. The notion of not going home for Thanksgiving was painful. Thus, I cut afternoon classes those long-ago Wednesdays and started hitchhiking.

The goal was Cincinnati, Ohio. At Cincinnati I picked up the midnight train that would take me across West Virginia and on into western Virginia -- between which wonderful place and the feuds and intermarriages of West Virginia we felt a great gulf existed -- where nestled my hometown, Roanoke, "the Star City of the South."

So they called it, and so I believed it.

The midnight train, you see, was free. My dad was a yard engineer for the Norfolk and Western Railway, and I had a pass. But the train rides are not the story, not today. It was the hitchhiking.

Do kids hitchhike today, what with murderers and perverts everywhere? I was much impressed and a little dismayed that my parents were so little concerned about my falling victim to murderers and perverts -- but if they weren't, who was I to worry?

Thinking back, I don't recall making a destination sign, you know, the ones on cardboard held chest high, garnished with a smile. I'm not saying I didn't, but I can't remember doing so.

What I do remember is that I always wore my three-piece corduroy suit. It seemed to me that suit made me look wholesome, benign, even conversational, that is, with something interesting to say. (I did not. But I was a good listener.)

I also carried a huge old brown striped suitcase that was either a gift from my Aunt Odell (who was a Depression pack rat) or something inherited from my Uncle Dumps (who whacked his head when he ran his car off the road and spent the next 20 years shuffling around the VA in Salem, Virginia).

I filled the suitcase with dirty laundry to take home to mama, convinced she would be glad to see it. I still remember that when someone stopped to give me a ride I felt it incumbent to run toward the car, thus showing gratitude and forestalling second thoughts on the part of the driver. How that clunky suitcase dragged through and bounced across the gravel.

All this was before the Interstate system was as widespread as it is now. One grabbed one's rides on the two-lanes that bridged the gaps in the interstates. Lots and lots of gravel.

I always got to Cincinnati in plenty of time, sometimes before dark even, and had one or two mild adventures, but none involved gorgeous widows twice my age -- the gold standard of hitchhiking fantasy for a good Christian boy back in the day -- and I will not talk of those mild adventures because the writerly energy has started to wane, and I have not yet expressed the point of undertaking this long and wandering furrow in the thin soil of this blog.

I am writing this because I canceled my Advanced Reporting class today and am still at home in my bathrobe with our crippled cat on my lap. I canceled my class because at WJBC afternoon classes on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving were never canceled and, indeed, I think my chemistry teacher may well have carried out his threat to dock the grade of anyone cutting his class.

Such penalties were school policy.

Which reminds me of the semester the school said that all the top honor roll students did not have to go to class if they didn't want to, since the school figured that all the top honor roll students would go to class anyway. But we didn't. And the school reversed itself.

Well there you go.

Anyway, that's why I cancel afternoon classes on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. There it is, kids. Sometimes I really am looking at you. But a lot of the time I'm looking in the rear view mirror at my own past, holding onto it, refusing to give it up, refusing to let it go dim, reliving it, savoring it, all the pleasures and all the pains that -- it turned out -- were just the tip of the iceberg.

The Whooper Walks on By

Image via Wikipedia

My old acquaintance from Whooping Jesus Bible College -- a very *slight* acquaintance, whose missionary visit to the Greater Bay Area was referenced a couple days ago, called again to make sure E. and I really did not want to have a meal with him.

I said I didn't want to. I said that "my years at (WJBC) were not the happiest of my life." We chatted for a while. He didn't know exactly what to say. I offered to have an email conversation about WJBC and my feelings toward it if he wished, but he seemed to just want to keep talking and let the spirit work.

I said "uh-huh" a lot and then told a beige lie -- I really did need to get going, or to make preparations for the getting of going -- and hung up.

E. had told me I should blame my unwillingness to take a meal with this fellow on her, that she was the stumbling block.

Oh great, I said. I am not a bold pagan but a pathetic pussy-whipped pagan. (Say that three times fast and then sacrifice a goat.) So I manned up to my own breach with god.

Now, the odd thing is I did not have that bad a time at WJBC, almost certainly no worse a time than I would have had at any college, beset as I was with pimples, style-free clothes inherited from my uncle and a severe case of ingrown personality.

I resented WJBC because it so completely encapsulated, summarized and exemplified who I was at the time, a hillbilly Jesus Boy terrified of a great many things, particularly thinking for myself. WJBC suited me so well. I have been a long time learning to think for myself and am not there yet.

