Response to "Now We Are Five: A Big Family, at the Beach" by David Sedaris

I thought this piece of creative nonfiction by David Sedaris did a great job at describing the details and engrossing the reader into the story.  In addition to that, I really liked the way the writing gave the reader a sense of nostalgia for Sedaris's childhood and past.  While the narrative was generally more sad and serious in tone, I enjoyed the small parts that showed Sedaris's personality, as well as portraying this family's uniqueness.

I thought Sedaris's insight on this quote was very real:

Now, though, there weren’t six, only five. “And you can’t really say, ‘There used to be six,’ ” I told my sister Lisa. “It just makes people uncomfortable.”

My best friend's sister passed away when she was younger, and having to say that she only has one sister when in fact, there were two sisters, always made for an awkward situation.  Saying that "[i]t just makes people uncomfortable" is an honest portrayal of losing a sibling and makes for a narrative that is touching and easy to relate to.

I thought the way Sedaris presented the background of Tiffany's story was interesting as well, and I think it has given me insight on how to incorporate a background story in a piece.  Throughout the story, there is an air of mystery about why Tiffany committed suicide, and it is never revealed as to why she might have done it.  While in a fiction piece the reader may learn why, it is interesting to note how in this piece based off of real life, we never find out why, and Sedaris and his family may never find out, either.  Sometimes in life one will never get an answer to the question they are asking, and it's a simple reality that we must accept.  Sedaris portrays this theme well in his creative nonfiction piece.

The details in Sedaris's piece are what makes it marvelous for me.  I really got a sense of who the characters were because of all the details written into the story.  For example, there is the scene where they are in the grocery store and Paul used wet parsley to mimic a sneeze on Sedaris's neck, all while getting a hapless stranger wet in the process.  The bit of comic relief in the otherwise sad narrative was refreshing, and the child-like nature of his brother shown in this scene lends a lot to his character.

Overall, with this piece I think I learned that creative nonfiction should be real.  And by that, I mean that when writing a piece, you should write about things that are otherwise taboo.  A sibling's suicide is tragic and it is something that most people are not comfortable with discussing, but by writing this piece, Sedaris gives the readers a great deal of insight about what it is like.  The details in the story are impressive and woven into the narrative seamlessly; I felt like all of them were purposeful and had a reason to be in the story.  In addition to the details and technicalities of the writing, I think what I most likely enjoyed best was the humanity of the story.  Each character had a vivid and unique personality, and they all felt quite real -- just like they are.

Blind Dates - Revised Draft

I was sixteen years old when I got my first job at a nursing home kitchen.  While I was in high school, I worked there part-time, mostly after school and on weekends.  It was a decent job and I was paid well for my service.  I worked mainly in the kitchen, preparing meals and food trays for the residents in the building, and then cleaning the dishes when the meals were over.  After I graduated high school, I started working there full-time and began serving in the dining room.  That was when I met Mary Alice.

            Initially, I was quite nervous to work in the dining room.  I was somewhat shy, and I would have one-on-one contact with the residents, taking their orders and serving their food, all while ensuring their comfort and delight.  My first day, I went around the dining room awkwardly, taking the residents’ orders patiently.  Each resident was unique in that they had different capabilities.  Some residents could read and talk quite well and knew what they wanted.  Others needed help reading the menu or making their decisions and others couldn’t speak at all.  The one resident in the room who needed the most help was Mary Alice.

            “She’s blind,” the activities coordinator told me.  “You’ll have to read her the menu and describe the items.”

            I walked over toward Mary Alice where she was seated in the corner of the dining room.  She was a small, elderly woman with short hair that had likely gone gray quite some time ago.  I couldn’t see her eyes because she was wearing a pair of stylish sunglasses, bejeweled on the side and with big rims. She wore a bright yellow sundress that made the corner of the room glow.  Mary Alice sat with two older black women, named Loretta and Mary.  Loretta was almost completely deaf and Mary had a hard time saying what she meant.  Loretta was a larger black woman with long, gray hair, wearing a heavy sweatshirt because she was often cold.  Mary was a very thin, taller woman with thick glasses and a blanket over her.  The three were having a lively conversation about Loretta’s family when she was growing up.

