Keep Digging

The text popped up on my phone at 5:08 one morning last week. It read, simply but dramatically, “The body is not Bishop!”

It was from my friend Karen, who—when she’s not busy swing-dancing and waltzing and canoeing and hiking and seemingly redefining the phrase “live life to its fullest” (no mean feat for a single mother of three with a demanding full-time job, three dogs, a cat and a semi-long-distance boyfriend)—like me, worries a lot about the end of the world as we know it. Karen’s big thing right now is Ebola. She was up early that day scouring the Internet for the latest on confirmed deaths, government lies and obfuscations, hospital screw-ups, and cruise ship travel by possible carriers of the virus. While scrolling through a list of reasons it’s best never to read the news, she’d come upon an item in which she knew I’d be acutely interested.

I knew the text message meant that the question I’d asked atop my previous post, “The Truth Unearthed?” had been answered by the FBI’s forensics team in Quantico, Virginia. The “John Doe” who’d been buried in a cemetery in Jackson County, Alabama, after having been struck by a car on October 18, 1981, was not, in fact, the notorious fugitive Brad Bishop, aka the Bethesda Bludgeoner. (OK, that’s my aka for him. But I’ve noticed that the British tabloids have been all over this story. Given their me-like zeal for alliteration and indifference to taste and decency, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of them has employed the term. Damn the Washington Post and their “journalistic standards.”)

“We were hoping it was him, but we have other leads, the Post quoted an FBI spokeswoman in Baltimore as saying. Here in Montgomery County—where the 39-year-old multilingual State Department employee one spring day in 1976 went to a hardware store, purchased a small hammer, then infamously embarked on a fiendish home-improvement project that consisted of beating his wife, three sons and widowed mother to death—Sheriff Darren Popkin and County Police Chief Tom Manger echoed the FBI’s disappointment and optimism.

The case has been open for nearly four decades now, and even this latest “big break” consisted of nothing more than facial similarities between Bishop and the autopsy photo of the John Doe. But, what is law enforcement going to say? “We’ve got nuthin”? Bishop might, after all, have died under an assumed name overseas, his true identity unknown to anyone with whom he’d dealt. If he is still alive, he may be just another Alzheimer’s patient at an old folks’ home in Croatia, or a retired ski instructor in the Swiss Alps whose longtime companion, a distant relation of Eva Braun, will carry her lover’s secret to her own grave.

It seems hard to imagine, in this era of omnipresent cameras and instantaneous communication, that a still-living Brad Bishop could remain hidden for this long. Plus, does a guy who’s unhinged enough to murder his entire family then just settle down to a quiet life of clock-making? I don’t know. I’m not a criminal profiler, although I’ve watched plenty of them theorize on TV.

I’m more dubious than ever now that this coldest of cold cases ever will be thawed out and solved. Per my post previous to this one, what I’d most like to see at this point is Bishop’s comeuppance—a cold-blooded killer who’s certain he’s gotten away with murder being brought to justice, ideally interrupted mid-sip on a martini by a swarm of gun barrels pointed directly at this wizened face. That would be justice, inasmuch as the word possibly could apply to a killer who’s enjoyed decades of freedom while his family’s been skeletal in the ground.

I suppose I should clarify and concede, after having indicted Brad Bishop so many times over in this space, that he is an alleged killer. He is the Alleged Bethesda Bludgeoner. He never stood trial, after all. Perhaps it was just a monumental coincidence and a huge misunderstanding that Bishop disappeared at exact time of the murders, that items found at the northeast North Carolina site of the family’s half-burned bodies were traceable to him, that more evidence linking Bishop to the slayings were found in the family’s abandoned station wagon in the Smoky Mountains, and that no other suspects ever have been suggested or have emerged. It’s theoretically possible that a wrongly accused Brad Bishop is a latter-day Richard The Fugitive Kimble, still out there trying to ensnare the real killer while the stupid, misguided coppers persist in pinning the rap on him. (Although such efforts can be difficult even for acquitted and unpursued innocents, as OJ Simpson discovered during all those years he spent turning Florida’s golf courses and bars-upside down in a frantic-if-geographically-curious search for the killers of his ex-wife and her friend.)