The complexity of my disdain for Alma Mediocre is rooted in the fact that E. and I hooked up there. That worked out. We've tag-teamed our way through life, battling our heritage, roped together on the difficult climb up and out. As I said: It's worked out. If WJBC was the price of finding E. -- rather like one of those Lifetime romances about love among the ruins of war -- well hell okay.

But I will always associate it with intellectual and emotional paralysis. And I will associate that paralysis with E. because she was its antithesis, quivering with curiosity and indignation, just so damn alive intellectually and otherwise.

And that was just so damn sexy.

Google: Where God Leaves His Fingerprints

I do love the Google. A little while ago someone I knew slightly at Whooping Jesus Bible College called to say he was in town for the weekend and would E. and I like to have dinner tomorrow?

I put him off until I had a chance to use the Google. Maybe he shed the WJBC timestamp and heard I'd done the same?

But no. As the Google made clear, he's still a serious Whooper, officially on the prowl in the name of the school for lost souls and any stray bits of cash they have lying around.

This is a discussion I don't need.

Having Plenty to Say Doesn't Mean You Say It

Cover of Lady's Not for Burning

I have posted -- really posted -- very little lately. It has been a difficult semester in many ways, and talking about it publicly wouldn't help. Oh my no.

Is anonymous blogging cowardly? Maybe. But certainly therapeutic.

In happier news, tonight we have the annual dinner for Media Studies seniors at the Villa Romana in San Francisco. That's where we had it last year, and I thought it a big success. I don't think students want their senior years to dribble away in a series of fragmented moments. This will be a pause, a signpost. Friends will be embraced. Faculty will be honored.

The last week of my own senior year of college went by well enough without such a moment, I recall. From one point of view, that last week was one big moment, a great holding of breath. E. and I had been secretly married for six months, and if that fact had emerged, even at the last minute, I would have been tossed out of school, and my lovely fellowship at Duke lost as well.

You may say: secretly married? Expelled??!! There you have Whooping Jesus Bible College in a nutshell, and why my memories are less than fond.

I'd already been expelled once my senior year, for having a roommate whose oil lamp set the room on fire. Not ciggies. Certainly not the dopeawanna, of which I knew nothing. It was just an oil lamp that turned over on his desk when we were out of the room.

What I remember -- my signpost -- from those final days is the night before graduation. (E. was driving in from Detroit the next day; we would announce our marriage to our parents in the parking lot outside the gym immediately after I had my degree in hand.)

Carl Haaland suggested we drive down to Ball State in Muncie to see a student production of Christopher Fry's "The Lady's Not for Burning."

In his car. In that vintage Volvo. I considered him quite the sophisticate.

I remember the play and then the drive back through the dark Indiana countryside afterwards, remember it so clearly. Carl and I talked about the future, and its uncertainty, but also how it was going to be okay, Vietnam or not. (As it turned out, Carl went. I didn't.)

I thought about telling him E. and I were secretly married, but ... no. No point showing off, and he was a pretty religious fellow, Volve or not, maybe more than he let on. Still, this conversation, this good fellowship, has to mean something, I thought, because this is a moment meant to mean.

But it didn't. Fifteen years later, after I had got the rest of my degrees, lost a job, moved around, come here to work for the San Francisco Chronicle, I got a note from Carl. He and his family were going to be driving through, from Arizona on the way to Oregon, and he wanted to stop by.

I wrote back saying he was so very welcome. As long as he didn't talk about Jesus. Because I didn't talk about Jesus anymore. And I never heard from him again.

Gee, Thanks, Say My Buddies

Image via Wikipedia

It's always entertaining to return next day to a late-night post -- particularly those written on fumes -- since such posts really do exemplify the iceberg nature of blogging, your ideas sitting there low in the water with all those dangerous implications inevitably lurking below.

A reader approaches and then: Crunch! Ouch!! That wasn't nice!!!

It would appear that I said in my previous post that I enjoy my league buddies because they odd, strange, borderline weird and off the chart. That's what I do mean, actually, but the hidden part of that statement -- the iceberg part; back to the metaphor! -- is that I was raised up in a fundamentalist home in the High South, and there was such a white-bread sameness to what I did and the people I knew.

And god help me, then I went to Whooping Jesus Bible College and damn that was tedious and grim. Graduate school was slightly more interesting, but my nose was in a book. My first teaching job -- that was better, but too many of my colleagues wanted to "talk bibliography."

It was only after I lost that job and we moved to the big city of Atlanta and I got into journalism that I began to bump up against folks who were so very different from those folks I had known before, and I began to relish the spectacle, to almost regard myself as a minor character in a novel -- Dickensian? George Eliotish? -- and to really enjoy life as a spectator sport.

