It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.  
  When I heard this week that Joseph Heller had died, I found my copy of his best-known novel and read those opening lines again. 
  The first time I tried to read Catch-22, I was an air force weather observer attached to an army infantry division at Fort Lewis, Wash. I’d just turned 20. The service and I didn’t get along. I was not mature enough—if maturity is what it takes—to see things the air force’s way, much less the army’s. As time dragged slowly from one gloomy day to the next toward eventual return to civilian life, I spent as much time as possible buried in books. 
  In the post library, I’d discovered books about single-handed sailing across oceans and seas. Losing myself in such tales was a pleasant, safe escape from the drudgery of one of the two jobs in the air force I knew going in I didn’t want. Tales of sailing with the wind toward ever-receding horizons were a safe form of escape from the boredom of being a weather observer in a place where the weather never changed. 
  Catch-22 was not so safe. 
  I bought the paperback at the PX, plowed through several pages, and set it aside. It was crazy. I couldn’t get into it. 
  Maybe it was the fact that Yossarian seemed to feel about his air force about the same way I felt about mine, but after a week or so, out of other things to read, I picked up the book and tried again. That time, it took. 
  I had no more tolerance for institutionalized stupidity when an adolescent than I do now. As I read those 463 pages during the next several days, Heller’s world as seen through Yossarian’s eyes became my world. The book became sane and the world my body lived in was as nuts as the book seemed the first time I tried to read it. 
  Depression gave way to euphoria. I extended the world the book formed in my mind into an invisible bubble, a force field that protected me from everyone else’s reality. My mind began to resonate with the bizarre tone of the book. People began to look at me strangely. 
  I sometimes think that Heller’s influence on my mind never completely wore off. I wonder if Catch-22 somehow inoculated me against the drabness and dullness of always seeing the world in conventional fashion. 
  Hollywood made a movie and called it Catch-22, but I haven’t seen it. Movie makers almost always screw up good books, and it would have taken a particular form of craziness to do justice to the world of Yossarian, Nately’s whore, and the dead man in Yossarian’s tent. 
  Heller set his book in World War II, his war. It didn’t fit that war as we know it from history books and movies. But the twisted logic, the absurdities, and the insanities that pervade Catch-22 foreshadowed the reality of Vietnam a generation later. 
  As I scanned my bookshelves looking for the book’s blue and white spine, I came across other paperbacks I’d bought from the same PX bookrack and read at about the same time. John Updike’s Rabbit, Run is there. Rabbit Angstrom’s life in that novel was as depressing as my life was when I read it. I should read that one again someday. Some bright and sunny day. 
  When I pulled my old, yellowed copy of Catch-22 from the shelf and blew off the dust, I was surprised to see that it was a 1966 printing. I’d bought it in 1962, the first or second paperback printing, not the 17th. Then I found a name inside the cover. The copy on my shelf for a quarter century or more belongs to an ex-wife’s brother. Perhaps my copy is in a box somewhere, or maybe it was one of a bunch I sold many years ago. No matter, though. The words are the same. 
  It’s raining today, a good excuse to stay inside and read. 
  I open the book carefully. The pages are brittle with age, but the words are forever fresh. 
  It was love at first sight...