Family Memoir

In my family I am more of the independent one, the competitive one, and probably considered the lazy one too. I can be a leader, or the one my sisters look to when times are troubling, but most often that part goes to my oldest sister, Sammi. She is the initial one her three younger siblings, Betsy, myself, and Hayley usually turn to. Betsy is a year older then me. She typically will look to Sammi for just about all her advice, although if she isn’t answering her cell phone, like most times, Betsy will call me to find out what to do. When I have a problem, I will turn to Sammi first too. Even before my dad. She always needed to step up and be older then she actually is, ever since she was in 5th or 6th grade. Around the time my mom started working.

For the longest time growing up my mom babysitter, pretty much running a day care in my house. When she started working though, the burden of keeping everyone on track when my dad wasn’t home turned to Sammi. She would be the one who had to make sure everyone got their chores done, then proceed to do her own, while trying to not allow fights to escalate. Most often though it would turn into me and her fighting. One time it got so out of hand that we ended up breaking our phonebook. That was not a good day, because since Sammi was the one in charge, she was right. I wasn’t. Even in the rare times I actually was right my other two sisters wouldn’t back me up. I never ended up winning those fights, because in the end I would be in trouble somehow. But even with all that going on, Sammi still would have to find time to make dinner, and do her homework. She was the perfect role model for me and my other two sisters because with all that going on, she only ever had 1 B on a report card, in 4th grade math, and strait As the rest of her career throughout high school.

All that did come with perks though. With 4 kids, our basement could be littered with toys at times. So on the occasional weekend when it was time to finally clean the basement, it meant put the toys back all in the right containers and in place. Sammi would always come up with the brilliant plan of dumping all the toys out, enough to cover the entire basement, and reorganize everything. That is all she had to do though. Within about 15 minutes of her getting the basement an even bigger mess she would be upstairs watching some old movie on TV with my parents. When I would try that I would be told to get downstairs and clean up the huge mess. It just wasn’t fair.

Sammi had to do this until she was a sophomore in high school. At that time I was in 8th grade. It was the time span between about Valentine’s Day until Easter. My sisters were all out of the house, I forget where, and my mom was gone also. It was when my dad broke the news to me. I always had a different kind of relationship with him then my sisters. When I was younger bed time was at 9. About an hour after bed time though, my dad would check to see if I was still awake, and if so, I was allowed to watch the rest of the Rangers game that was on. It was something I always tried to stay awake for, waiting for him to say I could come out from bed and watch the hockey game with him. When he broke the news that my mom wanted a divorce though, it was tough. I didn’t know how to handle this, and my dad was sitting in front of me crying. I had now idea how to react to what was happening.

The concept of divorce was not something I ever thought I had to worry about. I always heard kids talk about it in school, but I never thought in a million years I would have to deal with it, but yet here it was, right in front of me, happening before I knew it could. I was sitting on the couch in my living room and I started petting my puppies, less then a year old at the time. My dad turned the TV off before saying anything, so I knew it was a big deal. I guess he didn’t know how else, or who else to say it to. It was just me and him in our house, my house, and he had this huge rain cloud pushing down on him, fogging up the room. He was sitting in his old dark blue broken recliner. I was to his right, where our couch was pushed up against the wall. His face got red, but it wasn’t because he was angry. He started crying right in front of me. I think at that moment is when I started to share this leadership role with Sammi.

The Friday after Easter we moved out. Sammi, my dad and I went to one house, and Betsy and Hayley went with my mom. I don’t remember if I was the one that told her what was going to happen with my parents, or if I was told not to mention anything. My mom was angry though. She even asked me a few times if she should go through with it. Isn’t that ridiculous? Asking your son if you should divorce his dad? The whole experience changed every relationship in my family. For me, I had surprisingly better relationships with everyone, except for my mom that is. Sammi and I grew really close together. I think that is how we got through the situation without problems. After 8th grade I transferred school districts too, which apparently is supposed to give people a lot of stress. I guess with all that had happened, it was easy to take on a new challenge because I knew it would be easier to get through.

