Friday, September 14, 2007

Retrospective Review

It's been one hell of a week and I am tired tonight but for some reason I just cannot wind down. I've almost finished my latest book in this new reading thing I'm doing. Reading, reading, reading. When I finish Into the Wild there are four more books waiting to take it's place in my hands at night. This has been an interesting book. The first two thirds of it moved along nicely, as the strange story about an even stranger youth unraveled. The kid walks away from college graduation at Emory University and instead of taking his twenty four grand and going to law school he decides to hitch hike and live off the land and what few people he meets along the way. For the next two years he does this until he decides to culminate his adventures in Alaska one summer. But then he starves to death. His poor family hadn't heard from him one time since college graduation. What a tragedy, although I have to say I work with this age group and have for years now and I can totally see how impassioned he was and how some people just aren't cut out to fit the mold of modern society. He obviously wasn't out to die, but that is the folly of the extreme stubborn youth I suppose. So this book was sort of depressing. Maybe that's why I'm having trouble sleeping tonight -- because this story is hard to put down and hard to leave. I wanted things to turn out differently but of course they do not. I understand that there is a movie coming about him. Check the book out if you'd like, it's slow in two sections but other than that it's good and logical story-telling.
Reading a book like this makes me even more determined to be a good mother to Sarah. Not to say that this guy's parents were bad, not the case at all. I just want our lines of communication to always be open, no matter how old she gets or how far away she lives. I'd die if I had to go two years without knowing her whereabouts or her condition only to get that call one night that she was no more. I'd just evaporate. I feel totally sorry for his parents. They had a son who had a complete mind of his own and would not stand to reason.
So here I am. I guess I'll lie down and stare at the ceiling for a while through the darkness, listen to the buzz of the box fan that I insist on having nearby, and wonder why some people do the things they do, including myself.

1 comment:

Joy Floyd said...

I have a lot of those nights too; where you stare at the ceiling and think about all the choices you made and the mistakes your still making. I can work myself into a total frenzy in a matter of minutes, but luckily I too have a noisy box fan that runs year round to help lull me to sleep and drown out the sound of a dozen dogs barking at the cat because he needed to get up out of his bed in the barn and take a leak at 3:00am.