next stop, Madame Pomfrey's

OK, not to make this page, like, HARRY POTTER CHAT or anything like that, but do you have a kid in your life who likes Harry Potter?  Because then by all means, if you're ever in Orlando, take them to Universal Studios and go to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  Because oh my god you guys, HARRY POTTER.

We were in Orlando last week for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmologists, which basically gave us a great excuse to do something that we wanted to do anyway.  Universal Studios even had a night where they kept the park open for special extended hours for Academy members and their families, and while this meant that none of my outdoor pictures turned out at all (my cell phone camera does decently with low light conditions, but there are limits, after all), you'll just have to trust me that, perhaps especially at night, this place looked really magical.

The area is set up as some sort of amalgam of Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade, and while there were a few rides and a replica of the Hogwarts Express (which puffed smoke but didn't actually go anywhere), the area basically consisted of numerous storefronts (Zonko's! Dervish and Banges!) and food vendors (Three Broomsticks, scattered Butterbeer stands) in order to move Potter-branded merchandise.  And I realize that that's sort of the cynical reality of things, and that everything was of course ridiculously overpriced and designed to prey on your love of the books or your weakness for indulging your own children--but look guys, I'm not made of stone.  Kids, hope you're in the mood to stay up late, because WE BE GETTIN' SOME CHOCOLATE FROGS AT HONEYDUKES.

The absolute best thing at Harry Potter World though (and the one thing that Cal really, really wanted to see) was Ollivander's Wand Shop.

The wand shop was set up as more of a show really, where small groups of about thirty people at a time were escorted into the store and Ollivander picks a kid out of the throng to perform what they called a "wand-pairing demonstration." The demonstration is much as was depicted in the movies--Ollivander hands various wands to the chosen, instructs him to do some kind of magical task, and the magic goes all haywire until Ollivander finally picks the correct wand, at which point a spotlight shines and aaaaaahhh! a chorus of angels sings from on high because the wand has selected the wizard, blah blah magic talk.

This bit of whimsey, of course, is followed by the cold hard reality of them shuffling you out to the storefront where you have the "option" to purchase the special, magical wand that chose you above all others. (You'll notice that I put the word option in quotes, because really, unless you're some kind of steely-willed gorgon, there is no way in hell after that little show where your kid is looking at you with the wide-eyed wonder of oh my god, this shit just got real that you're not going to buy that thing. There's just no way. In fact, if you're really determined not to shell out for a wand, do yourself a favor and don't even walk in there.  I WARNED YOU.)

I do also find it ironic that it was the annual meeting for the American Academy of Ophthalmologists that led to a night of so many kids running around pointing long tapered sticks out in each others faces, but perhaps they haven't been doing as many ruptured globe or orbital trauma repairs as usual and want to make up the shortfall before year's end. Well played, ophthalmologists. Well-played.

lumos

I was excited when Cal started making the move from reading-as-deciphering to reading-for-comprehension because finally, finally, we could do nerd stuff together.  As a child endowed with neither facility at sports nor a particularly gregarious nature, I read a lot of books as a child, many of which I remember vividly to this day.  Not that they were all quality books by any means--I do think I read both "Sweet Valley High" and "The Babysitters Club" series in their entirety well beyond the age when I should have known better--but I read a lot of other books too.  And I read constantly.  I read at dinner, with the book in my lap under the table.  I read in the shower (note: not advisible).  I read on the subway on the way to school, and I read when I was outdoors, ostensibly getting some fresh air and exercise.  I read a lot.  So when Cal started to get to the age where he could actually start read on his own, for fun, I was super-excited, both for him, and for me to finally have an excuse to re-read the full Beverly Cleary opus.

And I have to admit, it was a bit of an uphill climb at first.  Cal liked being read to (I think I'd mentioned the "Illustrated Classics" series here already, and he particularly enjoyed the science-fiction-adventure story picks of that lot--your War of the Worlds, your 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, what have you) but I still think he viewed reading for himself as a bit of a slog.  I got him some easier chapter books (in particular he had mentioned reading some of the "Cam Jansen" books at school--basically your standard kid mystery series, Case of the Missing Dinosaur Bones, that kind of thing--and while it didn't seem like great storytelling I did particularly like that the protagonist was a girl and her best friend was a boy who was always babysitting his baby brother) and Cal worked his way through a dozen of those, mostly when I asked him to.  But it still kind of felt like that to him: work.  He'd read two or three chapters after school, mostly on assignment, and then, duty dispensed, he'd go and do something he really wanted to do, like write the definitive illustrated reference guide to prehistoric reptiles or some such thing.

