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Wednesday, January 29
aw thanks. *blush*
Giorgie 6:54:00 PM
Monday, January 27
i like your essay. the end paragraph does need work though. the last line confuses me a little, just because i feel like it's redundent. because the way life should have been is the same as the way life should be. or at least that's how i read it. i think you should go into how it's not possible to know what maine's really all about, coz it's only touched on slightly and i think that's an interesting and strong point.
i think i smell dirty.
Maria 1:05:00 AM
Sunday, January 26
ah love it!!!
hey guys tell me what you think of my essay. its for a scholarship. and i hate it (the essay, notsomuch the concept of free money). i want to kick myself for writing it, becuase its so dorky and stupid. and the last paragraph really sucks. give me advice on how to end the damn thing. because i cant. and im tired. (hee).
might i add that the topic of the essay was to write about "maine the way life should be", or about an "adventure" i've taken, and under no other circumstances would i have written about either.
might i also add that this is mostly ficticious. in real life, there was an acid field, but i didnt dare touch it. and when we moved to maine, it wasnt the first time i'd ever been in the state. so i'm a l-i-a-r. tim o'brien wouldn't care.
and sorry it's so long. just skim it if you get bored.
The Way Life Shoulda Been
by L-Rod Rodriguez
The sign is off the highway, shortly after crossing the green bridge. We must have passed it at night the first time, when the unfamiliar trees looked black rather than green. The sign probably illuminated for a brief moment in our headlights. I bet my mom exclaimed and read the slogan out loud – “the way life should be”. Maybe as she read, it woke my brother up, or maybe he continued sleeping straight on until Bangor, exit fourty eight, our new stop. This was the furthest north I had ever been; people back home had stressed “way north” and nodded curiously, with some notion of Bangor as being some netherworld of ice and snow. This was also my longest car ride to date, way longer than the four hour trip to Grandma’s. The night made the dark road seem endless. Mom and Dad probably tried to pick up the New York am radio stations we had once so easily received, and as the sounds faded into thick static and the long road became straighter and straighter, we inched towards our new home.
It was only Connecticut we left, but in my mind the old home seemed much further away. Connecticut represents bare, white forests of birch trees in the winter; trench coated men who drive their Mercedes to work; cities like Bridgeport with dark hulky buildings surrounded by smoke; the faces of the older kids in my neighborhood; my role as the Ugly Duckling in kindergarten. I never saw the ocean while living there, despite the miles of coastline. Maine is all ocean. Even far off from the coast, Maine is like a tidal pool. It catches the sun like a mirror and it teems with invisible life.
The field was an ocean, muddy and cold. I smiled up at the other girls. A few hours earlier, they had introduced themselves to me and I stammered to register new faces with names like “Stephanie” and “Amy”, the same names of my old friends. Now as we aimlessly ambled through this squishy field, I listened to them chat about boyfriends and jokes. I wanted to join in, but all I could think about was the mud. It smelled fresh enough, but it wasn’t really what I expected of Maine. I wanted Maine to be mysterious. I wanted to live in a shack made out of faded drift-wood on top of a sandy hill with pine trees on one side, the ocean on the other, and lobster abound. Now that I was there, Maine felt like practically anywhere, and yet there I was standing with these girls who were entirely unique to anybody I had ever met. Nobody in Connecticut traversed through mud unless there was a good reason for it- and no fourth grader I knew back home had ever had a boyfriend, either.
A girl named Lindsay stopped walking and squatted down near the muck- “See here guys? This is acid.” We stared. True, the pigment of the dirt was a little more tannish, even rustier, than the rest of the area. The other girls started chiming in, saying they heard the janitor dumped battery acid into the field, and that the mud would fry your skin just to touch it. The wet clumps of earth began to bubble before my eyes. I stared harder. No dandelions or grass had even attempted to grow in this red patch of mud. It smelled bad too- downright poisonous. The girls formed a casual circle around the area and most of them looked at me. I began to realize what this was- a farce! Slowly, cautiously, because I didn’t want this guess to be wrong, I knelt down and pressed my palms flat against the cold, wet ground. It was like sticking my hands in a tidal pool, not being sure whether the tadpoles would bite or if the algae was really alive.
The girls probably looked at me with confusion. Maybe they secretly felt bad I hadn’t been duped. It was my first real day in Maine and I was getting dirty. That first day was the hinge of the door; once I started living past the “the way life should be” sign on the highway. But it’s funny how people forget that second sign on the highway, for I was also past that other, somewhat perplexing sign that proclaimed “if your business was here, you’d be home by now.” That’s the thing with Maine, you never know what it’s really all about. It’s calm, but sometimes little teemings of life bubble up to the surface. Is it the place where the way life should be, or maybe just the way life should have been?
Giorgie 10:50:00 PM
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