            Arriving at the table, I approached Mary Alice cautiously and knelt down next to her chair.  I felt a little nervous before I greeted her.  I had never met a blind person before, and I wasn’t sure if I should act any differently.  They definitely did not train me for this in the kitchen.

            “Hi, Mary Alice,” I said.

            “Why, hello there, friend,” she said.  Her voice was soft and sweet.

            “I’m here to take your order for lunch,” I told her. 

Mary Alice explained that she had a hard time eating foods that were hard or crunchy, so she selected menu options that were easier for her to chew.  She told me that I had a lovely voice and that I sounded like a sweet young man.  She made me blush and smile, but she didn’t get to see any of that.  The first day I met her, I helped her eat her food and let her know where all of the things were on her plate.

“At 12 o’clock is your roast pork,” I told her.  I was instructed to use the visualization of a clock to help her out.  “At 3 o’clock are your peas, and your mashed potatoes are at 6 o’clock.  Can I get you anything else?”

“Could I have more coffee, Rob?”

“Of course, Mary Alice,” I said.

“Just a little cream and no sugar.”

My initial contact with Mary Alice was brief, but I gathered that she was a really sweet woman from her polite manners and how soft-spoken she was.  Despite being blind, she was quite capable of eating by herself, and could even walk with the guiding hand of a nurse.

After working in the dining room for a few weeks, I began to get the swing of things.  Upon meeting Mary Alice, I would usually go up to her and tell her that it was me, but one day, I didn’t do that.  I walked up to Mary Alice with a smile and greeted her.

“Hi, Mary Alice,” I said to her.

“Hello, Rob,” she replied.  “I haven’t seen you in a few days.”

“You knew it was me,” I said in surprise.

“I never forget a voice,” she grinned.

As I began reading her the options for lunch, she stopped me and said, “You know something, Rob, I can really hear the smile in your voice.”

Her compliment caught me off guard and made me smile even more.  Hearing Mary Alice say that bolstered my confidence and made me realize the kind of positive energy I exuded when I worked in the dining room.  Those kinds of interactions with Mary Alice were the most rewarding parts of my experience at the nursing home.

As Mary Alice and I became closer, she eventually disclosed to me the story of how she became blind.  She told me that she was an alcoholic, and that she drank so much that she severely damaged her stomach and needed surgery.  As a result, she had a much smaller stomach now and could not eat as much.  Toxins in her body from the drinking and the stomach damage led to her blindness.  She told me that she used to be a terrible person and neglected her family because of her alcoholism.  She was in a dark place.

“You know, Rob,” she began, “I wasn’t always this nice.”

Her frankness always made me smile.  “What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m in an alcoholic, and I used to drink so much and forget about my family.  It was really bad.  I would drink every night, and I would leave my kids alone.  I didn’t like myself very much back then.”

“You are very lovely now, Mary Alice,” I told her.

“Where’s your hand, Rob?” she asked.

I put my hand on hers and she smiled.  She then gripped my hand lightly and said to me, “Do you take good care of your mother?”

“I do,” I told her confidently.  “I love her a lot.”

Mary Alice smiled, and then I left to take care of another resident’s table.  

Even though I was working in the dining room and assisting other residents, I often sat with her after the meal was over and talked.  Over the course of my time there, she talked to me about many things.  She asked me if I pray to God and whether or not I had a girlfriend, and also talked to me about stories from her childhood and life.  She was a great listener, and she would always hold my hand gently while she talked to me.  I told her about my plans to go to college, and she always supported me.  Mary Alice was especially sweet to me and complimented me often.  She said that I was one of the sweetest boys she had ever met.  She made me blush nearly every day.

When I moved to California for college, my friend Kim, with whom I worked at the nursing home, texted me to say that she let Mary Alice know that I was studying in California.  Her health has been more compromised lately and she is only able to eat pureed foods.  Over winter break when I return home to Pittsburgh, I hope to visit Mary Alice and ask how she is doing.  I will never forget the times I spent with this woman, who taught me that seeing a person involves a lot more than looking with one’s eyes.