I figured I wouldn't push it.  I figured he wasn't ready.  I figured (and this I kept to myself, but with growing dismay) that not every kid loves to read, and just because Cal didn't want to read in the bathtub didn't mean that he wouldn't have a rich intellectual life.  (This was a recurring theme--many of my paperbacks from childhood and adolescence were more than a little warped from water exposure.)

I got the Harry Potter series for Cal...kind of...but also just because I thought they were books that were worth owning, period.  I expected Cal would like to read them eventually, of course, but I didn't really think he'd be quite ready for them yet--some of the writing and plot are a little dense at points, and the dialogue and vernacular is a touch continental (stuff like Ron exclaiming "bloody hell!" all the time, people referring to large groups of students as "you lot"--which I guess is the British version of all y'all) but, you know, I figure we'd have them lying around for later, and maybe Cal would pick them up and leaf through them if and when he wanted to.

A couple of months ago, we started reading "The Sorcerer's Stone" to Cal at bedtime.  We watched the movie.  Cal started getting interested, pointing out that while he liked the movie because it "showed what things look like," he liked the book better because it had details and some side plots that necessarily got dropped from the film version.  (I'd argue, actually, that they weren't judicious enough in their editorial process for that first film--have you tried to re-watch that thing?  God, it's like Exposition City, and it just goes on forever.)  We got through "The Chamber of Secrets," Joe and I reading most of it aloud, Cal reading some of it himself.  First he read it aloud to us.  Then I started noticing him silently reading it alone, while I was cooking dinner, or taking care of Mack.  We finished the second book and instantly he picked up "The Prisoner of Azkaban."  He started reading in the car.  I took him to Target the other day (to buy underwear for Mack, remember), and he was reading as we made our way down the aisles.  These past few weeks, we've been seeing more of this:

He has one of the lanterns from our camping trip in the bottom bunk of his bed, and he says up late, reading Harry Potter.  He begs us to let him read for ten more minutes, to let him finish the chapter, he'll go to sleep right after, but it's the part with Quidditch, mom, just let me finish the part with the Quidditch.  Right under our noses, he's made the jump from reading for comprehension to reading for enjoyment.

I guess the real conclusion from all this is something that no one needed me to point out, which is that J.K. Rowling is a very good writer.  That, and maybe we need to get a better reading light for Cal's room.

shelf exam

I've only ever watched, like, two episodes of "Hoarders," but it's enough to make me feel 

1.) Vaguely reassured, that, despite my packrat tendencies, I'm not that bad (did you see the one with the lady that had two dried up dead cats under her rubble heap of trash?  Like cat jerky they were, good lord).  Also

2.) Slightly uneasy about my own clutter, to the point that, after I watched the last episode, I just started throwing things away to make myself feel better.

One thing that I've never been able to get rid of--even though we've moved five times (yes) since I started med school--is my books.  I am unnaturally attached to the books.  I have purged many of our other possessions, some of which would seem to have more sentimental value (Cal and Mack's old baby clothes went to Goodwill with the last move, for example--they were adorable and teeming with cuddly memories, but there's only so many outgrown onesies flopping around in boxes that I can abide) thought when it comes to my books, I have repeatedly put my foot down against giving any away.  Because you can tell a lot about people by their books.

We used to have them somewhat categorized on separate shelves (all our medical books were clustered together in our workspace, for example), but at this point the fact of unpacking them seemed like feat enough, so everything is all jumbled together in a hodgepodge.  Highbrow, lowbrow, and everything in between. 

Evidence that I don't just recommend books willy-nilly.  My own copy of Michael Ruhlman's "Walk on Water" has damn near been read to tatters, obviously.  (I used to have the unfortunate habit of reading in the bathtub, which no doubt accelerated the process.)  So you can see why I basically had to resuscitate myself when I heard he wrote a blurb for my book.

I went through I period in college where I read a lot of plays.  I also went through a period in college where I got used texts from the college bookstore for classes that I wasn't taking because I thought it would broaden my horizons or whatever.  (Nerd.)

And then when I was in med school I got a book of pictures of 1000 olde timey tattoos, just the right size to keep in the bathroom on top of the toilet.  Highbrow, lowbrow.

Ophthalmologists have the best words for Scrabble.

