The Flowers - Rough Draft

            Within the novel The Flowers, by Dagoberto Gilb, we find a rather typical American teenager named Sonny. Sonny is our narrator, and the main character of the story. Throughout The Flowers, Sonny tells us his life story on a day-to-day basis by including what he is currently going through at that moment, while sharing memories that he’d made in the past. This balance of present versus past that Sonny conveys his story to us by, keeps him on a more relatable level because we go through life not only living in the present but thinking of our past as well. This type of first person point of view story telling allows us to fallow Sonny’s every move, and really divulge into his character; in which through his stories and encounters we are able to learn so much about him. In this novel, we learn that Sonny partakes in some risky business, has a local hang out spot, and has a few very diverse adult influences; which in my opinion are all typical teenage behaviors.  However, my personal memory of being an American teenager varies quite drastically from Sonny’s habits and experiences.

            While Sonny partakes in some risky, and downright strange habits of watching people through their windows and seeing into their homes, both in order to learn so much information about the families who lived there, just by that simple act of watching them. I can’t necessarily say that throughout my teenage years, I had a specific habit that would allow me that pleasure of gaining knowledge about other people without actually interacting with them. On the other hand, I’ve actually always been a social person who can talk to just about any one and by doing so, I feel as if that is the way that I would get to know people. Sonny’s voyeurism tendencies acted as an escape from his home life by being another place he can go, mentally as well as physically, to escape whatever it was he had to deal with at home. In contrast, whenever my home life was too much to handle, I would go over to a friend’s house and hang out there for a couple hours, or even a couple days. Sonny and my escapes from reality are quite different in how we get away, yet the reasons why were so similar in that we both were faced with situations we didn’t want to deal with at the time. Also, at the beginning of the novel, Sonny would not only watch from the outside, but break and enter into different houses just to get a feel for what it would be like to live in other types of home atmospheres. On the first two pages alone, the first things we learn about Sonny is that he would go inside strangers’ homes. “… I would go to a house… I’d crawl through an open window… I sprawled out on their couches or lay down on their beds. Go, How would it be if I lived here?” (pg. 1-2) While Sonny does this forcefully, I would spend time at friend’s houses that have different family morals. Some would be of different religions; some would be a single parent home, while others would have both sets of parents with many siblings and I’d stay with them for a few days at a time and try my best to imagine what it would be like to live there. But the fact of the matter is, no matter how we would do it; we both liked to get away from our situations and try to imagine ourselves in different ones.

            Another avenue of escape for Sonny is the bowling alley; it is another place where he can go to lose himself and forget about what is happening at his apartment, it is away for him to stop thinking about his mom and Cloyd, and it’s a local hang out spot where he can spend his time away from his home life. I too had a place where my friends and I would go to spend hours just hanging out together. Every Friday evening we’d all head down to the Tennant Station here in Morgan Hill. It all started when I was in 7^th grade, I would bum a ride off someone old enough to drive us there, we’d all meet up there and hang out together for hours on end; or at least until our moms would come to pick us up. The funny part about it is that we would rarely ever do what we had come there to do. Within that Tennant Station is a movie theater, bowling alley, bocce ball court, and a Safeway. But being in junior high limited us with how much disposable income we had, we hardly ever saw a movie at that movie theater, we never step foot inside that bowling alley and we literally never bowled, with the bocce ball court you had to be 21 even in order to enter and we were only half that age, that left the spot where we spent most of our time, the Safeway. No one really knows why Safeway became our popular hang out destination for Friday nights, maybe it was because there was a Starbucks, a deli, and anything you could ever want to munch on; whatever the reason, that Safeway was our hang out spot where we would meet up and spend hours at every weekend.

            Every person, at one time or another in their lifetime will have the opportunity to look up to someone for guidance. They will be faced with admiring someone for advice or support, also the role that adults automatically assume into a teenager’s life will help to shape who they will be one day, and Sonny is no exclusion to this. Sonny has been faced with many different men from who his mother brings home to meet him. While Sonny is often smart enough to know whether or not the relationships between his mother and the men will last or not, when Cloyd becomes a more permanent figure in his life, Sonny will certainly be influenced by him. Cloyd is certainly a father figure to Sonny whether he is aware of it or not.  At all moments of time, we all have influences in our lives, however sometimes when we’re younger we are more susceptible to adult influences compared to when we grow up a little and become more self assured of who we are. Growing up, I didn’t have many male or father figure influences in my life because I was raised by single mother while sporadically visiting my own father. So when my mother was busy working, which she often was, I would actually look to friend’s mothers to for guidance. One mother in particular was always so accepting and so kind to me, she would offer me her best advice, she would help me with my homework and often feed me dinner. I would actually consider myself lucky to have had this lady in my life throughout some very impressionable years in my life in order to guide me in making the right decisions and having helped me in so many ways to become the woman that I am today.