Post by B-r-e-z-e--->> on May 3, 2009 13:52:52 GMT -5
So, for my homework, I had to do a project on the speech by Shakespeare, The World is a stage. It's about the life of humans and how typical it is, I guess. Anyways, for my project I decided to do a creative writing on it from first person and this is what I came up with.
It's written from the point of view from a boy who grows up in the country. He becomes a hot-shot lawyer and forgets his family. Finally, he returns to his hometown and realizes he lost everything. It's depressing, but good.
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It's written from the point of view from a boy who grows up in the country. He becomes a hot-shot lawyer and forgets his family. Finally, he returns to his hometown and realizes he lost everything. It's depressing, but good.
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I was born on the porch of a two-story country home surrounded by a mixture of wood and farmland. It was pleasant most of the time, but when I was born it was lightly raining. Some say that’s a bad omen, but Mama says that it was extraordinarily pretty that Saturday morning.
In the mornings Mama would always take me out of my white cradle with its peeling paint and bring me down to the kitchen. She’d put me in my highchair and I’d watch at as early as five ‘o clock in the morning as she’d begin cooking the meals for the day.
I was carried almost everywhere and didn’t begin walking until I was two. Papa said I was a slow-wit, but I just enjoyed being waited on. Eventually, though, my cradle turned into a bed, and Mama didn’t carry me anymore. I had to walk down the stairs all by myself. The highchair went to and I was forced to pull myself up on the big-boy chair and eat on the table (with the help of a couple pillows).
The advantage to not being carried is that I could do what I wanted. As soon as dinner ended I would run outside and dance in the wood or go to the barn and play with the horses, cows, and chickens. Mama would call me back home, but I wouldn’t come until Papa came and carried me away. Carrying became a bad thing and I began to wonder why I had ever liked it.
Mama and Papa must’ve decided that because I was so eager to leave the house they’d send me to a place called school. My older brother said it was a wicked place where they ate six year olds like me, and I grew scared of it.
That first hot August morning I was shaking so much in my shoes I didn’t know how I was managing to walk down our long driveway to the bus stop at the end. Our driveway was at least a mile long and my brother made sure to fill me in on how not to get eaten by the evil monsters called teachers. Too soon, though, we had reached the end and my brother told me that there were thousands more ways to avoid becoming the dinner food, but I’d just have to fend for myself that day with the knowledge he’d already told me.
When I got to school I was led away by a woman who looked like my grandma, with her white hair and wrinkled face. She seemed kind and led me, along with a bunch of other children my age, down several hallways and then into a medium sized room with four large, circular tables. We were instructed to sit down, and we obeyed, although I was on the look out for the monster teachers.
The woman called herself Mrs. Horn, even though she sounded more like a soft whistle than anything else, let alone something as loud as a horn. Then, she said she was a teacher. My head immediately snapped towards her, my eyes wide with alarm. I couldn’t come to believe that Mrs. Horn was a monster, but I kept my mouth shut, for that was the first thing that brother had advised. You never talked to a monster unless called upon or asked a question. I was as quiet as a mouse.
By the end of the semester I was Mrs. Horn’s favorite student. She let me in on a lot of her monster secrets, but she never did tell me how she cooked her students. Student was just another word for victim in teacher language. She called me her star pupil, though, so I decided that I was safe.
Mrs. Horn became Mr. Wyatt, and then Ms. Kay. Ms. Kay was replaced by Ms. Rabby, and from her Mrs. Hoot, then finally Mr. Rotcher. After that, I went onto a different school altogether, and by then a lot of things had changed. I no longer trusted my brother, for one.
At the new school I had several different teachers and far more homework. Everything flipped. I was no longer my teachers’ favorite, and no matter how quiet I was, it didn’t stop them from calling on me when I wasn’t ready to give an answer or from noticing when I whispered something in my neighbors ear.
One day something amazing happened. I saw her. Sandy Cheeksmore, the prettiest girl I had ever seen, moved to my humble town and was enrolled in my homeroom. It turned out that she was in all my classes, and if it was for better or for worse I never did find out. I was too busy staring at her honey colored locks.
I, one Friday afternoon in May, decided that it was time to act. I found Sandy walking home after school, her backpack weighing down with at least three textbooks. I ran up to her and offered to take her bag, just as a gentleman would do. She handed it over with grateful relief, and that’s when I asked. I told her that she was as beautiful as a goddess with her wavy hair, freckles, and dusty brown eyes. I ventured if she would like to come to my house sometime, even. Always the glib talker, I didn’t even stutter. She laughed and agreed.
I was back at my house before I realized that I had never given back her backpack. I trekked all the way down the mountain to her house to give it back. I was an hour late for dinner, but I didn’t mind at all. Not even my aching shoulders could beat me down. I was seeing Sandy that weekend. The planets must have been perfectly aligned for such euphoria to erupt in me.