These EC comics were a Christmas gift from my parents.  Somewhere, possibly still in a box, is a complete box set of "Crime Suspense Stories," "Weird Science," and "Weird Science Fantasy."  A healthy proportion of the books on my bookshelf are actually comics or graphic novels, a fact that perplexes my mother-in-law a great deal.

I still have a handful of author copies for my own book lying around.  It seems weird to have them out but I literally don't have anywhere else good to put them.  But they're on a very low shelf, at least, so less visible, thereby making me a little bit less like Richard Dreyfus in "What About Bob?".





(I said a little bit.)

an object of beauty

Hey, look what I got in the mail!




Turns out Steve Martin's new book is published by Grand Central Publishing also, and my editor sent me a copy after I sent her a rhapsodic e-mail like OMG STEVE MARTIN, DID HE COME TO THE OFFICE, DID YOU MEET HIM, DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS SHOPGIRL THE SPANISH PRISONER OMFG!!!

Man, book publishing people have the coolest jobs.

better than cliff notes

When I was a kid maybe a little older than Cal's age, I had this set of "illustrated classics"-- pocket-sized paperbacks with abridged versions of famous works of literature. I really thought these books were awesome. Some of my favorites that I remember vividly were "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," "Swiss Family Robinson," "The Time Machine," and "War of the Worlds." In other words, books that I probably would think are a total snooze now. My tastes run more towards contemporary literature nowadays (anything written after World War II usually is suspect in my book--I know this makes me a Philistine but I'm just being honest, just like I'm being honest when I tell you that I am a girl and I thought that "Pride and Prejudice" was SUPER BORING) but when I was a kid, I just remember being captivated by those illustrated classics.

I had no idea that they were abridged versions at the time, but somehow the fact that they were abridged made them better than the originals--like they cut through all the wordy embellishments and baroque flourishes and reduced the books down to pure scene and plot. That along with the pictures just made them fantastic to read. I know it's probably telling that I was the kind of kid who'd prefer snuggling on the couch with a stack of books and some old Halloween candy than--well, pretty much anything else in life--but really, I have very fond memories of those books.

Cal's been reading a lot more these days, and so lately, I've been trying to locate some of those old paperbacks. Not at my parents house--they moved since I was a kid, so any books from that era are probably long gone, sentimental value or not. But there is Amazon.com and eBay, after all. Still, I can't find the same versions of those illustrated classics. And believe me, I have looked. I found books in the same vein, in that they are classics, and they are illustrated--but no, I want the same books. EVERYTHING MUST BE THE SAME. I know, it's a disease. My child must enjoy what I enjoyed. (Next up: a Wilson Phillips CD.)

This is what I remember about the illustrated classics that I read.


1.) They were paperbacks.

2.) They were small. I want to say 4" x 5". You could cram one in your back pocket.

3.) There was a black-and-white picture every other page. Left side was the picture, right side was the text. Usually the picture was captioned by a pull quote from the text. Like, "The Swiss Family Robinson sailed to the island on a boat out of sawed-open barrels!"

4.) They came in a big box set of, like, 12 or 24 books.

5.) I think the publisher imprint was Moby? Or something like that. Anyway, there was a whale on the cover.


One more think about the illustrated classics series from my childhood is that I credit them for making me seem smarter than I actually am. For instance, to this day, I have not read the real versions of "Great Expectations" or "Little Women," but I know a lot about the plot of these books from the illustrated classics. You know, like how Jo sold her hair and how Ms. Haversham stopped all the clocks in her house and still wore her wedding dress around until she caught on fire. Now if only they had one about "The Portrait of Dorian Gray," so I would know something more about this painting under the bed that everyone keeps talking about.




Edited to add: Woo! Found some on eBay! Mission: Nerd Kid 2.0 complete!

correspondence




So the reason that my favorite medical books have been on my mind recently is that, like I mentioned before, my editor has been sending out advance copies of my book for people to blurb. Early responses have been pretty good (no book burnings yet that I'm aware of, at least), and so I've been trying to put together a fantasy wish list of all the people I would love to take a peek at the manuscript before it comes out. Certainly if any of the authors on my top five list even leafed through my book (yes, I know Randy Shiltz died, but, you know, the alive ones), my head would explode with happiness, and it seems unbelievable to me that something I wrote might possibly be looked over by these authors whose works I've read and loved for years.