So, to be fair, it was DNA from an alleged murderer that the FBI compared recently with DNA from that Alabama John Doe. And the 350 leads that the FBI says it’s received since attempting in April to revive interest in the case by placing Bishop on its Ten Most Wanted List are just part of an effort to touch base with a widower who’s got some serious ’splainin’ to do.

If that roadside drifter in Alabama had turned out to be Brad Bishop, however, the book would’ve been closed on him, and on a case of presumed guilt. Ebola still would be frightening, to be sure. Wars still would still rage all over globe, atrocities still would abound, environmental calamity would keep looming ever closer. But at least I could’ve run by that house on Lilly Stone Drive and thought, “So much for that alleged homicidal asshole.” Now I wonder if I’ll be able to say that anytime earlier than 20 years from now—when I’ll figure that Bishop probably didn’t live to be 100, and when I myself will be 76 years old.

By which time, if I’m still alive, I’m sure to find Bishop’s default death by old age to be pretty unsatisfying. Especially as I’ll be dealing with my own infirmities, and all the manifestations of impending Arageddon about which I’ve so cheerily written in this space. (If, that is, Karen’s fears prove unfounded and Ebola doesn’t wipe us all out first.)

So, one final note, and then I’ll drop this subject. I promise! Unless and until there’s bona fide news.

This morning I spotted a handmade sign at the entrance to Lilly Stone Drive, advertising a neighborhood Halloween “Spooktacular.” Not at the old Bishop place--despite its provenance, ghost potential, and suitability to Nerf-hammer party favors! Talk about an opportunity lost.

The Truth Unearthed?

I swear, I had the best of intentions to break blog silence of more than a month by writing about something upbeat. Or, at least not so damn dark.

I mean, last time I wrote about my firm belief that that everything we cherish about human life soon will cease to exist—possibly within our lifetime. Surely within the lives of the children of those who took the losing gamble of bringing kids into a doomed world.

After that post, I’m sure my readership (I like that word because it suggests a vast following) was screaming into their computer screens, “Lighten up, man! We expect end-times talk from guys with signs on street corners—or from that buzz-kill trio with megaphones outside Nationals Park this past season. Stick with what you do best, Ries: complaining about shit in a self-effacing but amusing way, with a stray optimistic thought sometimes thrown in.”

I heard you, imagined voices! I really did. In fact, I had a post planned in my head that would talk about all the senior citizens I’ve volunteer-visited over the years. About how I never really know what they’re all about, because by the time I enter their lives their memories are failing and/or the narratives they’ve constructed over the decades have calcified into their own reality. A reality that may be the truth, but that in many key respects probably isn’t.

So, OK, it wasn’t going to be a happy piece, exactly. But it was going to have a bittersweet tone. Note that “sweet” is part of that.

What had brought all of that to mind was the recent experience of my friend Bob. Or, rather, his recent experience as told by him.

Bob is 92, and in many respects his mind remains sharp—as evidenced by the fact that he’s always asking me if I’ve yet ordered on Amazon that CD or transistor radio or talking watch for him that my younger and theoretically sharper brain has completely forgotten about. Bob recently lost his only surviving sibling, a sister who was only 80, to brain cancer. He’d known she was dying, and had spoken to her on the phone many times during the months of her decline. But, as Bob tells the story, he didn’t learn of her death until two days after the fact—and then was prevented from attending the service, which was local, by his sister’s only child. This woman is in her 50s. Bob describes her as “liking  to control things.”

According to Bob, the daughter wouldn’t tell him where the service was being held, even after he told her he could get a ride. He then appealed to his late sister’s husband, who Bob has long characterized to me as reticent and ineffectual. The brother-in-law shruggingly responded, Bob said, that he was “between the devil and the deep blue sea” in this matter—the implication being that his own daughter was the devil and that he risked sleeping with the fishes were he to tell Bob where and when the funeral service was being held.

