Afterglow

                                                                     Afterglow

I’d like the memory of me
to be a happy one,
I’d like to leave an afterglow
of smiles when life is done.
I’d like to leave an echo
whispering softly down the ways,
of happy times and laughing times
and bright and sunny days.
I’d like the tears of those who grieve,
to dry before the sun of happy memories
that I leave behind when day is done.

Authors Note: I am doing a text analysis on the poem “Afterglow” by “Helen Lowrie Marshall”. I will be comparing it to the movie “My Sisters Keeper”.

In the first two lines of this poem already sets the scene of wanting people who care about you to carry all the good memories that they had with you, and not think about the bad ones. Whenever someone leaves in any sort of way you try to remember them by good things. By these lines you don’t know whether the good memories with them will continue or whether they are stopping for good, either way they just want the reader to remember the good times they spent with one another to make them happy.

Later on in the poem it is saying that they want to leave behind good thoughts and leave peacefully when their life is done. No matter what happened they want people to think of them and be happy that they had this person in their lives, even if it was only meant. They don’t want people to be sad that they are gone, they want them to be happy that they were once there. They don’t want to be thought of as gone they want the memories of them keep them alive.

Like in the Movie “My Sisters Keeper” Anna, the younger sister of Kate who has cancer. And through her cancer, Anna was always there through everything and they would have fun all the time even though she was sick. Anna was Kate’s donor, so if Kate needed something they would take it from Anna’s body and put it in Kate’s. This poem relates to this movie because in the end Kate is ready to die and she is okay with it. Her mother wants to keep fighting the cancer though. Kate has to convince her mother to let her go. So like how the poem says they don’t want the people they love to be sad about them leaving, Kate wants her mom to set her free.

This poem tells you to be happy even when they are gone, but obviously no one is going to be happy, they will always be sad. No one wants to see someone they love to leave forever, but sometimes it’s better to let go of them and hold on to the memories with them. They always want them to be there with them through everything. It might hurt at the thought of them being gone, but no matter what their memories will live on forever. 

Unwanted

"He's lonely. I'm not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me." Was a important quote, because the young waiter was just not caring about the old man and his problems and just focused on his and his life, not thinking about how the old man is feeling or that there might be something going on in his life that he as a young person might not know much about his situation or what he has been through in his life.  "Last week he tried to commit suicide," this is another important quote because this kind of explains why the old man is always at the bar. He is there to get away from his life, he clearly isn’t happy with it so he just drinks so he can feel free of worries and pain. "You should have killed yourself last week," this quote is rude and sad, the young waiter is suggesting that along with the old mad he doesn’t think the old man’s life is worth living either. Even if the old man didn’t know that he said that, if he did he would feel even more worthless and unwanted and unloved by even more people.

Between the video remake of the story, I thought that the video made more sense and really made the story look good, it had very good reenactments of the sense in the story. The music in the beginning didn’t really fit with what was going on, but in the end it fit perfectly because it was kind of a sad feeling and it just set the mood of the whole moral of the story. How they described the setting in the story fit very well in the video, like the well lit place and how nice it was in the diner and then the unclean dark bar in the end. 

Nightmares

Authors Note: I wrote a essay on the book Blue is for Nightmares by Laurie Faria Stolarz, I talked about how the two main characters in this book relate to people in or society and where they would fit in. 

Imagine you are engulfed into the dark night, the sky is clear, the light from the moon shines on you like a spotlight. The trees closing in all around you, sharp sticks scratching at your sides. You hear a familiar scream from your best friend and try to follow where it is coming from, but it seems to be coming from everywhere you turn. The ground, wet and squishy, gets harder to run;  everywhere you go the screams fade further away. You hear footsteps right behind you, but there is no one in sight. They whisper your name, you turn around and see a figure and right then you wake up; everything is fine. You’re in bed, safe. In our society when something like this happens it is just a bad dream but for Stacy, her nightmares reflect on a event that will happen in her life. 

This was a regular nightmare that was reoccurring for Stacy in the book Blue is for Nightmares by Laurie Faria Stolarz. To start off Stacy was average, she wasn’t the most pretty or the most popular girl, but something different about her was her dreams and how real they were, especially when things start to happen in her life that she recognizes from her dreams. Drea, Stacy’s best friend acted as a normal teenage girl, she was obsessed with one boy, she was very pretty, and always tries to look her best. They have a good friendship, like anyone else’s in our society. They help each other through problems and always trust each other. Then something happens that turns their normal days into a sketchy game.

The concept of this story is pretty unusual, they are both at a boarding school and Drea starts getting weird phone calls that were restricted and they other things started happening that no one had a answer to. They refused to talk to the police about it so they kept it to themselves. Everyone was a suspect, but at the same time they thought they were innocent. If this type of thing happened in our society people would call the police right away and report the problem and get it fixed. Not try to handle this kind of problem by yourself. 

If Stacy was in our society she would be kind of a outcast because she did spells and believed in supernatural things like that. On the other hand Drea would be a normal girl, pretty and funny. A regular high school girl. In both cases there are people like them in the real world. There are all kinds of people that are just like them. Like Stacy, she isn’t weird. She just has a different point of view on things in the world and has different ways of solving or figuring out problems. Drea just goes along with it because she trusts Stacy to help her.  

There are people just like them in our lives, they fit in their own parts in society. They might not have the same situations happen to them, but there are people who believe in the same things they do. They are different in their own way but they would still fit in society with the rest of people. People in our society might react to the things they went through differently but other things the same.

The Ransom of Red Chief

In the story The Ransom of Red Chief  I thought the most important quote was "bring Johnny home and pay me two hundred and fifty dollars in cash". This is what the letter said from the father when they said in order for the father to get his son back he had to pay them two thousand dollars. After realizing that the boy was irritating and they couldn't put up with him anymore they decided to go along with the fathers request and take him back home and pay his father to get the boy off their hands.