Holden's Gladstones!

I have decided that no one gets stranger than English teachers who are punch-drunk. Yes, when we feel battered and bruised—well, we handle it ways that I’m pretty sure no one else would. Naturally, since the CSAP makes the best of us paranoid, conversation turned to teachers we’ve known who really were less than competent, and one teacher in particular often comes up. She’s been bounced around this district for 30 years, but she knows how to play the system and has been impossible to fire. Schools just toss her around like a hot potato. It’s really very sad, but it didn’t stop me from telling a story about her that always makes me chuckle. (This was a silly mistake, not evidence of her incompetence. Those stories aren’t funny.)

She was teaching Catcher in the Rye when a student came up to her desk and asked her what “Gladstones” were. She asked to see the sentence in which the word was used. Holden Caulfield says, “My Gladstones were banging hell out of my legs.” She looked at the hapless student and said, “Well, I believe they are testicles.” He blushed and went back to his seat. A few minutes later, having read further into the text, he said, “Ms ____! They’re suitcases!”

Retelling this story in my department had us going crazy with Ms ____’s interpretation of the word and the myriad situations in which Holden’s Gladstones are discussed in the book. At one point, a less wealthy roommate puts Holden’s expensive suitcases on his luggage rack, in hopes of convincing others that they belong to him. Well, it’s just wrong when you start talking about a kid putting Holden’s Gladstones on a rack by this teacher’s definition. Holden leaves them in a locker in Grand Central Station at one point. We decided that this would be the perfect euphemism for someone weak and spineless. “Yeah, he’s kinda left his Gladstones in a locker, if ya know what I mean…” Poor Holden believes that his teacher is trying to molest him, and he uses the fact that his suitcases are at the station as an excuse to escape. The scene takes on new meaning if Holden more or less says, “Excuse me, Mr. Antolini, but if we’re going to do this, I have to go get my Gladstones out of the locker at the station…”

We were laughing so hard! Kinda scary, isn’t it? Now what does it say about me that I find stuff like this infinitely amusing, not to mention the fact that I have all kinds of pretend people that live in my head and come out of my fingers onto a keyboard? I don’t need to ask, do I? Have a great weekend!