Catching a Glove

To Jerome David Salinger

“Many, many men have been just as troubled as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement”.  Mr. Antolini, Catcher in the Rye, p. 189.

Nothing is easier than feeling small. Not even small I must say, tiny. Even more if as it was my case, you had the experience of being short for your age, of always being part of those in the first rows of the school line and of receiving worried looks that might express: are we going to have to deal with a short boy? However, this is another feeling that goes beyond our own physical size. One feels insignificant facing an inclement weather, the vegetal and animal nature, the human actions and works, the present and the future.

In some occasions, one feels like an abandoned glove in the middle of a busy sidewalk. 

During winter time this is a common image. You can observe gloves abandoned everywhere to their luck, far away from the hands they use to warm and far away from the glove mate. In the middle of the movement around them, their stillness looks like it is saying: “I am here”. The hope for a lost glove might be to find a new hand to warm, to meet a new glove and establish a new couple, or rest thanks to the sentence of suddenly being garbage because of the randomness of fate. Luckily, for both, the lost glove and the human feeling overwhelmed and tiny, time and movement exist.

I lost a glove, and I almost lost another one. After following my steps, I was able to recover it. While I felt relief, I guessed that maybe for the glove it was not the same. Could it be that by recovering it I was cutting its wings of emancipation? Luckily, also, things can be seen from different perspectives.

In such many ways that you can even feel as others feel. As it is to share the housing drama in New York and be a moral support when adversities arise. Or as it is when you feel bond and connected through literature.

On my way home, I entertain myself reading Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger Salinger, who recently passed away. The history of Holden Caulfield, expelled from school and submerged into the uneasiness of adolescent years and the absurd of life, is able to connect people. Riding the 7 train, I receive looks from a group of teenagers. At the distance, I can hear them comment that they read the book, that they can barely remember it, but that it was good. One of them remembers the story, and describes it as the narration of the three days after a kid was expelled from school and decides to hang out in New York.

I change trains and take the G train, where again I receive looks that are not able to distract me from the reading. When I arrive to my stop in Nassau Avenue, two college girls casually comment: “The best book in history”. We chat about Salinger’s work, their faces smile when I confess that I am from Colombia and we take different ways with the excitement of sharing a moment among strangers. While I listen to their laughs while they take the other way, I confirm that even with the help of Salinger, I am really lousy flirting.

On my way home, and while I go off the bus, a fat man with glasses, loaded with packages, comments that he read the book a long time ago and that he wants to read again. “You should”, I suggest, at the same time I confess that I read it in high school but that I barely remember its title and author. Salinger’s death was enough excuse to read it again. He confesses that he loves to read classic literature, right now his in page 57 of Crime and Punishment and recommends Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. We take different ways and he yells me from the other side of the street, “I tried reading Moby Dick, but it was too hard! Take it easy”.

Finally, it seems that we are all like gloves, looking to give and receive some warmth from other hands. Sometimes we get lost, other times we find ourselves. The important thing to know is that despite difference, we all seem to be in the same struggle.