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Ryan DeLuca
Feb 24th, 2019
ENG 123
Dr. Drown
I Just Wanna Be Average – Prewriting 1
The kind of child hood Rose had seems to be the kind of child hood any kid would have if their parents were scrambling for money. His child hood family contains his mother and father and a few people who live in the same house as him, he has a close relationship with his father. He frequently talks about how him and his father go to a restaurant named Freddie’s to get something to eat before going to a bowling ally to play games while his father has a few drinks at the bar. He also mentions how he tried to cheer his father up when he was sick, “I began devising child’s ways to make him better. We had a box of rolled cotton in the bathroom, and I would go in and peel off a long strip and tape it around my jaw. Then I’d rummage through the closet, find a sweater of my father’s put one of his hats—and sneak around to the back door.” He tried his best to cheer his father up when he wasn’t feeling well by doing what children do best, dressing up in a costume and sneaking around. Some dangers he would occasionally encounter include criminals running from the police and throwing contraband on his lawn, “ One night I watched as a guy sprinted from Walt’s to toss something on out lawn. The police were right behind, and a cop tackled him, smashing his face into the side walk.” Another danger Rose encounter was, a man named Carman, he lived directly south of Rose house next to a barber, Carmon sounds like a crazy man, “Carman was a short, quiet Italian who, rumor had it, had committed his first wife to the crazy house to get her money. In the afternoons, Carman could be found in the lot behind his shop playing solitary catch, flinging a tennis ball high in to the air and running under it. One day police arrested Carman on charges of child molestation.” The area Rose lived in, he could have easily been put into the obituary or put on national television for selling drugs, but none of that happened, he stayed away from most of the dangers.
Rose neighborhood compared to Coates they sound very similar, they both have a crazy neighborhood shop owner, they both have groups of “bad boys” also called gangs who roam the streets causing trouble. Rose and Coates experienced the same dangers they both could have easily been abducted and they both could have easily been shot or become a drug dealer. But, that didn’t happen to them they stayed safe they took school seriously, but they also had to take the street seriously both simultaneously, taking school seriously might have been the best thing they did to pull them selves away from the dangers of the streets and neighborhood school kept them safe and allowed them to chart a new path to greatness.
Towards the end of page 18 on I Just Wanna Be Average, Rose wrote “I developed a picture of human existence that rendered it short and brutish or sad and aimless or long and quiet with rewards like afternoon naps, the evening news paper, walks around the block, occasional letters from children in other states.” This look on life would seem to be the case for many American kids who live in tough neighborhoods they seems to think there is no way out of this life they live, thinking that way would bring someone down and transform them into another statistic. Thinking “… it all sounded like a grorious fairy tail…” would cause someone to not take the way out seriously. When I say the way out I am talking about school, school is the way out for most of these kids that live in the tough neighborhoods academics would allow them to go to college get a degree and make a positive name for them-selves, sadly some kids don’t see academics as the way out and those are the ones that will live their whole life in
