Will you please write me a letter sometime when you get the time? It gets pretty lonely here and I love you very much and maybe even you could come to see me some time, if you get the time.
Please don't misunderstand me, Miss. I'm a magazine illustrator. My card. I'd like to sketch you more than I've ever wanted to sketch anyone in my life. Perhaps such an undertaking would be to a mutual advantage.
I beg your pardon. I love you very much. I'm nuts about you. I know it. I could love you all my life. I'm a printer's assistant and I make thirty dollars a week. Gosh, how I love you. Are you busy tonight?
I was going to write a tender lovely boy-meets-girl story. What could be finer, I thought. The world needs boy-meets- girl stories. But to write one, the writer must go about the business of having the boy meet the girl. I couldn't do it with this one. Not and have it make sense.
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.
Anyway, 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.
Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.