Blog Post 180-270

Dear Reader,

I’ve had it with the dad.  I’m done.  I quit.  I’m sick of trying to defend him mentally, to think of it from his perspective.  The poor family would be better off with him dead.  It’s against the rules to divorce, but if he died, then surely she could remarry!!  I just find it so unfair!  She didn’t even want to marry the old bum; she was forced to!  He needs to get his alcohol addiction under control.  It’s ruining him, and it’s ruining the people around him.  I’m sorry if this paragraph lacks structure, or anything like that.  This is just more of a rant.  It made me sick when he went off to England and drank the money.  I felt even worse, however, when he drank the money for the new baby.  That was too much.  My heart broke when he was in confession and told the priest, “‘Because she sent me out looking for my father in the pubs, Father, and I couldn’t find him and she hasn’t a scrap in the house because he’s drinking the five pounds Grandpa sent from the North for the new baby and she’s raging by the fire because I can’t find my father.’”  (185).  It’s the worst.  I hope it somehow gets better for them, but I doubt it will. 

            So to go with their father being pointless, I was really happy when he got the job working with Mr. Hannon.  He finally felt like a grown man.  But more than this, he was making money, some of which he gave to his mother.  They desperately needed money.  He felt like a man, bringing home the day’s salary.  I don’t know how to describe how I felt when he did this.  It seemed to me that in the absence of a decent father, he felt as though there was extra weight needed for him to pull.  To him, there was a deed to be done that needed doing, and he did it.   Or at least, he was starting to.  And the pathetic bit is, it’s true.  They needed money, and their father wasn’t going to do anything about it.  When he lost it, he cried, and thought to himself, “…This was my one chance to be a man and bring home the money the telegram boy never brought from my father.”  (265).  I feel sad to think of that poor boy and his poor eyes.  I’ve had pink eye (no where near as severely as he did) and it’s not any fun.  It’s miserable.  They’re miserable. 

            The medical advances that we’ve made astound me.  It is WWII in the book, and it took him months to recover from typhoid.  It takes about a week to one month now, with antibiotics.  That’s only 70 years, that’s crazy!  Yet, I think he’s lucky to have spent so much time in the hospital.  I think that it was his being in there that inspired his writing career.  He read books to pass the time.  With nothing else to do, he grew to love it.  In order to write, you need to be able to read.  Without that, poor Frank may have not become the writer he is today.  It gave him a sense of hope and protection, “I can dream about the red-lipped landlord’s daughter and the highwayman, and the nurses and nuns can do nothing about it.  It’s lovely to know the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head.”  (202).  In my opinion, he deserved it.  Do you think that it helped him love writing?  Or that it expanded his imagination?  The stories his dad used to tell when sober, those probably helped too.  All of these things, without them, he would have been in a much different (probably worse) situation. 

Sincerely, 
Emily