That Sunday, Sandy came home with me after church. We took off our stiff shoes and took shortcuts home. We ran through cornfields and waded through streams; we climbed trees and lied in the grass for what seemed like decades. Eventually we came to my neck of the wood and I realized that our shortcut had a delayed us by about two hours.
The sun was setting and we decided to make a pact before I returned Sandy back to her farm. I took her behind the barn where I used to play with the horses, cows, and chickens, to where there stood a great Willow Tree. That’s where I kissed her.
We engraved our names in the gnarled bark with my pocket knife and I carved a heart around it. We returned to that spot every Sunday after church until junior year in high school when we eventually broke up. Sandy was moving again, and we convinced each other with ill poetry and many tears that we would always be friends. We lost touch with each other when I went to college.
I went to the nearest city and went to the state university there. I got a job as a waiter and began to make money that didn’t come from chores around the house or by helping the manager of the general store back home clean his store. This was money from strangers for doing unfamiliar work. I got better at it, though, and by the end of college I was the manager. It had taken four years, but I had gotten there. I realized that with hard work and time, I could go anywhere.
I got into Georgetown University Law School. This new place was very different than what I’d thought to be a city and expanses bigger than the town I’d grown up in. Law school served to be one of my toughest obstacles, but I got through it with marks never too low, but never too high either. I was average, but I was still a lawyer.
This proved to be the best decision of my life it seemed. Money started pouring in by the hundreds at first. It shifted to the thousands and I realized I was lucky indeed. I would have told my parents, but they didn’t have electricity, let alone a phone. As for my brother, he didn’t understand the power of money, and whenever I tried to talk to him about my salary he’d hang up.
I was no longer the young country boy I once was. My brown hair had become striped with gray, and no matter how hard I tried I could never quite shave all of my whiskers off. Being fifty was quite the hassle. In my booming career I had lost contact with my brother, and barely thought of him. I couldn’t even remember what the old wood looked like.
One night I got a call from brother. I almost didn’t pick up, for I had grown bitter, especially to those I was, or had been, close to. For some reason, though, I did. What he said took the breath right out of my lungs and when I exhaled into the phone it seemed to be stale, the type of air that’s in a tomb. Mama had passed away.
My hometown had changed a lot. There was a whole new section of town where fast food restaurants flocked outside of a newly built highway. The road up to my home was the same, though. Nothing had changed there. The woods were still there and the barn still had horses, cows, and chickens in it. Papa worked the corn fields, even at the age of eighty-five, maybe this time, though, a little sad. It seemed like I was going back to happier times. The world was so much simpler back then.
The funeral was at the church. All twenty-five citizens of the town were there to mourn with us, for they were just as close as Papa, brother, or I had been to Mama; perhaps closer.
I returned to Los Angeles, the new place I lived, as soon as the funeral was over. However, it was only a month later that I got another dreaded phone call. After Mama’s death, Papa had been working as hard as he could, for it was harvesting season, and it was the only way he could subdue his grief. He had a heart attack in the middle of the cornfield. The town was so spread out, the good country folk didn’t find out until maybe a few days later; maybe a week. His body was already being picked at by crows and beginning to rot. Brother and I decided that we would cremate him and spread his ashes over Mama’s grave.
After the memorial service, we came to the question that had sat between us like a fidgety child. Who would take the farm? We searched the house and found Papa’s will in the back of the pantry behind a dusty cookie jug. It gave the farm to Brother. Brother said he didn’t want it, though, and gave it to me. I had nothing to do with it, though. I sold it. I was resourceful and would use any opportunity to get more money.
I was getting older, and around seventy, I decided it was time for me to retire. I had plenty of money, for I’d never had a family and had always been on the frugal side. I decided that I wanted to move back to my hometown. I did.
The business I had sold my old farm to had developed it. My farm had had been followed by several other neighbors’ farms. The town had changed from homey country to endless suburbia. The cemetery Mama and Papa now rested in was behind a new church that was as big as three houses and made of red brick. The dirt road up to the farm was demolished, replaced by a concrete one that forked in several different directions.
I found a house where I figured my old barn had stood. I bought it and settled down. I stayed in my house most of the time and only went out occasionally. When I went out, I searched for the Willow Tree that had stood behind the barn. I never did find it.
Twenty years later my eyes had given away to blindness, and my hearing had depleted severely. I needed dentures and had to have a cane to walk. Still, I looked for the Willow, feeling the bark of trees to try and see if I could find the familiar heart shape and initials that I myself had carved. I guess that love really never lasted, and neither did the tree as well as my childhood home. Money meant nothing when you were as old as me, and now my career seemed a waste of time. I didn’t even have a family anymore. Brother had died ten years ago. I had lost everything, and now I could only wish for the grim hand of death to claim me, for I had nothing left to lose.