My first and natural instinct was to mourn for my elderly friend who’d lost his last remaining family member and closest confidante—they spoke at least weekly on the phone, and she sometimes came to visit, bearing new shirts and pants and other items that her nearly blind and ambulatorily unsteady brother couldn’t shop for himself. Not only had he lost her, but he’d had no closure on her death—no funeral service, no chance to mourn with a community of family and friends who’d loved his sister, too. Not even a program or memorializing obituary to which he could cling. If the latter existed, I couldn’t find it anywhere on the Internet.

Bob was able to cull from the brother-in-law that his sister’s ashes had been scattered on a section of Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach that is reserved for such purposes. So, no cemetery to visit, either. I’m loath to drive Bob anywhere because he’s so feeble, and I haven’t done so for years. But I would’ve gladly driven him to his sister’s grave site, were she to have had one.

I’d better get to the point, because right now I’m telling you about what I was going to write about today, and I haven’t yet gotten around to what I am going to address.

To make a long story shorter, I e-mailed a niece of Bob’s—the daughter of a brother of his who died 30 years ago—to inform her of her aunt’s death and her uncle’s loss, if she didn’t know already. Which I figured was distinctly possible, given that this niece, too, lives locally, but she’s seen Bob in the flesh exactly once, to my knowledge, in the many years I’ve known him. In fact, I had served as go-between for that lone meeting, which struck me as odd at the time. But, whatever.

So, the niece e-mailed me back. She’d had no idea her aunt had died. She thanked me for letting her know. She said that she would write “Bobby” a note of condolence. Within her short reply, she also referenced her family’s indifference to her “outreach” efforts in the years since her father’s death. She alluded to “strange family dynamics.”

No kidding! It was then that I fully realized something that I’d already been thinking about at some level: I know nothing about the Bob who preceded our acquaintance. I know the outlines—his long marriage; how he tended to his wife in her Alzheimer’s years; his career as a bank teller and later, in semi-retirement, as a seller of fine pens; stories here and there about his family and his schooling; hobbies such as his lifelong love of watches. (I’ve worn a hole in the carpets of a jeweler in Alexandria buying new batteries for his vast array of timepieces. Or, I did, until his eyesight deteriorated to the point where he no longer can tell when time stands still.)

But what do I really know about Bob? About his familial relationships, for instance? How do I know that he didn’t somehow make himself persona non grata with his sister’s family? Why, for that matter, has the one niece with whom I’ve communicated largely snubbed Bob in the years that I’ve known him? I used to simply assume that she’s a self-centered bitch. But perhaps Bob had been among those family members who’d been insufficiently “there” for her upon her father’s death and had then rejected her overtures.

Twice in e-mails this niece has written to me “He’ll always be Bobby to me.” Why? What does that mean? So, I asked her. In an e-mail, I also asked if she has any idea what the real story might be about the alleged funeral-service snub. I conceded that it’s really none of my business, but added that I’d like to be able to sort out—or at least have some insight into—an elderly friend’s past, for a change.

I’ve run into this many times, and it always drives me a little crazy. Why? Yes, my wife is right—I’m nosy as hell. But also, I like these people. I care about them. But I see only a single puzzle piece of their totality. I wonder what the big picture once looked like. I wonder what my elderly friends loved and loathed in their prime, what they cared about the most. Who they were, when they were fully themselves—as opposed to the diminished and circumscribed fragments of themselves that I now see before me.

Just to name a few of them, there was Helen, who’d been a nurse and a doctor’s wife and an avid tennis player and swimmer, but whose divorce, progressively debilitating MS, and bouts with cancer had rendered her bitter and cantankerous (to be kind) by the time we met, but who lit up when talking about the fine arts and her travel days, and who always thanked me for coming. There was Phyllis, who’d put her heart and soul into raising her three boys, but couldn’t remember much about them to tell me. They and I finally met at her memorial service, where they regarded me warily, as if fearing I was about to become rich in a recently rewritten will.

There was Marianthe, who’d run a Greek restaurant in DC back in the day with her late husband, and who was mortal assisted-living enemies with Augusta, whose son in California either was a saint or a bastard, depending on whether Augusta or the man’s son was telling the story. And there was Jean, who’d once helped Rachel Carson research Silent Spring, and who dreamily invited me to her family’s island retreat on the St Lawrence River at a time when it was clear that she herself never would see it again.

