On the Road Post #1

Learning how to actively read the novels for this class has been somewhat of challenge for me. Admittedly, I am much more comfortable following the storyline of a fictional book. I believe that the the lack of constraints in a fictional format allows authors to take care of their reader a bit better. Instead of reviewing this book like I did for “Growing a Farmer”--critiquing and analyzing each successive section-- I have chosen to write about sections that I found particularly interesting.

I enjoyed her animated description of her childhood; reminiscing about learning to read from road signs and learning from her family how to take care of herself outside of the confines of a conventional childhood. Her predictably tangential narration actually yielded some really insightful observations. For example, she spoke about how movie theaters and malted shakes allowed her to briefly escape her great-depression era childhood. She then uses this to talk about something I have thought about a great deal, our need for distraction as humans. It is extremely difficult especially in this age of social media and technology to be truly alone. I connected to her childhood experience of being buried in books constantly. I spent countless hours from elementary school to high school, preferring to read the books off the library shelves, losing myself in the stories like she did on the road.

I appreciated her honesty in describing the nuances of her childhood. She described the benefits of living as a child of the road-- being able to buy her own clothes, allowed to have her dessert even if she didn’t finish her dinner and being raised by a caring father that valued her opinions. When her father dies she is able to reflect a great deal on the benefits of being raised in the fashion that she was, even if she seemed to resent it at the time. She was able to avoid bad partners in her words, “because of my father only kindness felt like home.”  However, she also recalled experiences in her childhood that were no less important, like her constant underlying desire for a conventional home to be like “any other kid.” Also selling used jewelry across the country while she could’ve been in school also is less than ideal.

As she talks more about her travels she talks about her lack of driver’s license and why she chooses to remain without one; although the examples she uses to demonstrate this point are a little outdated with the use of taxis the idea made sense to me. Her reasoning for traveling with taxis rather than by herself in a car seemed to follow along the lines of her yearning for adventure and desire to learn more about the world. She describes a post 9-11 cab ride where she saw graffiti around NYC with the message “our grief is not a cry for war,” something that intuitively made sense to me, but I had never heard a story of this sediment from New Yorkers about going to war with Iraq. She also talked about the characters she met from a transgender Mormon cab driver to a racist Ukrainian cab driver.

The last thing that I noted in the story for use in this blog post was her interaction with a young cab driver. She talks to this young man who explains that he is abstaining from all media; movies, tv and otherwise in an attempt to strip some of the lenses that he typically sees the world through away. I thought the idea of trying to see the world through your own eyes was really profound. I think continuing to form our own opinions and values is really important.