Scribbles

I wish someone had stopped her. I didn’t notice much of a hook, she starts off telling us about her grandmother. Many of us have to listen to our grandparents go on and on about their past, and reading about someone else’s grandma is boring.  After about the second paragraph, I began to space off. For example the line, “The stories were collected in the late 1930s by the Federal Writers’ Project, a unit of the Works Progress Administration that employed out-of-work writers. But before the intended series of anthologies could be published, the Writers’ Project was Red-baited out of existence.” Do we really need to know this? It was more of a history lesson, and I don’t like reading about some historic event that’s taught every year in school. The lines “Sifting through the 150,000 pages in the dusty storage room, I was looking to fall in love. And I did—with a collection of people who were by turns scared, determined, funny and brave, and whose clamorous vitality seemed to burst from the pages.” Sounds so cliché. She looks for something intriguing among a dusty storage room, and suddenly she finds ‘treasure’. It’s basically just a bunch of facts and stories she read and found out about, and then she goes on a refers to Obama. She goes back to talking about our current economic crisis. The only part I actually like in this essay was, “Listening to each other’s stories may grant us a sense of common purpose that money can’t buy,” because it’s a fact that we can all agree upon, that all of us can relate to. We can’t relate the making quilts and silver dollars.