LIVES

I read through quite a few of the LIVES articles from the NY Times, but I am choosing to write about one titled "No One Told Me Learning Yoga Would Involve Snakes" by Jake Halpern (although another, called "How My Sister Cured My Writer's Block by Helen Sheehy, I found quite beautiful).  In this article, Halpern describes how his family moved to India and how he decided to learn yoga with a man named Suresh.  He also was forced to face his greatest fear:  snakes.

I liked this article because yoga is a big part of my life and the things that Suresh told Halpern are things that I incorporate into my life.  "'Yoga is not some circus routine you do with your body,' he told me. 'It is about aligning the mind, body, breath, intellect, and soul.' It was also, he said, about dying."  For me, yoga has always been about aligning the various aspects that make up me:  body, mind, and soul.

I found Halpern's narrative of India enlightening and fascinating.  I have always wanted to visit and I really enjoyed reading his perspective.  The infused modernity of the situation when a snake-catcher also named Suresh was catching a python at a chicken coop was particularly interesting:  "I spun around briefly and saw — true to the spirit of modern India — that nearly every man, woman and teenager in the village was filming the event on a cellphone, capturing the improbable image of the python, the snake tamer and the terrified white man."  I liked this part because it displays an interesting juxtaposition: a snake tamer and the crowd with their cellphones.  The snake tamer is something we think of being culturally related to India, and the cellphones are modern.  Somewhere in here lies an interesting view on new technology and cultural heritage, and how they are fusing together in our contemporary world.

The most interesting part of Halpern's tale is the ending, where he confronts his fear of snakes:

"Suresh was trying to get the python into a burlap sack, but it was resisting. The snake whipped its head around as if to face me. I focused on my breathing — in and out, in and out — just as I’d practiced in yoga class. For a brief moment — I kid you not — the image of Suresh and the python morphed into the specter of the god Bhairava, with the serpent coiled around his neck.

And then it was over. The python was in the bag; the villagers were clapping. I felt calm.

Very calm."

I found this direct confrontation and the image of Bhairava, the Hindu God/Physical Embodiment of Fright, truly intriguing.  The calmness that overwhelms him afterward is equally fascinating.  It seems like Halpern truly did confront his fear, all while having an interesting spiritual experience, too.  I suppose I liked this article because I'm in love with yoga, I'm fascinated by the divine, and I really want to visit India.

TABULA POETICA feat. C.K. Williams

I am really glad that I decided to go to the Tabulica Poetica event with poet C.K. Williams.  The reading at 7:00PM was extremely nice.  C.K. Williams' reading was captivating and I wrote down the titles of many of the poems he read because I liked them so much.  The refreshments were nice, too.

One poem of his, "Yours", caught my attention in particular.  I admire the way Williams describes certain complex ideas with relatively simple words.  For example, in this poem, Williams writes about one's "proudest life thing".  This simple phrase embodies something so complex, and it got me thinking:  what will my "proudest life thing" be?

Other poems that I enjoyed include:  "Love: Beginnings", "This Happened", "Whacked", "A Little Hymn to Time", and "The Sun, the Saint, the Sought."

No, more than impulse or fancy, the girl knows what she's doing,
the girl means something, the girl means to mean,
because, it occurs to her in that instant, that beautiful or not, bright yes or no,
she's not who she is, she's not the person she is, and the reason, she suddenly knows,
is that there's been so much premeditation where she is, so much plotting and planning,
there's hardly a person where she is, or if there is, it's not her, or not wholly her,
it's a self inhabited, lived in by her, and seemingly even as she thinks it
she knows what's been missing: grace, not premeditation but grace,
a kind of being in the world spontaneously, with grace.

-excerpt from "This Happened" by C.K. Williams

I actually ended up liking this Tabula Poetica event so much that I think I will go to more of them :)

Abby & the Sea

 When Abby was a little girl, she reveled without a care, and mystery and adventure could only excite her.  She took utmost delight in life and felt like an explorer wherever she went.  Every summer for six weeks, her parents took her on vacation to Lake Erie.  Those six weeks were always her most favorite time of the year, even more than Christmas.  The drive to Lake Erie from her home in Pittsburgh always took a very long time, but Abby liked to sleep during the long car rides.  The lake was vast and had many beaches.  When Abby looked out from the shore, she couldn’t even see the other end, and therefore, she always thought she was gazing upon the sea.

