so long, jerry

The thing was, I couldn't think of a room or a house or anything

to describe the way Stradlater said he had to have. I'm not too crazy

about describing rooms and houses anyway. So what I did, I wrote about my

brother Allie's baseball mitt. It was a very descriptive subject. It

really was. My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was

left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he

had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In

green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he

was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia

and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him.

He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as

intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always

writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a

boy like Allie in their class. And they weren't just shooting the crap.

They really meant it. But it wasn't just that he was the most intelligent

member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never

got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very

easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. I'll tell you what

kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years

old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all,

and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I'd see Allie.

So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the

fence--there was this fence that went all around the course--and he was

sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee

off. That's the kind of red hair he had. God, he was a nice kid, though.

He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table

that he just about fell off his chair. I was only thirteen, and they were

going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows

in the garage. I don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage

the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just

for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station

wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by

that time, and I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll

admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know

Allie. My hand still hurts me once in a while when it rains and all, and I

can't make a real fist any more--not a tight one, I mean--but outside of

that I don't care much.  I mean I'm not going to be a goddam surgeon or a

violinist or anything anyway.

(J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye)