Friday, September 24, 2010
Parents
My parents fell in love when they were sixteen. My mother had long henna colored curls huge eyes and a wide smile. She played guitar and sang with a raspy voice that gave my father chills. She was sensitive and sheltered, could always cry at the drop of a hat and was obsessed with making her parents happy. She wanted to complete the impossible task of compensating for their experience in the concentration camps, before they came to this country and had her. My father was angry and brooding, the product of a violently broken home. He wore bell bottoms and a ponytail. He played ultimate Frisbee and chain smoked Marlboro reds. He was popular, stoned and addicted to adrenaline. He loved the way her Contralto voice vibrated such that with only a whisper she could shake a room.
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This is a very vivid snippet of both your parents upbringing and how they met. The piece gives little information accept for some intriguing bits from their past. I liked the description of the mother's Contralto voice, if you would like to make this into a larger piece you should consider making music a major theme in the essay.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in how the two would interact based off of their characterizations (angry and brooding with sheltered and sensitive). A scene would be effective in garnering the reader's interest, as it is the piece is summary.
ReplyDeleteThis is a vivid introduction to the two characters. Do you foresee developing scenes that you imagine the parents to have had or embelishing on family folklore stories? What does this little portrait mean for the narrator?
ReplyDeleteI love the character details given here. There is something about the way they're described that creates this tension, this set-up for their love story, perhaps. I would definitely like to read more about these two people.
ReplyDeleteA good character sketch of your parents, though I'd like more details such as place and time, and more development. The details you include do strongly suggest the sixties, and what is especially intriguing is the juxtaposition between the parents and the grandparents, the social revolution of the sixties in the US and the Holocaust in Europe earlier in the century. There is a lot to explore here--keep writing.
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