            Lake Erie was fun, particularly when the summer days in August would get so hot.  Abby would run down to the beach and roll around playfully in the gentle waves.  She would run back to her father, giggling and covered with sand.  Her mother would comb her long, blonde hair and take her over to the showering station to get all the sand off.  After playing at the beach, they would all head over to a small concession stand to get shaved ice.  Abby always got the rainbow kind because rainbows were her favorite.

            To young Abby, there was no such thing as feeling the weight of the world.  Those vacations at the lake were comprised of building castles in the sand along the beaches and endless swimming.  Lake Erie was enormous, and it fed Abby’s wild imagination with fantasies and stories that she would tell her parents.

            One time she ran up to her mother, concealing something in between her two tiny hands.

            “Guess what I got!” she shouted.

            Her mother was fond of her playful imagination and responded with a smile, “What could it be, Princess Abby?”

            Abby smiled and slowly unveiled what she was holding in her hands.  There, nestled in some wet sand, was a tiny snail shell scintillating in the sunlight.  “It’s a birthday gift from the mermaids!”

            “Why that’s quite wonderful!” she exclaimed.  “Did they ask how old you were?”

            Abby nodded and held up six fingers.  “Where’s Daddy?”

            “He went on a business trip, honey.”

            “But it’s vacation!”

            Her mother laughed and picked Abby up into her lap.  She brushed the hair away from her swollen eye and looked at her daughter with a sense of pride and mystic wonder.  Abby looked up to her mother and touched her eye.

            “What’s wrong with your eye, Mommy?” she asked.  “Why are you crying?”

            “Because I love you, birthday girl.”

            Abby’s mother couldn’t tell her child what had transpired in the hotel room earlier that morning while Abby was asleep.  But Abby knew.  She had seen her father during his violent streaks from behind the couch in the living room.  She knew what he was capable of doing.  She heard the abusive words and threats that were targeted at her mother.  Abby knew.

            She didn’t make sense of a world that was so at war with itself, so she imagined a wonderful land across The Great Sea where the beaches had glitter for sand.  In Abby’s Kingdom, she was a beautiful princess, and all of the people in her Kingdom were talking animals.  She reigned over them with kindness and never did them any harm.  One time, when a begging mouse came up to her and asked for food, she invited him over for a grand feast where they ate in a house that looked like a giant picnic basket.

            When the summer was over, Abby hated going back home to the city, but she knew she would always come back.  She especially hated saying goodbye to her people.  The mice and deer and ducks all cried with big tears as they waved goodbye to their Princess with the bright blue eyes.  One particular summer, Abby waved goodbye to The Great Sea, telling her people how she looked forward to seeing them next year.  She always saw them next year.

That winter, Abby’s parents decided that they were officially separating, but Abby did not know what that meant.  She listened with her ear up against the door while her parents argued.  She heard the word “divorce” and it sounded scary like a monster, and she wanted to talk about defeating The Divorce with her people of the Kingdom.  But Abby would be alone this time.  The Divorce meant she would not be returning to The Great Sea next summer. Abby would not return to The Great Sea for nearly ten years.

When Abby turned ten years old, her parents officially separated and she lived with her mother.  As she grew up, her mother was plagued by loneliness and began to drink heavily.  She didn’t see much of her father, but sometimes he would come back to Pittsburgh for weekend visits.  Abby felt very much alone and missed going to the lake.  She had a hard time making friends in school.  They would call her weird because she was always writing in her notebook.  Sometimes they would steal the pages and rip them up.  This made Abby cry.

