I once wrote this

"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. 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'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all." --Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye

I thought about this quote earlier today when Ann sent me a story about a Czech mother who locked up and tethered her 7 yr. old son in a basement and was eating him alive. The boy was found with his 9 yr. old brother who was also abused. The children were found by chance by a neighbor who picked up images of them on his baby monitor. It was a crazy story that only began to get more complicated since the mother posed as the sister of the two victims. Ill. This is only the most recent mind boggling story to come out of these "sleepy" countries.

In April I believe, an Australian man was arrested for kidnapping and sequestering his daughter and their children for 24 years. Apparently, he built a trap room under the basement, drugged his daughter, and faked her running away with a cult. Over the course of 24 years, he had seven children with her, one of whom died. Three of the children lived with him and his wife, the daughter's mother, who claimed that she knew nothing about her husband's extra-curricular activities.

This case came on the heels of another case happening 2 years prior in the same country. A girl who was kidnapped at age 10 as she was walking to school, managed to escape her captor8 yrs. later. The dastardly kidnapper threw himself in front of a train when her learned of her escape.

Each time I read stories like these, many things run through my mind:

1. How can people so cruel?

2. If you can't trust your family, who can you trust?

3. And this is the thought that kills me more than anything, who else? The idea that there might be some poor, helpless child locked up with no chance of escape kills me which leads me back to the quote with which I started.

I want to be the catcher in the rye, not saving children from going over the precipice of childhood into adulthood, but from going over the cliff of happiness and lightheartedness into the abyss of suffering both physically and mentally. I just want to protect them, to set up a sanctuary where they can stay to live out their dreams, to be free, and pure and beautiful.

I never want to have children. There are too many children who need someone to care for them who need someone to care for them. I'd rather make the world's unloved, parentless, lonely, poor, unlucky children my children.

I want people to look at me and say, "God that girl has got a good/pure heart." She's a little mysterious/aloof/quirky/eccentric/whatever, but damn she's got a good heart.