A Lifelong Adventure

A Lifelong Adventure

If you really want to hear about it, the last ten years of my whole goddamn childhood, now would be a good time to start. It wasn’t until I reached that little half frozen over lake down in central park, that I sat on a crumby bench and thought about how long its been since I talked to that phony of a therapist and told him pretty much my whole damn life story up till that point. Yeah, lots changed since then. I don’t really feel like telling the whole damn decade- but I'll start with that winter when I just got kicked out of that Pency joint-up till it gets important.
That winter I guess I was pretty sick and all, with all the drinking and smoking I was doing then, I was always damn near winded and it just took the flu to catch up with me. All the swanky doctors my parents took me to said I "was pretty lucky to have survived", and that I "was given a second chance-". Bunch of bullshit. My parents just sent me right back up to the next school in line for that spring. Benjamin Prep, which would be the last phony infested place I'd study. Except for this time, I got roomed with this kid Brandon Kindfield- we hated each other's guts when we got paired together for dorms. He thought he was such a bad ass. Turned out he wasn’t as phony as the rest of 'em. His family was filthy rich and they lived in about the nicest apartment in Manhattan, and he looked like a goddamn model. He didn’t care at all though, not about his grades, his family, and heck, he was one of the best liars I've ever met. We kind of helped each other out I guess, whenever the chief would come up to accuse one of us for something the other would make up ways to get out of it, that’s how we made it to the damn graduation. Funny thing is I don’t ever recall a dull moment with that kid. We always kept each other company and had a hell of a lot of fun.
After we graduated we went our different ways, he was always a smart allec, and his family got him into one of the best law schools on the eastcoast so that he could be a lawyer and help phonies get out of their damn problems. As for me, I fooled around in New York for a semester- mostly looked out for Phoebe; my parents were always away on vacations now that she was old enough to look out for herself. We even took dance classes out near the old museum some nights. She always fooled around saying that she loved dancing with me so much; she wanted to be a dancer when she got older. I always teased her about it, but damn well knew she could do it.
Ol' Phoebe influenced me into going to a near by College- I looked at it as an excuse to live in my own god damn beaten apartment, away from the rich phonies at my parents. I decided while I was back in the school hellhole I might as well take some English classes, those were the only things I liked anyway. And get this- Jane ended up tutoring at that college on Wednesday nights. Before I knew it she dumped the jock she was going out with and we ended up hooking up a few times. Been together ever since then. She would read my writings when we were getting real serious, and tell me how much she loved them, she even showed them to her boss who was the head of the whole English unit at our school.
Few years later, I was a goddamn English teacher. Some how I wound up teaching these high school kids how to read and write and before I knew it I was getting paid for it. Don’t get me wrong I'm not one of those phony guys that are a stuck-up teacher and lives with his British babe. Jane and I keep it real simple, still up in New York, we've been spending a lot of time indoors since she has been knocked up for the past 9 months. It wasn’t planned or anything, I didn’t even want kids, but it was her dream to have this whole family thing and all, so when she said she was pregnant, I just went along with it.
Jane's going to be a real amazing mother, when we were up in the hospital she just went into that little yellow room and before I knew it gave birth to our damn son covered in all sorts of muck. She gave me the first choice of the name- I thought about it real hard, I didn’t want it to be one of those little phony kids with a horrible name there mom gave it while she was reading a damn Shakespeare novel. No, I wanted it to be something decent so that he could grow up liking it or at least trying to live up to it. For the first time I looked into his small brown eyes, they almost looked familiar, and he grabbed my hand with his all of his might and held on real tight. The feeling of a perfect baseball glove cradling your hand. " Allie" I said. Hell, I don’t expect him to be anything like ol' Allie but I just felt something so right at that time- with that name. He'd be a great kid.
Well, who in the hell could have told you that in just ten years I would have my whole damn life settled? I have a job- teaching, be married a woman that still refuses to move her kings from the back row, and have a small squirming child as a sit here in the mist of winter.
Oh, one more thing I figured out along the way, it doesn’t really matter where the ducks go for the winter- and all the twist and turns and ups and downs they encounter on the way. In the end they end up right where they started, and for some reason- it all works out.

Analysis

I tried to continue off from the original text by adding on a story that Holden would tell of his successful life in the future to kind of show that he was actually a nice kid after all and had potential to pursue what he wanted. J.D. Salinger made Holden to be a teenage boy stuck between childhood and adulthood seeing downfalls in both of the two extremes (childhood means being immature, and being an adult meant being a phony). If he was able to kind of give a brief summary of the rest of his childhood leading up to his adult life where maybe he acted the same but was more accomplished- you could see that he has the ability to grow up, and become an individual that he was proud to be.
Holden seemed to be unmotivated and he hated school, so in order to make him be able to finish it and become something I included the character Brandon Kindfield which would parallel him with his actions and views. He was there to be a friend to Holden and a way for him to vent and share his ideas. I think that Allie was a really great friend to Holden, and when he died Holden had trouble excepting people into his life and he thought everyone was phony. If he had a best friend that agreed with him and allowed him to maintain his fun / troublemaking self maybe his life would have been that much easier. However, I thought that by separating them in the middle of the ten-year span, Holden could still be independent and decide what he wanted to do.
Phoebe also acted as a motivator and convinced Holden into going to college. In the novel, Holden confided in his younger sister and took into consideration most of what she told him. She was very bright, so she would know that going back to school would be good for him and a way for him to find a career he liked. As for herself, Holden always said she was one of the best dancers he has ever danced with- so a future option would for her to become a professional dancer.
Holden always loved English, and that was the only class he didn’t fail in most of the schools he went to. He also mentioned that he wanted to be "the catcher and the rye" meaning he would want to save kids from falling off of the cliff. Since this really isn’t a profession I thought that by becoming a teacher he could kind of shape children's minds from "falling off of the cliff" (or becoming phonies), and kind of turn them in the right direction. While doing something he was great at.
In the college, Jane was put in as a sort of prize for all of his accomplishments. He had a long time crush on Jane and really showed affection towards her; they got along and would be a great couple.
Since Jane had a messed up stepfather, she would be able to learn from him and be a better mother. Holden's childhood experiences are not far from bad either, that’s why I chose to close with Holden becoming a father of a baby whom he names Allie. He will never fully cope with the loss of Allie and by introducing this child, my hope would be that Holden could shape him into someone that he loves and trusts -not to replace his brother, but match up to the greatness that Holden saw within him.
Lastly, I think the ducks that Holden was always curious about symbolized the lost path he was on when trying to find him self, and not knowing where to go when he was having a rough time. In the end he would see that there will be times in his life that are hard, but in the end everything works out.