            When Abby got older and was in high school, she started to hang out with the wrong kind of people.  She was dressed in all black:  a black cut-off shirt, black jeans, black shoes, black eyeliner, and black nail polish.  On her left shoulder, she bore a tattoo of a compass, symbolically guiding her toward her dreams and leading her heart in her adventures.  On her right arm, she had even more tattoos; three seagulls flew on her flesh adjacent to a bracelet composed of seashells.  The seabirds seemed almost animate, as if they were ready to take flight off her body into the sky.  Finally, there were two anchors tattooed onto each of her ankles.  They kept her grounded.

            But Abby no longer felt grounded, and she felt like her dreams were trash and her heart misguided.  She went by Abigail now, and she smoked cigarettes and thought about her life.  Her parents had separated more than ten years ago, but the consequences of her father’s infidelity showed up in her mother’s drunkenness.  She didn’t know where her father was.  She barely remembered his face, let alone the times they had shared at the lake.

When Abigail’s friend Judy learned that she had developed depression and a life-threatening eating disorder, Judy vowed to take Abigail to Lake Erie for a few weeks in the summer.  Judy and Abigail had stopped talking since she started wearing black and hanging out with the wrong crowd.  Abigail wanted to invite the guys she knew, and she wanted to bring along vodka and marijuana, but Judy refused to take any of that stuff with them.

            “This is our trip, Abby,” Judy said.  “Just you and me.”

            “I just want to have a little fun.”

            Judy still called her Abby because they grew up together.  She understood Abby.  She knew what had been going on in her life.

            When Abigail and Judy got to the lake, Abigail took a deep breath.  The aroma instantly took her back to when she was young, and she couldn’t help but smile.  The lake was gorgeous and it looked the same as she had remembered it.  Abigail giggled to herself as she remembered the fantasies she used to think of when she played at the lake as a young girl.

The two decided to take a canoe that rested near the shore for a trip.  They hopped in the yellow canoe and set out while the sun was high.  Abigail rowed and rowed.  They rowed for what seemed like forever.  They rowed passionately.  Judy watched Abigail carefully.  The smile never left her face.

When they finally reached the other side of the lake that was known as The Great Sea, Abigail had remembered her Kingdom.  The talking animals there shouted and cheered for her, welcoming back the Princess who had been gone for so long.  The mermaids brought her beautiful and exquisite shells as presents, and the begging mouse who had once asked her for food was now quite fat and had a beautiful family.

            Late that night, when Abigail and Judy returned from their long trip on the water, Abigail turned on the desk lamp in the hotel at which they were staying.  Ever since she played into the fantasies of her imagination as a little girl, she loved storytelling.  She wanted to be a writer.  She penned in her notebook in sloppy handwriting:  “Life is short and sometimes tragic, but I vow to never forget that magic.”

Nabokov's "Symbols and Signs"

I found this story to be intriguing because I felt like Nabokov was leading up to the climax of the story. Would the couple's son commit suicide with success?  Would they get him out of the sanitarium?  What was going to happen?  All of this rising action and suspense leaves the reader with a rather shocking conclusion:  the phone rang twice and both times it was a girl looking for a boy named Charlie.  The phone rings a third time and the story ends.

While I feel like I could delve into many possibilities and play with numerous explanations for the story, I wish to focus on Nabokov's style of writing.  Throughout the story, Nabokov gives great detail in just a few pages that lends the reader insight to these characters' lives and their surroundings.  From the opening sentence alone, I was immediately intrigued and excited to read on.  Nabokov excellently portrays a sense of mystery:  "For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind." Who is this young man? What incurable derangement of the mind is he suffering?  This kind of sentence is artful and persuasive in that it immediately hooks the reader in.

Nabokov's skill for writing becomes immediately apparent when he describes the illness the son suffers, a disease called referential mania.  "With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being."  Instead of simply stating that referential mania is a mental disorder in which the sufferer believes that everything around him is telling him something, Nabokov writes these beautiful sentences to explain how the son thinks.  The idea that "the great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up ... the ultimate truth of his being" gives greater impact to the disorder and gives the reader a concise image of what the son experiences.

Characterization throughout the story was strong.  I found the description of Mrs. Sol to be quite depictive:  "... Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers."  From this sentence alone, I could easily imagine this woman. The "cluster of brookside flowers" is an interesting image that conveys much about this woman's personality, even if she is just a side-character in this story.