My editor feels like personal note tucked in with the advance copies might be that extra touch that adds so much (as opposed to a my-people-will-call-your-people sort of situation, I guess...not that I have people, but I'm sure the other authors do, because they are famous and also AWESOME) which is why I've been writing fan letters to Anne Fadiman and Atul Gawande. And also why I finally got some personal stationery. I have been writing notes on ripped out pieces of notebook paper for far too long, but now I am thirty-two years old, which seems like an age that having plain notecards with your name printed across the top might no longer be exceptional, but expected.

like oprah's book club without the oprah

My youngest sister (she's ten years younger than me, which either makes her very young or me very old, I'll choose the former) is starting medical school in the fall. I think there is a certain futility in giving medical students or pre-medical students advice outside of the purely practical--never pass up a free meal, sleep when you can, that kind of thing--because there are certain things that you will never, ever believe, and certain lessons that you will not be ready to absorb until you've gone through the experience of learning them firsthand. In that sense, medical school is much like that final scene in Oz (as in "The Wizard of Oz," not the HBO series set in prison with all the riots and butt-raping) where the scarecrow asks the Good Witch of the North:


SCARECROW
Then why didn't you tell her before?

GLINDA
Because she wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.


Medical students, there are things that I can tell you about medicine, but you'll never believe me. You'll just have to learn them for yourselves. However, let it not be said that I didn't try.

Therefore, I would like to now present to you my list of the five books I think that every student should read before starting medical training, be it for your MD, DO, PA, nursing degree, or what have you. Note that my own book is not among them, though if you would like to read it nonetheless when it comes out, I certainly wouldn't dissuade you.


* * *


1. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down (by Anne Fadiman)




The story of a young first-generation Hmong girl with epilepsy, her interface with the American healthcare system, and the catastrophic culture clash that ensued. I read a review that called this a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, and I think that's pretty much right on the money. I also think this is one of the best books about the medicine I have ever read. Sensitive and beautifully written, this book dares you to choose sides, turns your expectations inside-out, and showed me more than anything that medicine should be treated more like an art than a religion.

I read this book early in my Pediatrics residency (long-time readers remember that I did two years of Peds before switching to Anesthesia) and it completely changed my life. I wish I could say that I remember the lessons from this book every day when I deal with my actual patients, but that's why it bears frequent re-reading; I must have read this book at least ten times in the past five years.

2. And The Band Played On (by Randy Shilts)




I first read this book I think in tenth grade, when I was writing a Social Studies paper about the history of the AIDS epidemic. (Grade on the paper: A minus, but this particular teacher was known for his grade inflation, so it probably was a pretty crappy paper. I do remember printing it out on my dot matrix printer as well, the sound of which always reminded me of sitting in a dentist's office.)

I know that for some people, just reading the subtitle, "Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic" is enough to send you to running for the door (or to say that it sounds like something you'd be assigned--read: forced--to read in some college Poli-Sci class), but hear me out. Written more than twenty years ago by Randy Shilts, who I believe since succumbed to the epidemic himself, it is a journalistic work to be sure, but written in such a way that can best be described as cinematic. It's an exciting book to read. It's a tragic book to read. AIDS has been part of our landscape for so long now it's hard to imagine living in a world before we even knew what the disease did, how it was spread, or that it was caused by a virus. The steps in the healthcare process, in the political process, the small acts of craven ignorance and everyday heroism depicted along the way are unforgettable. We live in a world now where AIDS is a household name. Everyone should read about this time not so long ago when it was not.


3. Complications (by Atul Gawande)




I'm pretty sure that by now I don't need to convince anyone that Atul Gawande is a great writer, but let me just say it again. He's a great writer. His writing is more process-oriented than personal, but I think some of the best parts of the book are the personal bits--the part where he talks about his first experience putting in a central line as an intern, the part where he talks about the decision process of choosing a surgeon for his own son, born with a congenital heart defect. Moreover, Gawande highlights his approach to medicine in his own subtitle, "A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science." Medicine is imperfect. We are imperfect. It is in acknowledging these imperfections and how we strive to be better than we already are that makes the difference.


4. Singular Intimacies (by Danielle Ofri)




I once heard a book editor complain about the glut of doctors who were pedaling around book proposals or manuscripts in various stages of completion about the medical training process. "Every doctor has stories," he said, "but not every doctor can write. The problem is, they don't know that." And I will freely admit to you, I have lived in fear ever since I heard that insider comment that I am yet another in a long line of doctors who has more stories to tell than the talent to tell them.

Danielle Ofri has stories, and she tells them well. This book is basically a memoir of a young doctor in training, starting with her days as a medical student up through her graduation from residency. Most of the chapters (more like vignettes) existed as standalone stories in one for or another; she was widely published in a variety of magazines prior to coming out with her first book, and is now the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of the Bellevue Literary Review, which is a literary journal that publishes works related to medicine and health.