Bob’s niece didn’t reply to my e-mail. Which was neither surprising nor in any way offensive, given the buttinsky nature of my request.

Anyway, what all this is meant to say is that I’d planned to make this entire blog post about the strangeness of time, age, perception, family, and the role of the volunteer. It wasn’t going to be an uplifting piece, but I was going to end it on a note of my affection for all the seniors I’ve known in this capacity. I was going to emphasize that I think of each of them often, and always fondly--for who they were in our specific context, not for who they may really have been over the course of their lifetime. Even though, yes, I always end up wishing I’d known more about all that stuff.   

Which would’ve made for, as I noted several hundred words ago, a bittersweet post. But at least not a dark one, coming on the heels of my subtly titled “Sing a Song of Armageddon” entry.

OK, I guess at this point I sort of have written that post, anyway. But now—and this part will end up being way shorter than I’d planned it to be when I first sat down—here’s what’s topmost on my mind today, blog-wise.

Last Thursday, the media again dug up Brad Bishop. Literally, sort of.

Surely you remember him. He’s the guy who, in 1976, bludgeoned his wife, three sons and widowed mother to death in their Bethesda home, piled the bodies into the family station wagon, burned them in a shallow grave in northeastern North Carolina, later abandoned the car in the Smoky Mountains, then infamously vanished into history. Given that he was a State Department diplomat who spoke five languages and was an avid outdoorsman, the thinking was that he might have hidden at first in a remote area of Europe and later built himself a life overseas.

I first wrote about him in June 2012, then returned to the subject in April of this year, when the FBI moved to heat up a very cold case by placing the now-78-year-old fugitive on its Ten Most Wanted list. I admit to having a morbid fascination with killers, particularly those who pile on the bodies. It bums Lynn out and can put a real damper on cocktail-party conversations. I often run by the former Bishop house, which is just a few miles from my own, and I think about the murders, and Bishop, a lot. Part of me enjoys imagining the scene of the Smartest Man in the Room being ripped off of his comfy fireside chair in an Alpine ski lodge by an Interpol SWAT team, being extradited back to Maryland, standing trial, and ultimately spending what’s left of his dotage being anally penetrated in prison.

But then, last week, a Washington Post headline screamed (OK, it didn’t scream, but I nearly did when I read the story), “Exhumed Body in Alabama Could Be Notorious Bethesda Fugitive Brad Bishop.” In a nutshell, a recent re-airing of the case on CNN led to a tip that a “John Doe” who’d been struck by a car and killed in Jackson County, Alabama, on October 18, 1981, looked remarkably similar to Brad Bishop. The John Doe’s autopsy photo was pulled, and the likeness was deemed compelling enough to dig up the casket. Forensic samples were sent to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia. Where, within a few weeks, we’re told, the case of the fugitive Brad Bishop may at last be solved.

Even if it is not resolved, in some senses. If the body is Bishop’s, we’ll never know why he did it, or where he spent those five years between the killings and his own death. For years I knew the street on which the Bishop residence was located but not the house number. And I’d long thought that this was a head-scratching case of responsible-family-man-inexplicably-turned-savage-murderer. But then all of a sudden my Google searches started turning up results they never used to. The house number suddenly was everywhere. (Prompting me this spring to drive over there, take pictures, and make Lynn eye me more nervously that she had before.) Also, the Internet now is rife with mentions of Bishop’s having been under psychiatric care in the years before the murders. And also, of his having been a huge narcissist whose own mother once had scolded him at a dinner party for his rudeness toward others, and had warned him of a “comeuppance” that she might have lived to see, if her rude son hadn’t first crushed in her skull with a household tool.

So, if the body exhumed in Alabama—which belonged, according to eyewitnesses, to a shambling, middle-aged-looking man who was wearing several layers of clothing at the time he was killed—does prove to be that of Brad Bishop, it shouldn’t come as any huge surprise. Alabama isn’t terribly far from the Smoky Mountains, and the journey from one place to the other may have been roughly as linear as might have been a mentally ill man’s journey from respectability, to homicidal rage, to cognitive descent into foggy homelessness and heedless perambulation.

