Nostalgia

Just made a batch of split pea soup.

From the time I was five until I was probably ten, I ate so much Campbell's pea soup (plain and split pea with ham) that my family called me "Little Pea."

I haven't had a can of Campbell's for probably twenty years and now I only eat homemade about once a year. But every time I do, I think of how much it was favorite food and how now I think it's just okay. And how it doesn't seem right that my taste buds should have changed so profoundly.

I don't really know what pea soup has to do with J.D. Salinger, except that I'm nostalgic about him too. The first literary author I really fell in love with. At fifteen, I read everything he'd written and was disappointed that I couldn't get my hands on more. But like pea soup, when I went back to him as an adult, he didn't speak to me in the same way. I didn't fall in love again. My tastes had changed.

Still, he was brilliant. And Adam Gopnik wrote a wonderful obit for him in the New Yorker. J.D. Salinger