I was just thinking about Franny this morning as I woke in the sunshiny house, the mornings quiet now without Grandma, save for the humming of the air conditioner. I was thinking about Franny as I made coffee and poured cereal and grappled with the Times crossword, frustrated because it’s Monday for chrissakes and all I could get was the “actress Farrow” type clues and so I gave that up and decided to write about Franny instead.
[By the way -- if you've never read Franny and Zooey, you may as well stop reading this. In fact, you may as well stop reading this, get yourself out to the nearest bookstore, buy the book, and read it post haste. Or, use the handy link I've provided!]
Franny is my personal heroine (one of them, at least) because she is a woman in search of enlightenment. It’s not a common theme. Women are supposed to either a)not be concerned with enlightenment or God or b)possess some sort of motherly female “earth mama” knowledge of such or c)just be naturally unquestioningly pious.
Religious quests are generally reserved for men.
Well, J.D. Salinger obviously observed differently. Franny’s no zealot, no Joan of Arc. She’s just a regular girl, a young woman grappling with the usual concerns — dating, school, family dynamics — while she seeks the meaning of God on the side.
I couldn’t say what made me think of that this morning.
I am so ready to move on with my life, but I have the feeling that my life here is not ready for me to move on with it, and so I have, for once, curbed my penchant for taking flight to more exotic locales and instead am in the process of formulating some sort of six-month plan (gasp! a plan?). I was supposed to start work in Austin on this very day, but was waylayed by Grandma’s stroke and death, and to be honest I don’t know if I’ll ever make it down there. I don’t know if I’m the same person anymore as the girl who wanted to move to Texas. And, while that may sound a bit capricious — oh, it is. I’m nothing if not capricious. But I reserve the right to be that way, barring ill effects on anyone else in my life. And that’s the glory of being single. Besides my family, there is no one else in my life whom my picking up and going somewhere other than Texas would affect, nor anyone whom my not moving to Texas would affect. It’s a marvelous thing to me to be able to make my own decisions.