What strikes me most about Ofri's first book is her fearlessness in admitting her own failures, her own weaknesses, her own moments of doubt throughout the early years of her training. We've all been there, but not everyone can so nakedly capture that feeling that one has as a medical student, an intern, that first night as the senior resident on the floor, of "I-don't-quite-know-what-I'm-doing-but-now-I-have-to-pretend-like-I-do." In a world of medicine being depicted as large-than-life and heroic, her humanizing the scope of medical training is wonderful and refreshing.


5. Walk on Water (by Michael Ruhlman)




I've read this book many, many times, and each time, I can't put it down until I've read it cover-to-cover. Michael Ruhlman is a journalist (I think he may have been a sports writer in a prior incarnation) who spends several months with a team of pediatric cardiothoracic surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic, headed by chief surgeon Roger Mee.

Now, this may be the anesthesiologist in me speaking, but there's nothing I find more distasteful than the "Surgeon as God" narrative, and so I picked up this book with some hesitation. But this book is nothing like that. That is not to say that the surgical skill displayed is not remarkable (it is) or that the scenes in the OR are not heart-pounding (they are), or the stories of the tiniest lives saved not awe-inspiring (they totally are). But the bigger picture of this book is the evolution of medicine, how far we've come in such a short time, where we are now, and how much farther we still have to go when it comes to saving our youngest and sickest patients. It also marvels at the craft of medicine, the skill, and how to be the very, very best at a certain field, it takes more than just hard work and dogged persistence--in some ways, you have to be kind of a freak of nature. Roger Mee is very, very good at what he does, which is pediatric open-heart surgery, and therefore he feels it is his responsibility to do just that, whether he likes it or not.

(As an aside, I have to say that I trained in Pediatrics for two years, and worked in the PICU and NICU where I took care of scores of post-op complex congenital heart patients. However, there were certain passages in the book where Ruhlman, a layperson, discusses the physiology of the Fontan or the challenges of the Norwood, and I understood the surgery in far more clarity than any of the cardiologists or surgeons I'd worked with had ever been able to explain to me. He is a gifted writer, and speaks fluently in the foreign language of medicine. Bravo.)


* * *


There is one theme at the core of all these books, more overt in some than in others, but a central thread in all good medical non-fiction nonetheless. Which brings me back to my original point. If I could give young healthcare professionals one piece of advice, one word to live by, it would be this: humility. Be humble. Yes, all the standard advice still applies: work hard, sweat the details, treat your patients as you'd want your family to be treated--but I think humility is probably the most important quality for a young doctor, for any doctor to have.

Admit when you don't know something. Admit when you've failed. Admit when your goals exceed your reach, when the skills required exceed your experience, but never stop trying to push that limit. Know when to stop, know when to ask for help, and above all, be aware of your own limitations while trying constantly to exceed them. That's the most important thing in medicine. If you think you know everything there is to know, not only will you always be wrong, but you'll wall yourself off against learning anything new. So be humble. Know what it is that is just outside your reach, and spend your entire life trying to get there.

(Any books to add to this list? Let us know in the comments section! For the five I picked here, there's another twenty I left out. What are your favorites?)

take a look, it's in a book, a reading rainbow





Cal has suddenly expressed a Great Interest in reading. To be fair, he is very proud when he can read things on his own, but he still prefers being read to, because why should he have to put in all that effort when he can just lay back and let Momanddad mangle the more rickety portions of The Lorax for him? Reminds me of that Simpsons where Homer is in the hospital and sees that guy on the ventilator. "And here I am, breathing on my own like a sucker." (I paraphrase.)

But anyway, it puts a song in my heart to be a nerd and have my child express these budding nerdistic qualities (some of my most cozy memories of childhood are lying on the couch with a giant pile of books next to me--no, I was not very good at sports, nor did I have any friends, why do you ask?) so of course when Cal started talking about reading, I immediately pounced onto Amazon and ordered him a kings ransom of "I Can Read!" titles, Uncle Elephant, Frog and Toad are Friends, Bread and Jam for Frances etcetera. Oh, and Amelia Bedelia. It remains to be seen if the somewhat more nuanced fumblings of Amelia Bedelia will be above a four year-old's head (this is a kid who says that his favorite part of "Monsters Inc." is when Mike Wizowsky burps up the microphone) but whatever, we'll see.

