I wanna be a shepherd. I wanna move up to Nashua, get a nice little spread, get some sheep and tend to them. — Will Hunting, Good Will Hunting
… I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. — Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye
While Will’s response to Sean’s “what do you wanna do?” question is laced with bullshit, I always thought there was real sentiment in the ache for simplicity his statement suggests. “I wanna be a shepherd.” It always reminded me of Holden Caulfield.
Years ago, on an emotionally complicated evening, I found myself full of longing for the sort fantasy space Will and Holden speak of.
I wrote to a friend, in an email:
… [A]fter going on a nice long walk down to the Store 24 in JP at 3 in the morning to get a coke, in the strangely warm, windy, rainy evening… there I was, sitting on my balcony at 4am…. It was a very Catcher in the Rye feeling evening, with the walking, wandering, feeling of isolation, and as I looked down at the street the wind was blowing everyone’s discarded Christmas trees (as it was trash day the next morning) around, some rolling into the street, and I thought of how nice it would be to just save the Christmas trees and keep rolling them back into the sidewalk, staying up all night and directing traffic around the trees, just like the Catcher in the Rye would catch those [kids].
I’ll never forget the response I received:
If I were home, I would give you my biggest hugs, and we would probably fall off your balcony and then someone like Holden would have to catch us….
