2.3 – Courage and Honesty
Read at least 3 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find. Post this list on your blog.
I handled the previous assignment with enough creativity to sidestep honesty and openness. My classmates, however, did not. They were brutal, they were raw, and they didn’t hold back the truths that illustrated what home meant to them. I used metaphors and illusions and they used experience and story. I did not, for example, expect to find Hannah’s openness:
It began in Abbotsford in September 1993. Actually, it began 4 months earlier when my dad did not replace the turn signal and a semi-truck hit the Volkswagen Golf belonging to my soon to be family. The accident left my mom bedridden. My parents marriage begun to crumble as violently as the car had been destroyed. I don’t remember these years. Most of my memories are blank until about two or three years old. I have images of home, our little bungalow on a half acre lot. It was nothing fancy or elaborate, but it was home during they day, until my Dad got home from work and the screaming and yelling would start. I remember sitting on the picnic table and my mom was blank (later I learned she was disassociating) and she took of her wedding ring.
That’s one hell of a short story. Reading through other posts showed the diversity of our experiences. Kevin’s chronological account, for example, gave insight into how we can overcomplicate simple questions. For example, his answer to the question “Where is Home?”:
“Easy. It’s where I live.”
Stewart approached the assignment similar to me and took liberty with the term “short story”:
The trio, considering this for a moment, asked the old woman “Would you like us to help you look for your home?” To which the old woman grinned once again and said, “I think, perhaps, I’ve already found one.”
The most interesting part of our choice was that Stewart and I both chose to be narrators of a fictional story rather than tell a personal story from a first-person perspective. This, I think, reveals a lot about a person’s willingness and ability to deal with what they call home.
List of common shared values:
Community – The sense of relationship throughout the breadth of articles was ubiquitous.
Escape – In the stories with a troubled home, the common denominator was a desire to find a new home.
Belonging – Perhaps the most obvious undertone, the stories people told always had the desire to belong somewhere.