I worked him into a fine frenzy rolling yesterday when I kept telling him that the books were set to be delivered that afternoon, that evening at the latest (creating the saddest possible tableau of him sitting next to the door looking for the mail truck) until I realized that it was President's Day and thus no mail delivery. And so it goes. But for sure they will come today, and frankly I am just as excited as he is. My little old man is becoming old for real!

sonny

In high school, I had something of an obsession with J.D. Salinger, because...well, who didn't? We all went through this, didn't we? From writing short stories painfully derivative of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" to fantasizing how we would soothe Holden Caulfield's angst-filled soul if only he would deign to let us (and if he were, you know, non-fictional), we've all been there. Those slim, plain covered paperbacks reinforced with packing tape where the covers were fraying, they're as worn and familiar to me as my memories of adolescence itself.

As I got older, in college, I went a little further with this obsession, once planning an elaborate summer road trip to Cornish, New Hampshire, in the hopes of meeting the guy. (This was not quite as far off as it sounded--one of my friends from college actually lived near him, knew his address, and had offered to mail him a copy of one of the weekly columns I had written for the college paper, the topic of which escapes me now but may or may not have been related to how I wish Holden Caulfield was my boyfriend). Needless to say, that particular road trip never happened, for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I did not have my driver's license (nor, as you all well know, would I get one for another ten years hence).

But one Salinger project that I did undertake, one that I actually saw through to completion, was collecting, in a stiff-backed leatherette portfolio, all of J.D. Salinger's uncollected short stories. I'm talking about all the short stories that didn't appear in his slim body of bound works: Catcher; Nine Stories; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; and of course Franny and Zooey. The internet then was not quite the endless information dump that it is today, so the stories certainly weren't available online to read, but it was easy enough to locate a list of these stories, along with references to the magazines that they originally appeared in.

It was a project that took most of the summer. What magazines they had at the Wellesley College library (as a science major, I was woefully unfamiliar with the layout of the non-science library, and had to feel my way around like a blind person until I found the periodical stacks) I unearthed and photocopied the Salinger stories out of, where they looked quaint and old-timey next to the period print ads with doctors promoting cigarettes for weight loss and various unguents to calm your troubled skin. What magazines weren't in the Wellesley stacks, I ordered copies of via inter-library loan, from other college libraries in the northeast. I remember this scavenger hunt as being very exciting--every time I got a copy of a new story in the mail, I would look through it, read it through once quickly, read it through once again more carefully, and then delicately put it away in my portfolio, as if it were the original print rather than a crooked photocopy hastily run off by the librarian's assistant. The task of assembling all these uncollected stories seemed worthy and noble in some way that I couldn't identify.

For the most part (and I say this with all humility and respect for the author's memory), it became apparent that Salinger's decision to leave these works uncollected (and in fact his stance to excoriate all those like me who set about unearthing them, as he felt the quality of these stories were uneven and humiliating) was a wise one. Because for the most part, these stories were not very good. There were some that were better than others, and some that were familiar ("I'm Crazy" from Colliers in 1945 was a scene straight out of Catcher in the Rye), and some that were downright inscrutable--the aforementioned "Hapworth," which, as far is I know, is the last thing J.D. Salinger ever wrote to see the light of day. By the end of the summer, I had all the stories together at last, arranged in chronological order in a thick, substantial pile. And it was satisfying and unsatisfying all at the same time.

What I remember most about this summer is not so much reading the stories, though that was interesting enough, particular for the small shards of Glass family memorabilia that wink out here and there. No, but what was most fun was the search, the digging, the finding, the adventure of it all. And what a Salinger-worthy metaphor that is: we look high and low looking for hidden treasures, and we find...what? The everyday. The ordinary. The expected. And isn't that one of the things that J.D. Salinger taught us, that the picture in your head doesn't always match the reality, and that what you idolize can disappoint you in the light of day with its banality?

But he taught me something else too, not just through his writing but, that summer, in my quest to collect it all--and that's that it may not be the end result, rather what happens along the way that counts. At the end of that summer, I had--what? A stack of photocopies? A tattered reference list? A pile of inter-library loan slips and the manila envelopes the came in? Yes, all that, and a binder of frankly forgettable short stories that history has largely ignored. And maybe that should have been a disappointment. But none of that takes away from the nobility of the struggle, or from the enjoyment of the journey. And maybe, in the end, it's the journey that's what really matters.

Goodbye, Sonny. Thanks for the stories.