a slight rebellion off madison

“It wouldn’t be the same at all. We’d have to go downstairs in elevators with suitcases and stuff. We’d have to call up everyone and tell ‘em goodbye and send ‘em postcards. And I’d have to work at my father’s and ride in Madison Avenue buses and read newspapers.” – Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s “A Slight Rebellion Off Madison”

Last week, my downstairs neighbors were playing a record way too loud. For the first time in my personal history of neighbors, this turned out to be nothing short of delightful. It was a bluegrass record of some kind, and the banjo melodies were all kinds of perfect, and at the end of the day it’s probably some very popular record that everyone knows about but me.

In those ten or fifteen minutes it took me to fall asleep, though, it was the most magical thing I could possibly think of. I hate that I have no idea what that album was, but it awakened in me some small remembrance that the scope of the things I love lies far beyond what’s in my immediate thoughts. A few nights later, a ramshackle sort of jug band played a Haiti benefit at the Bell House and I watched in delight as a saw and a washboard made their entrance.

It’s strange sometimes the things that you forget about: I’ve had a musical saw sitting in my closet for going on ten years now, and I take it out and play it approximately twice a year. My love for the washboard extends back to a time I can only remember vaguely, the kind of memory that gets reconstructed more fully through other people’s stories than through my own mental pictures. Still, it’s there, and it’s a part of me that I keep to myself more often than not because it’s occasionally hard to explain the ways in which one is different.

I had the honor of going to the Morgan Library and Museum with a certain friend and her parents this weekend, and I’d forgotten just why I’ve spent the past seven or eight years “meaning to go back.” The library itself is a thing of brilliance and a testimonial to why being rich must not be all bad. It smells of old books and holds a number of intricate art objects, and I can’t really even put into words how I feel about the ceilings.


(I will say this: they make my knees shaky.)

The first and only other time I’d been to the Morgan was on a trip with my step-grandfather’s graduating Princeton class. It was a strange reminder of both class divisions and the fact that at 19 or 20, I was still unrefined on purpose. Even then, though, I felt that it was likely my grandparents felt more out of place than I did: in a world of bankers, lawyers, and professional nostalgics, they stood out in their career choice as co-owners of a nudist resort in southern Georgia.

This fact is a simple and small one of my upbringing, one I tend to forget until I say it out loud and people find it odd. Alongside this, the memory of the washboard that my parents’ friend Kangaroo used to play with his bluegrass band on our lawn. I have the strange sense that my home as a small child looked a bit like a DIY venue in Bushwick: there were beards and bandanas and beer cans everywhere you looked. I didn’t have a flaky hippie childhood, but it’s hard not to sound like it in the retelling.

Today, my parents have grown into softer caricatures of themselves; my grandparents – who I might add were the kindest, most in-love people I’ve ever met – have regrettably passed. It’s only in the context of spending time with other people’s families that I’m reminded of these little pieces of my past. Whether we like it or not, there are parts of each one of us that stem quite clearly from the people who raised us. In me there’s an unrefined brashness that I can’t curtail despite myself. The love of music that so many people recognize at the heart of me originates from a strange mix of Otis Redding and Kansas records with those animal-named bluegrass dudes on the lawn.

And I am quite certain that I didn’t learn my ability to cuss like a sailor “from the other kids at school.”

Whether we realize it or not, we all spend a lot of time rebelling against the unshakeable parts of ourselves that grew inside of us as children. I wanted quite badly to have something eloquent to say about the passing of J.D Salinger this week – as cliché as it seems, it is true that no other artist so clearly paved the way for who I became as a thinker and an adult. His most famous character, Holden Caulfield, felt all too well the constraints of the worlds we grow up in – even in the city he called home, Holden had a hard time trusting what he knew best simply because he knew it all too well.

I grew up, and I left behind the lawns and the washboards and (to a certain extent) the Kansas records. I moved to New York City, and I have a job on Madison Avenue. Every morning, I take the elevator to the 7th floor, and I walk through glass doors and into a hallway lined with gold and platinum album plaques, and I round the corner to my own little office.

Then I dance around a little bit to whatever’s playing in my headphones before I take them off and get to work.