Return to Sender: The Handicapper General

Dear Readers:

Indulge me this week, won't you?

I searched and searched for a direct tie between Kurt Vonnegut and Philadelphia. But other than assorted random mentions of him in the Inky, all I could find was this page, indicating that Harold Bloom published a volume of criticism on Vonnegut with a Philadelphia publisher. So no, this column is not going to be about Philadelphia, nor about any entity therein, which is the basic framework of "Return to Sender." This is going to be a column about Kurt Vonnegut. And if you don't like it, feel free to scroll.

When I found out about Kurt Vonnegut's passing, I was doing the most un-Vonnegut thing possible: I was compiling links for yesterday's "This Week in Celebrity," and there it was, sandwiched in between an article about the Jackson Family's new reality TV show, which I chose not to link to, and a piece on Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie administering enemas at a fat camp, which I eventually did. (That, I figured, was at least a story Kurt might have gotten a chuckle out of—especially if Paris and Nicole were actually aliens administering "treatment" to abducted WWII vets.) Because I'm a champion multi-tasker, I was mid-conversation with a friend when I read the news (in Variety, of all places) and interrupted our dialogue: "Holy crap. Kurt Vonnegut died."

I don't know why the writer's death didn't hit the news until the wee small hours of yesterday morning, even though he passed on Tuesday. But for a moment, one single, and very lonely, moment, I felt like I was the only person in the world who knew or cared. It was two a.m. There weren't a lot of people I could talk to. So I was glad that my friend was online. "Are you okay?"

The obvious, and honest, answer is that yes, I was fine. I am fine. I didn't know the man personally. He was eighty-four. He'd lived a long life. Another friend I spoke with yesterday mentioned something along the lines of: "I thought he died years ago." I don't know how many people's radar he was still on. And the truth is, I didn't even always like, or entirely agree with, what he had to say or write, especially in recent years. But that doesn't mean that I'm not just a little stunned, just a little mournful, and just a little teary-eyed as I write this.

At some point in middle school—I can't remember if it was seventh or eighth grade—we were assigned to read "Harrison Bergeron" in class. I remember finding it funny, even though many of my classmates "didn't get it." I was "that girl" in class that day: I probably didn't shut up about the story. (Come to think of it, I was probably "that girl" through most of middle school.) That night, I took our reader home with me and read the story again. And even though I already knew, and had known for some time by that point, that I wanted to be a writer, my second reading of "Harrison Bergeron" was one of those pivotal moments in my life. It cemented for me that I could spend my life doing nothing but writing and be happy forever. Years passed, and influences came and went, but "Harrison Bergeron" remains, to this day, one of only a handful of stories that I continue to turn to when I need inspiration, or even just when I want to read something that's damned good. And I'm not the kind of person who likes re-reading. (That's probably why I'm a horrible self-editor and always harass Jim to look at things I've written before they publish.)

I read Slaughterhouse Five for the first time about a year and a half ago, during Winter Break of my last semester at school. Believe it or not, I read it when I wanted to take a "break" from writing my thesis. (A little light fare, right?) When I came back to school, there was actually a university-wide discussion on the novel, which is why I'd been reading it, and not Love in the Time of Cholera, as I'd originally intended for that break. And all over again, when the discussion started, I was "that girl." That girl who fell in love with Vonnegut's words. That girl, the writer, who only hopes she can someday do his memory proud.

Image via Backwards City Review.