It was made easy in a way, because Sammi was going to my new school for half a day too for a program she got into. I followed her into the same program when I was a junior. The day she left for college though is another time I won’t forget soon. Her freshmen year in college was spent at a school in Maine. The name of the school is Bowdoin, a small division 3 school that is 12 hours from where we lived. Over the previous 2 years of living together we gained a closer relationship then I had with Betsy and Hayley. We would be able to share problems with each other, talk to each other when angry or upset with something, or even just to hang out. I realized that me and Sammi had a lot better relationship then a lot of my friends had with their siblings. They always seemed to be at odds with each other, fighting constantly, but we didn’t. I didn’t fight that much with any of my sisters actually. The divorce brought my sisters and me together like nothing else could. I know for a fact that my relationships with Sammi, Betsy and Hayley would all be drastically different if we still lived in the same house, our house that we grew up in. But the day Sammi moved out, which seemed like for good, I was losing my security blanket, the person who I could always go to when I needed something, anything really. It was hard watching her pull out of my driveway with my dad driving and grandma next to him. Sammi was in the back, next to a pile of her belongings, and the last thing I saw as they pulled away were tears strolling down her cheeks.

Part 2 of RF

So, once again, I feel like I do not know that much about what is going on in the book, and I know nothing more about Mr. Michael Ondaatje. He seems more as if he is telling a story about where he is from, mainly Ceylon through all the poems, but more so about his family. I think it is really important for him to let us know as much about his family as possible. I hope that maybe later in the memoir, maybe collection of essays, that he will go further into himself.

To touch on what exactly this is, I am starting to feel that it is almost a collection of short stories. The poems kind of brought me to this conclusion, but also how it seems so disorganized. Ondaatje went from about 4 poems in a row about Ceylon, and kind of the culture going on in Ceylon, to talking about the Insurgence. It just seems in an odd order when reading, and that no chapter or story really goes off the one before.

I did like the Kegalle(ii). I feel like in this chapter we found a little bit about Michael and his family when he was growing up. The story is good too, because it relates to his trying to describe about Ceylon culture, while also talking about his family. The story is about how his stepmother and father had to shoot snakes that would sneak into their house with a shotgun. After his father died, an old silver cobra then comes periodically and everytime the stepmother tried to shoot it, the shotgun would misfire. After that, the Insurgence had to take the shotgun. But the story relates to Ceylon culture because they talk about how the snake is actually a reincarnation of their father as this old cobra to protect the family. You see, since the cobra started coming, other snakes stayed away for the most part, and this cobra never attacked. This is a short story, but it lets the reader know a lot of information about what was going on in Ceylon, to a little of how his family was.

Running in the Family

This memoir is a lot different from the others that we have read. So far, it seems like this is more about the family, and less about the actual author. At this stage in the other two novels, you know a lot about the author. After the first reading in this though, I know pretty much nothing about the author. So far it seems more of a history of this guys family. I know a lot more about Michael's father then I know about him. The writing style thus far is a lot different too. Ondaatje has a simple writing style, but then throws in some big words, and it just isn't fun reading at this point. It has been really hard to get through this because it seems like it skips, and there is not a lot of anything happening. I am having trouble trying to figure out what is going on, and often find myself trying to go back and pick up things I missed, or that I just didn't remember from a page ago. Monsoon Notebook (i) is a perfect example of this. It is a really short chapter, much like the rest of this book, but one of the pages us a full paragraph. The way that this is structured is just difficult to read, but also I just don't know what the chapter is saying. I try to reread it, but just get lost and do not find much of what is going on. This comes after they were in Ceylon looking for paperwork of Reverend Jurgen Ondaatje, then the memoir goes into talking about his oldest son Simon. I just find it difficult trying to follow the story of the book.

900 FSB

In Fathers, Sons, & Brothers, Bret Lott takes small events and makes them have a much greater importance. Lott shows this through 2 examples; the drive out to Wadmalaw Island, and in the essay ‘Sound’ at the end when he finds this wonderful noise after his paper route. He focuses in on these small, seemingly meaningless events, but turns them into something much better with the use of lyrical words, the flow of his sentences, and the tone changes in his writing.

A great example of where Lott brings a greater meaning out of a seemingly insignificant event is when he is in Wadmalaw. He says, "Though she does not know this yet, the view from here is the most beautiful gift I can remember Melanie giving me, and already I'm lining up words in the back of my head to give back to her once we drive back home... words that will amount, I know already, only to a meager translation of all I've seen"(149). Lott says what the whole chapter is about through this one sentence. The whole chapter is at the beauty of this experience, the drive to Wadmalaw, but after all the description he tells the reader that he cannot even come close to describing how it actually is. Lott tells more through admitting that his words are only a "meager translation" to the actual beauty that he sees.

There are many times when the reader can relate to what Lott says here, this being so great that it’s indescribable. The reason why this sticks out to the reader is because of the great picture that Lott laid out before hand. There is an image in the mind of the reader, and when Lott suddenly says no wait this is only a meager translation, just a little bit of what I am experiencing right now, then it puts this great picture that is already in the mind of the reader onto an unreachable pedestal.

