Catcher in Honesdale

Returning from karate class tonight, I double-clicked my baby cousin’s IM away message. It reads: “life sucks sometimes.” I feel a Holden Caulfield complex coming on.

Remember that scene in Catcher in the Rye where Holden finds the f-word scrawled on a bathroom wall? He says:

“It drove me damn near crazy. I thought Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them--all cockeyed, naturally--what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.”

Holden manages to erase the f-word from the wall, but then he finds another one “scratched on,” and he has to give up. Phoebe’s loss of innocence is a foregone conclusion -- it might drive Holden crazy, but, really, there’s nothing he can do.

The truth is, my “baby cousin” isn’t a baby anymore. Parker is a decade younger than I am, and this decade grows smaller with every year. Ten years ago his bedroom sported a Thomas the Tank Engine motif, while I had only recently packed up my New Kids on the Block posters. Now his bedroom walls are adorned with Franz Ferdinand memorabilia, and mine display a few family photos. In ten more years, our walls will probably look more or less the same.

The s-word is pretty darn close to the f-word. It’s perplexing to me why the two words aren’t level on the vulgarity playing field. Don’t they both connote intimacy of the sort 50 Cent and Lil’ Kim rap about? Maybe Parker doesn’t know the cruder meaning of the word “suck,” but one day some “dirty kid” is going to fill him in. Like Holden, I’m done with damage control. The f-word and the s-word predate me and my cousin, and both words will still be around long after we’re gone.

“It’s hopeless anyway,” Holden decides. “If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half of the F-you signs in the world. It’s impossible.”

What to do, then?

Buried among Parker’s alt-band bedroom shrine is a picture of the two of us, circa 1991. Even though, as a 1 year old, he’s clearly big enough to walk around on his own, I’m holding him up. Hoisting him, really -- at this point, he weighs a good chunk of what I do. He’s scowling at the camera, slipping out of my scrawny 11-year-old grip. It’s disturbingly clear that he might hit the pavement at any second. My embrace isn‘t too secure, but I’m grinning through a mouth full of braces just the same. There’s no telling what will happen in the next five seconds, but as the flash goes off, I must be telling myself, “I’ve got you, Parker. I’m gonna keep smiling, and you just hang on.”