Wednesday, February 15, 2012
A Cabby in the Ride
Elizabeth isn't the ugliest city in New Jersey. But on a gray, damp, chilly March afternoon it seemed like it as two female cabbies gave me tours of some of the ugliest streets, avoiding downtown traffic. Downtown is ugly, too. Not for the most part residential streets, but light manufacturing, machine & suspicious looking auto body shops, specialized building supplies, fenced in lots with junked cars, boarded up commercial buildings, bumpy pot-holed streets.
I was alone with the shrink's MSW assistant for awhile, attractive young woman of oriental extraction, not long out of college. Good listener & I had some things to say, she prompted me well, I tell the stories well. Not someone I'd yet ask for advice - bring practical matters to the older social workers who've heard everything & know what to do about it. This wasn't a practical matter. Chat saves time with the shrink, who can only handle digests of anything important from the past two months. I think she enjoyed what I had to say, talking about love, grief, memory, distance. They're wonderful subjects. Would've been a great session with my former Ph.D therapist.
***
I'd read everything readily available by author J.D. Salinger by the time I finished high school. There wasn't much of it, & I wasn't drawn to his upper middle class characters, too young to learn from how he wrote, never went back to him. I was recently was given the paperback edition of a recent biography, J.D. Salinger: A Life, by Kenneth Slawenski, & read the entire book, though not front to back. Most interested in his horrific WWII war experiences in Hürtgen Forest, a tragic, ill-conceived campaign that turned into The Battle of the Bulge. It led me forward & backward in the book. I didn't recall many details about Salinger's writing. I've never understood why so many people became so obsessed with Salinger's withdrawal to New Hampshire, decades of seclusion (his neighbors saw him often enough), & fanatical protection of his published works. He wrote it, put it out there, & gradually concluded he didn't owe the world anything else just because he was J.D. Salinger.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I was alone with the shrink's MSW assistant for awhile, attractive young woman of oriental extraction, not long out of college. Good listener & I had some things to say, she prompted me well, I tell the stories well. Not someone I'd yet ask for advice - bring practical matters to the older social workers who've heard everything & know what to do about it. This wasn't a practical matter. Chat saves time with the shrink, who can only handle digests of anything important from the past two months. I think she enjoyed what I had to say, talking about love, grief, memory, distance. They're wonderful subjects. Would've been a great session with my former Ph.D therapist.
***
I'd read everything readily available by author J.D. Salinger by the time I finished high school. There wasn't much of it, & I wasn't drawn to his upper middle class characters, too young to learn from how he wrote, never went back to him. I was recently was given the paperback edition of a recent biography, J.D. Salinger: A Life, by Kenneth Slawenski, & read the entire book, though not front to back. Most interested in his horrific WWII war experiences in Hürtgen Forest, a tragic, ill-conceived campaign that turned into The Battle of the Bulge. It led me forward & backward in the book. I didn't recall many details about Salinger's writing. I've never understood why so many people became so obsessed with Salinger's withdrawal to New Hampshire, decades of seclusion (his neighbors saw him often enough), & fanatical protection of his published works. He wrote it, put it out there, & gradually concluded he didn't owe the world anything else just because he was J.D. Salinger.
Labels: Elizabeth NJ, mental health, what I'm reading