See, the point is that if you were born bland, so many things add spice to your life. It's subjective, of course. At times it's overwhelming. And it's limiting. One is perhaps too content with small successes in one's own life, partly because one is so dazzled by the lives of others, by what seems to be an essential sophistication one can only dream of.

But back to my league buddies. Time to set the record straight, to adjust the lens. They are all good guys, regular guys, definitely okay guys, relatively solid citizens all living under their real names and not under indictment or otherwise on the lam. I find them fascinating, though. I'm still just a country mouse, easily impressed and quickly delighted.

Here's one of my favorite passages from Byron's 'Don Juan':

Thrice happy he who, after a survey

Of the good company, can win a corner,

A door that's in or boudoir out of the way,

Where he may fix himself like small "Jack Horner,"

And let the Babel round run as it may,

And look on as a mourner, or a scorner,

Or an approver, or a mere spectator,

Yawning a little as the night grows later.

That's an attitude I only aspire to. I'm not a mourner, scorner, a "mere" spectator or a yawner. I'm not precisely an approver, either. I'm everyone's ideal audience, amazed I've been let in the door and endlessly intrigued by the "otherness" of others, their exuberance, their wonderful quality of not being me.

Thumb Riders

This is the day before Thanksgiving, and I remember certain days before Thanksgiving more vividly than most iterations of the actual holiday. All of those recollections come from college days when I was a student at Whooping Jesus Bible College in the Indiana barrens, location as metaphor but also literally far away from my home in Old Virginny.

God, I was a homeboy. The notion of not going home for Thanksgiving was painful. Thus, I cut afternoon classes those long-ago Wednesdays and started hitchhiking.

The goal was Cincinnati, Ohio. At Cincinnati I picked up the midnight train that would take me across West Virginia and on into western Virginia -- between which wonderful place and the feuds and intermarriages of West Virginia we felt a great gulf existed -- where nestled my hometown, Roanoke, "the Star City of the South."

So they called it, and so I believed it.

The midnight train, you see, was free. My dad was a yard engineer for the Norfolk and Western Railway, and I had a pass. But the train rides are not the story, not today. It was the hitchhiking.

Do kids hitchhike today, what with murderers and perverts everywhere? I was much impressed and a little dismayed that my parents were so little concerned about my falling victim to murderers and perverts -- but if they weren't, who was I to worry?

Thinking back, I don't recall making a destination sign, you know, the ones on cardboard held chest high, garnished with a smile. I'm not saying I didn't, but I can't remember doing so.

What I do remember is that I always wore my three-piece corduroy suit. It seemed to me that suit made me look wholesome, benign, even conversational, that is, with something interesting to say. (I did not. But I was a good listener.)

I also carried a huge old brown striped suitcase that was either a gift from my Aunt Odell (who was a Depression pack rat) or something inherited from my Uncle Dumps (who whacked his head when he ran his car off the road and spent the next 20 years shuffling around the VA in Salem, Virginia).

I filled the suitcase with dirty laundry to take home to mama, convinced she would be glad to see it. I still remember that when someone stopped to give me a ride I felt it incumbent to run toward the car, thus showing gratitude and forestalling second thoughts on the part of the driver. How that clunky suitcase dragged through and bounced across the gravel.

All this was before the Interstate system was as widespread as it is now. One grabbed one's rides on the two-lanes that bridged the gaps in the interstates. Lots and lots of gravel.

I always got to Cincinnati in plenty of time, sometimes before dark even, and had one or two mild adventures, but none involved gorgeous widows twice my age -- the gold standard of hitchhiking fantasy for a good Christian boy back in the day -- and I will not talk of those mild adventures because the writerly energy has started to wane, and I have not yet expressed the point of undertaking this long and wandering furrow in the thin soil of this blog.

I am writing this because I canceled my Advanced Reporting class today and am still at home in my bathrobe with our crippled cat on my lap. I canceled my class because at WJBC afternoon classes on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving were never canceled and, indeed, I think my chemistry teacher may well have carried out his threat to dock the grade of anyone cutting his class.

Such penalties were school policy.

Which reminds me of the semester the school said that all the top honor roll students did not have to go to class if they didn't want to, since the school figured that all the top honor roll students would go to class anyway. But we didn't. And the school reversed itself.

Well there you go.

Anyway, that's why I cancel afternoon classes on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. There it is, kids. Sometimes I really am looking at you. But a lot of the time I'm looking in the rear view mirror at my own past, holding onto it, refusing to give it up, refusing to let it go dim, reliving it, savoring it, all the pleasures and all the pains that -- it turned out -- were just the tip of the iceberg.