But I have to concede, I’ll feel some disappointment if that proves to be the case. Not that I’ve ever felt that Brad Bishop deserved the decades of freedom I’ve imagined for him. But, rather, because I relished thinking of him sitting pretty, smugly convinced that he’d gotten away with murder, only to find that all his linguistic brilliance and cunning couldn’t save him from justice in the end. (And I do mean “the end.” See that earlier prison reference.)

Last week’s Washington Post story quoted a now-retired State Department colleague of Bishop’s, Roy Harrell, on the matter of “comeuppance.” He says he was sitting at the dinner table with Bishop and his family in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1965 or 1966. The final line of the Post article was this:

“Regarding the possibility of Bishop being run over by a car, Harrell said, ‘I would think that this is what his mother referred to as his comeuppance.’”

Maybe. But I personally think she would have preferred my scenario—self-proclaimed criminal mastermind rotting in prison (there being no death penalty in Maryland)—rather than the image of some addled bum shambling aimlessly down the road one second, dead the next.

See? That’s dark. But nowhere near as dark as Armageddon. The Bishop story may even have a happy ending, depending on how you define such things.

Sing a Song of Armageddon

One of the more surprising career resurgences of 2014 has been that of song parodist Weird Al Yankovic, who’s roughly my age and was last big news decades ago. Well, a parody has been running through my head recently, but I won’t share it with Weird Al because I’ve only gotten as far as the title and, more problematically, it doesn’t lend itself to the upbeat humor for which Weird Al is so well known and celebrated.

There’s a scene in the Woody Allen film Annie Hall—which coincidentally dates back to 1977, even before Weird Al’s heyday—in which Allen’s character, Alvy, comes to a third-rate nightclub to hear Annie make her singing debut. She battles the bad sound system and noisy and inattentive crowd through a tentative rendering of the classic song “Seems Like Old Times,” which had been a big radio hit in the 1940s. It’s a sweet scene in the film, coming at an early moment in a young woman’s quest for identity and a fledgling couple’s hope for intimacy. Afterward, Alvy addresses Annie’s self-criticism with a first kiss on a New York City sidewalk.

The thing is, though, my parodic song title is “Seems Like End Times.” It’s a recognition of the sorry and worsening state of world affairs. And the only thing funny about that is that it’s the one point on which fundamentalist Christians and I agree in principle, if not in context or details. Which isn’t funny ha-ha, anyway, but, rather, funny-odd, in that I otherwise have very little in common with a demographic that thinks things like gay marriage and legal abortion are hastening the Final Judgment.

It’s not same-sex matrimony, the right to abort a zygote, or Middle Eastern tumult that's been given a wacky biblical spin that I worry about. And I’ll be among the more surprised guys on the planet if Armageddon plays out in exactly the way the fundamentalists expect, with a climactic battle between the Messiah and the Antichrist, the righteous being lifted up to Heaven while the rest of us wail and gnash our teeth, and I don’t know what else. I’ll go directly to Hell, maybe, without passing “Go” or collecting $200. I’m so not a biblical scholar that I had to Google even the preceding recap, which probably leaves out many juicy details.

Anyway. What I worry about are little things like the fact that wars are being waged all over the globe, millions of people are dispossessed, overpopulation continues unabated (while we in America celebrate loony incubators like the Duggar family), the climate’s done for, entire categories of jobs are gone for good, political will and public tolerance for hard decisions are nonexistent, and oh, yeah, enough nuclear weapons still exist to annihilate humankind many times over. Sorry if I left out a thousand or three reasons for near-suicidal despair, but you can be sure they’re on some level further swelling the worry-tumor in my brain.

Given the enormity of that clusterfuck (a vulgarity that nevertheless seems abundantly apt here), you wouldn’t think that I’d still have the time and energy to get outraged about things like America’s gun-nut culture or the fact that most US citizens polled think it’s fine to call a football team the Redskins when you’d never call a Native American such a degrading thing to his or her face. But those quibbles are peripheral to the end times discussion, because paranoia and racial insensitivity, as bad as they are, are way less lethal than are jihadists and other murderous bullies, the ravages of climate change and the exponential growth of the world’s population.

