December 15, 2022

Holden Moments

Everyone deserves, or perhaps should be required to have, at least one Holden Caulfield moment every Christmas.

We should all have at least one instance of being lost, feeling lonely, stumbling drunk, feeling hopeful, being mournful, saying you’re sorry, and hoping for yesterday.

And drinking while listening to a past-their-prime pianist.

And more than one moment of wanting to save the kids. To, as J.D. Salinger wrote, “…catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff.”

How do you catch a falling kid at Christmas? You can probably figure it out.

Our purest The Catcher in the Rye moment came long before Christmas, but we claim it for this most stirring of seasons. It was in October at a Chicago school that has more than 70 Ukrainian refugees among its students. On this day there was a concert in the gymnasium being given by musicians from the Lyric Opera of Chicago. They played, and the Ukrainian kids sang, and if you had thoroughly dry eyes your humanity needs an upgrade.

But before the music even began, as the kids were taking their seats on the gym floor, the teachers were still trying to get everyone in the right spot. And one of the school employees, a woman who had just recently fled Ukraine herself, approached the little ones, they appeared to be five and six-year-olds, and, as the exuberant children sat cross-legged on the floor, she simply slid them into place. She took each one of them gently by the shoulders, and slid them several feet across the smooth hardwood floor into their proper place and the kids didn’t protest at all. Almost as if they didn’t even notice they’d been saved.

They are kids. They are used to being picked up, carried, put in their place.

And these kids came from war. It was their first October in America. Now it’s their first Christmas here, as the bloodshed back home marches on.

The Christmas images fly through one’s heart like Charles Dickens’ ghosts. Snowflakes, lights on the tree, presents, your mother’s laughter. Let them all swirl about and settle in along with the memory of smiling, laughing kids from a ravaged land sliding across the floor on a sunny Autumn day.

It was a golden Holden Caulfield moment. It’s a new Christmas memory. --TK