Lott also does another tactic to make this sentence stand out to the reader. His writing style changes in this sentence compared to the rest of the essay. Lott writes this to have a flow to what he is saying. This flow happens because Lott has terrific use of commas, and lyrical words. The first is easy to see. Commas are obvious and stand out to the reader. Instead of putting a period at the end of each idea, he puts these commas in so the reader just feels like they need to keep going. If he were to stick a period at the end of each sentence then Lott would definitely not get this desired effect on the reader. He also uses these lyrical words though. They are words that do not necessarily stand out, but together seem to give an uplifting tone different from the rest of the essay. Lott says that he received “most beautiful gift” from Melanie. This is an example of these lyrical words that Lott uses. Ordinary enough if they stood alone, but saying the most beautiful gift leaves some sort of mystique around it. The reader knows through these types of adjectives, and also the run on of the commas Lott, uses that he really is trying to emphasize this sentence, and set it apart from the rest of the essay.

The reader gets this type of writing style before in the collection of essays. In ‘Sound’ Lott does this at the end after going through what he had done during the day. He says, “It was what I waited for, something even more mysterious than a snake on the driveway, than a shooting star above me while a folded papers on a winter morning: the high-pitched and constant flow of sound in the room, right there in my ears, a sound so loud, the house quiet, my body whipped by the work of delivering all those papers, that at times I thought my head would burst with it, and I had to sniff or cough or hum a song just to make sure the world wasn’t drowning in all that sound”(22). Lott uses these lyrical words again, and the flow of sentences to get this thing that seems so small, a noise he heard after delivering all of the newspapers, to this much greater amplification in meaning. He changes quickly from the type of tone at the beginning of the essay, to this once again, uplifting or enlightening feeling.

Before this part, Lott is simply explaining the paths he took, the encounters he would take on daily, and the houses he threw papers at during his route. But when he gets to this part, it all takes on a much greater meaning. The sound he hears, which he later says he found out was his blood rushing in his ears, was a point for him to feel accomplished, better then the rest of his family still sleeping, and almost superhuman since he thought he had the hearing of a dog. This is all shown by how excited his writing gets while explaining this, his flow and lyrical words behind what seems like something ordinary to anyone else, but extraordinary to Lott.

Shown in these two quotes, is how Lott can turn what seems to be small inconsequential events into something that is more. Much more than just more though, into something of significant importance to Lott, as a kid and as an adult. He takes the two things, and finds the absolute beauty in them. More so, he does this through his writing, by changing the tone, the flow of sentences and using more lyrical words.

300 words on FSB

In Fathers, Sons, & Brothers, Bret Lott takes small events and makes them have a much greater importance. He does this by... (says he cannot describe so he makes them into a much greater importance then what they actually are to help convey how he feels about them.) Lott shows this through 2 examples; the drive out to Wadmalaw Island, and when he is looking at Zeb ride his bike when he is only four years old (look at Sound, maybe change this example). He focuses in on these small, seemingly meaningless events, but by going through the depth of description on them can show how great these events are to him. (tone, word choices. add another sentence here to clear up.)

(clear up this sentence, make more of an intro)
In Wadmalaw he waits until the end to talk about this. Lott says, "Though she does not know this yet, the view from here is the most beautiful gift I can remember Melanie giving me, and already I'm lining up words in the back of my head to give back to her once we drive back home... words that will amount,I know already, only to a meager translation of all I've seen"(149). This part is significant to the essay, and stands out by itself. When reading, there is a sense of uplifting in the tone of his writing at this time. Before he was describing how wonderful this event is, but yet says he only falls short of being able to actually reflect it all in his writing. This leaves the reader with a guess at what he is experiencing, but really its no guess at all. (He tells more through admitting that his words are only a "meager translation" of it all then his actual ability to describe the scene.){go off of this sentence) As a reader one feels that they are in a better place experiencing what Lott was actually going through on the drive back to Melanie. He was at a complete awe, and ease with that moment, that view, and through his writing leaves the reader where he is, in almost a mystical translation of what he actually saw.

Lott also does this when talking about watching Zeb chase the Boy Scout down the street.... (will continue on this idea in 900 word post)....

Through these two descriptions Lott lifts the reader to almost an innocent state, one of complete wonder as to what he is going through, and yet, knowing the same feeling.

Thesis from FSB

There's a lot of instances where Lott looks at small events like in Wadmalaw and makes it into something really significant. Another time that happens is when Zeb is chasing the kids on his tricycle.

So my thesis:
Lott takes small events that he says he cannot describe so he makes them into a much greater importance then what they actually are to help convey how he feels about them.