My take, in a nutshell, is, if you don’t think we’re screwed, you’re not paying the slightest bit of attention. I’m not sure when the tipping point was reached, but I don’t think it’s even within sight anymore. There’s a deadly Catch-22 in play: It’s easiest for people to think rationally and charitably—to look beyond their own needs and wants, and toward the greater good—when things are calm and they don't feel threatened. In the world of 2014, everyone feels threatened in some way. Calm is illusory, and temporary at best. It’s not an environment that’s friendly to altruism, or even to enlightened self-interest. The Enlightment, such as it was, was so 18th century.

Speaking of days of yore, I’ve written before about how I love going to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Part of it surely is the giddy mix of alcohol, skin and Elizabethan vaudeville. But it’s alarmingly easy, in this day and age, to romanticize and even luxuriate in an era in which life was short and brutish, true, and deodorant was unknown, but also in which so much that’s frighteningly out of control in the contemporary world hadn’t even started yet. The Earth then was under-populated. The Industrial Revolution was centuries off, so the ozone layer was happily intact. There were dukes in the palaces, not nukes in the silos.

Walking through Revel Grove—as the Renaissance Festival’s woodsy grounds are cheesily dubbed—a couple of Saturday or Sundays each fall is a dependably delightful distraction from the world as it is, and, I believe, ever shall be. Until the world, for all recognizable intents and purposes, simply isn’t anymore. Which will happen, I fear, much sooner than later. I’ll be surprised, in fact, if something akin to anarchy doesn’t reach even the DC suburbs in my lifetime.

Cheery thought, that! If it sounds as if I’ve given up hope, it’s because I have. But does that mean I’ve given up on living? Hardly. There’s a lot of beauty in the world. I’m blessed with an amazing family and friends. I’m gainfully employed. Roof over my head, AC in summer and heat in winter, food in my gut? Check, check and check. I’ve got the time and means to escape to the Renaissance, to movies, to music that moves me to in-car harmonies no one should ever have to hear. When I feel like it, I post to this blog, and a few people even read it.

I’m not saying I haven’t had a good time. But all time is borrowed now. I truly believe that. Technology won’t save us from ourselves, although it will provide more distractions as the ship continues sinking. By the 2060s, even insolated America may well look more like Mad Max than the Mad Men of a century before. Good luck getting WiFi when there’s no more electrical grid.   

No, I can’t see even a clever artist like Weird Al taking my premise and song title and turning it into comic gold. On the other hand, though, maybe fundamentalist Christians could play the song straight, supplying their own suitably dire lyrics about man’s folly and God’s wrath.

Except that the word “seems” in "Seems Like End Times" sounds too tentative. For both the fundamentalists and for me, now that I really think about it.

Holden Steady

The best obituary I’ve ever read is a tribute to my favorite novel.

I was going to write “the best novel I ever read” because that would have made for a better sentence. But I don’t suppose The Catcher in the Rye is the best novel I ever read, in terms of language and plot. Although I’m not a huge reader of novels and have terribly retention of the ones I have read, I seem to recall that Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys blew me away, for instance. But if I’m honest with myself, I have to concede that, even though it sounds unoriginal and probably dated in the year 2014 to say so, Catcher, the coming-of-age classic from 1951, is the novel I most cherish within my admittedly limited sample size.

You’d think I’d remember how old I was when I first read it, but I don’t. I probably was in my late teens. I definitely hadn’t yet come of age, although I’m not quite sure what that even means, or whether I ever made that transition. It seems to connote a level of maturity or comfort in one’s own skin that, by the end of The Catcher in the Rye, seems perhaps graspable for protagonist Holden Caulfield, but remains tentative. I still feel that way much of the time, even now, about my own maturity and self-assurance.

Anyway, last week on public radio’s The Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor quoted the book’s revolutionary-in-its-time first line on the 63rd anniversary of Catcher’s publication. It reads, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” The recitation brought back to me how Holden’s voice and worldview are there from the get-go, and how I knew at that moment I knew this was a story I wanted to hear, as opposed to read. (If you don’t know the difference, you’re probably more into that David Copperfield kind of crap than I am.)

