JD Salinger died today. The author of The Catcher in the Rye, he was once acclaimed as an "important writer." All sorts of fame and fortune awaited him. But Salinger turned his back on all that, retreating to live a private, quiet life in Cornish NH. He wrote The Catcher In the Rye in 1951, and published his last work in 1965. 

He fought hard for his privacy, and the price he paid for this was the label of "reclusive" or, as the NY Daily News labeled him, a "fugitive from fame."

Past my admiration for him as a writer, past the influence he had on my thinking, particularly with the beautiful Franny & Zoey, I have always wondered how his life might have been different without the many expectations of others as to what this "literary giant" could or should or might or ought to do. What any of us project onto another, what expectations we hold for others, these actions serve only to block us from who and what that other really is or needs to be. Worse still, we will never know what the pressure of these expectations does in shaping the other's life. No question, expectations can deform a life, a conversation, a relationship, an experience.

I'm as guilty of it as any other person I know, though perhaps somewhere there's a lovely community of people without unfair expectations, folks who can truly let others be as they are not as they like them to be. I've put my teachers on pedestals so often that you'd think I did a pretty brisk business in the damn things. But I've learned to put down my pedestal building tools as quickly as I realize I've gone into my little mental workshop to whip up a new one. I have come to understand how massively unfair it is to do put anyone on a pedestal. They can't help but fall, being human, clay feet and all. Becoming aware of my own expectations for any person is the only cure, and I work daily on this. And I see the same thing - expectations & projections - with animals whose owners expect so much, so often unfairly, so blindly. I too have done this with my own animals, though the lessons are slowly sinking in.

JD Salinger had the resources to retreat to his NH home, steadfastly refusing interviews or visitors, fiercely protected (by all accounts) by the local folks who understood what privacy meant, who guarded against claims to Salinger's attention, time, lifeforce that were born of --- what? Some person's self generated insistence that Salinger do what they expected or wanted from him.

Yet, the demands against which he guarded himself throughout his long life took a toll, ultimately shaped him, and unless he wrote about it, I doubt we'll ever know in what ways it did indeed alter who he might have been in a world where he could be both a gifted writer and just a man trying to live his life in a small town in NH.

Our expectations can weigh heavily on others. Unlike Salinger, our animals do not have the resources or even the freedom to move away from that burden. The obligation is, as it is ever, ours to be sure that we have not laden them with our expectations and needs. This is also true in our human relationships, but in the relationships where we have greater power, the obligation becomes paramount.

In our quest for deeper, more humane relationships with the animals in our lives, it is a good thing to pause and contemplate JD Salinger. Within ourselves, we must find the villagers who will fiercely guard the animals we love against our unfair expectations, against our need of them to serve us in ways that perhaps we have no right to ask them to do.

It is ironic that Salinger wrote of the pull of both the need to work to one's best for yourself and no one else, and yet, in Franny & Zoey, wrote of the obligation to answer to something higher, using your talent in response to another call for the excellence within us all. Since reading this passage long ago, I have tried hard to be sure that I did my best not just for my own standards but for the Fat Lady: 

"Seymour'd told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn't going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn't see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again ? all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don't think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and I don't know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense."

I know nothing of JD Salinger except through his own words, and what others have said of him. But I do know I am grateful to him, and glad that for whatever bit that he could, that he wanted to, he shared a bit of himself with us all.

"Liife is a gift horse in my opinion." from Teddy, by JD Salinger

Thanks, JD -- we barely knew ye...