Family myth

My family has a myth that is passed down, so that at every family gathering we bring this up. The myth is that my grandpa Hutzy, who is actually my great grandpa on my dad’s side, was a stealing lying cheater. At least once at every family event something done is out of respect for him. Whether it be trying to cheat in a card game or perhaps trying to steal the best part of the food. Oh, and I don’t know why his name is grandpa Hutzy either, it just is. That wasn’t his name though. Did I mention there’s a rumor he was a bootlegger too? He came to America during Prohibition, and the rumor is that he started bootlegging once he was here. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s certainly cool to tell people.
It never fails. Every Memorial Day I head to my grandma’s house for a parade that goes up the hill in her town, and to the cemetery. There are a few speakers, a few things read, then the guns are shot. When we were little me and my sisters and our cousin (really second cousin) would all try to get the shells to these shots, it was the cool thing to do. We’d try to get the most. Then we would go down to my Grandpa’s grave, and behind it, maybe in front depending on the direction, is Hutzy grandpa’s and his wife’s. We would stick little American flags that we got every year into the ground next to their gravestone, and over it we’ll lay flowers. Once we are done with that everyone is ready to go to breakfast.
Breakfast is what everyone looks forward to most. Eggs, bacon, sausage, fresh strawberries, water melon, cantaloupe, and rashti. Rashti is shredded potatoes (like with a cheese shredder) that are cooked on the stove top with a plate over top of it. When it is down, there’s a nice crispy, almost hash brown like crust that will be on top when you flip the skillet over. This comes to the table, and almost inevitably there will be someone, probably my dad in all honesty, that will have their fork ready to swipe this crispy top. For the longest time I didn’t like it at all. But everyone else loved it, and apparently so did Hutzy grandpa. To be continued….

600 revision

In the reading of The Liars’ Club, by Mary Karr, one gets bombarded with the use of imagery. Karr uses many different ways to assist in her descriptions. One of the more reoccurring describers though is the use of smell. She helps describe what she wants the reader to feel often through the smell that she relates to something good, or bad, or nice, etc. Ultimately though, Mary uses smell as a tool to set up how she feels about her memory.

The first example of this is when Mary is talking about draining her parents’ alcohol. Karr writes, “Dumping those bottles down the sink drain, I always craned my face away” (236). Literally, when smelling alcohol many people have to lean back because of its strength. This also helps to show how Mary feels about her parents drinking. Other then the obvious fact that she is dumping the alcohol down the drain, she cannot stand what it does to them. She mentions that she is surrounded by poisons, yet that smell she cannot stand. Partially that smell is associated with her negative feelings about her parents drinking.

Karr states that the “brown liquor” seemed dangerous to even breathe showing her unfavorable feelings toward it through the sense of smell. There is a theme of alcohol being related to negative events or feelings. There was alcohol involved during the night of the mother’s breakdown, when Hector’s sister Purty is attacked, and also when mother threatens to shoot Hector. Mary not liking the smell of alcohol is related to those bad experiences, along with always having to take care of her mother. Ultimately it is the reason why Lecia and Mary decided to stay with the mother rather then go back to Texas with Daddy. There is resent in Mary’s mind about alcohol, and it is described by her hating the smell of it, even though she lives near many other poisons or bad smells in the atmosphere.

Another example of how Karr uses smell to help with her descriptions is when Mary is talking about the time she was in her grandmother’s room. Mary says, “It’s not just the smell of death, but the smell of something thriving on death, a smell you link up to maggots, or those bacteria that eat up corpses one cell at a time” (76-77). Karr uses this description in talking about her grandmother, later saying that the smell was her, and actually coming out of her. This is another example of smell is used to bring the reader into a feeling of disgust. The reader can feel pity for Mary at this point for having to deal with such a foul, unthinkable odor.

When Mary looks back to her grandmother, many of her negative feelings are associated with this smell of death. Perhaps this is the reason why she does not feel sadness for her grandmother when she is dead. Mary is still very young and impressionable at this age in her life. If looking back all she can think about her grandmother is the absolute death like smell then her feelings and attitudes toward her grandmother will be diminished as well. That odor could be the reason why Mary showed no hard feelings over the death of her grandmother; it’s the relief of never again having to have the odor being shoved down her nostrils. Looking back on life, if a distinct image about an event or person sticks with someone, very often that is going to be the first way they feel about the person. If it’s a good thing they think about then they will have a good first memory. If it’s like Mary’s memory though, one will think poorly about that memory.

Karr uses smell to help her bring to life the feeling that she is describing. She can do it through both negative and positive ways, as shown through the examples. Karr allows the smell of certain objects to lead into many different feelings, or even more imagery.