Much has been written over the decades about how JD Salinger’s story of a young prep school kid trying to figure out life transcends its privileged trappings to become a universal tale of every teen’s struggles with peer pressure, sexuality, adult hypocrisy, grief and all the other things that stretch a young person’s ability to cope. I certainly felt immediately that I’d found a friend and fellow traveler in Holden, as so many other readers had—and presumably still do, although with the Internet and social media the escape routes from feelings of emotional isolation that now are available to young people are multitudinous.

And then, of course, interest in and attention to The Catcher in the Rye were rekindled in early 2010 by the death of Salinger at age 91. We were reminded at that time that Holden’s creator had been not only a longtime recluse but also a seeming creep who fed on impressionable young women and couldn’t take a compliment on his work without shaking his fist and screaming at you to get the hell off his lawn. While he shared some of Holden’s crankiness, Salinger didn’t seem like a guy who his vulnerable but essentially hopeful literary creation would’ve much liked.

What I loved about the obituary of Salinger, though, was that it ignored all that and reconciled author and protagonist in a send-up that was worthy of Catcher itself. It ran not in the New York Times, but, naturally, in The Onion. And, despite the outsized impact that Salinger’s slim output had on 20th century literature, the obit was far from Dickens-sized. Like Catcher, it was short and packed with attitude. Its headline was “Bunch of Phonies Mourn JD Salinger.” Here it is in its entirety:

In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author JD Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. “He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers,” said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don’t have to look at them for four years. “There will never be another voice like his.” Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it’s just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything. 

Ha! If that isn’t perfect, I don’t know what is.

Just a few days after Garrison Keillor’s notation of the publication anniversary, I was walking back to my car, having completed my Sunday-morning run. I was on MacArthur Boulevard in Cabin John. I’m used to peering down at cigarette butts, beer cans and other litter, despite the best efforts of Adopt-a-Road monitor Kepler Framing, in the person of our delightfully eccentric friend Ritch Kepler. But this time I happened upon a rarity—a book. It was rain-soaked but readable, open to a spread of pages. At first I passed it by, but then my curiosity got the better of me. I wondered what book it was.

You know where I’m going with this, but I’m not making this up. It really was The Catcher in the Rye. It was open to the chapter in which this girl named Sally suggests that she and Holden go skating at the Radio City ice rink, and Holden figures out that the reason she’s so “hot to go” is that she “wanted to see herself in one of those little skirts that just come down over their butt and all.” In a scene that well-represents the entire book, Holden kind of hates the superficial Sally and feels sorry for her at the same time, because she’s a terrible skater and is killing her ankles. He’s also chagrined to concede “how cute her little ass looked” in the skating skirt.

I saw the book’s roadside presence as a sign that I must in some way blog about The Catcher in the Rye. I just didn’t know quite what I wanted to say about it. Then, yesterday, I saw a link from the Washington Post to a piece about how Bethesda has made some group’s list of the “Top 10 Snobbiest Small Cities in America.” I clicked on it since I, too, think Bethesda is incredibly snobby (even though it’s my mailing address), and I was ready to read this vindication of my view. As it turned out, however, the designation was misleading. A real estate website had assigned the ranking to Bethesda based on such measures as household income, education levels and private school attendance, rather than having made any attempt to tabulate and quantify the stuck-up unpleasantness of the citizenry.

Well, no matter, I thought. Cabin John is essentially Bethesda, and surely I could figure out something clever to say about having found a book that indicts phonies blithely chucked aside in a town that’s full of them. Except that I spent the next several days thinking on it and came up with nothing beyond the basic premise. And anyway, I got to thinking, are snobs and phonies precisely synonymous? Also, isn’t one of the points of The Catcher in the Rye to point out that nobody is pure, and that a certain amount of “phoniness” is acceptable and even necessary, lest the societal order fall apart?

The task I’d laid out for myself started to seem too complicated, contrived, even boring to complete. And why should anything related to The Catcher in the Rye run the risk of being boring, when the novel is anything but?

That’s when I thought about the obituary, which actually is posted on my office bulletin board.

It’s great, as is the novel it parodies and celebrates. And that’s the heart of what I really wanted to say today about The Catcher in the Rye. There's no need to complicate things and get all David Copperfield about it.