Sounds like a movie I'd like to see. Of course, with the seemingly prevalence of jungle law in our cities, I wonder just  how "wild" wilderness is.

Catpaw~ hence the "not so wild" lands...I will not give away the ending,but suffice it to say even small things are dangerous in the wild.

Personally, I've never got the whole "finding yourself" mentality. But to each their own. Looks like a grand adventure.

The young man in question grew up in a family consumed with violence and lies,that often leads to confusion about oneself.Sounds like you were blessed with a solid foundation. 

Thanks Pup~ the beauty of the wild is clear in this film and while tragic,peace was found.

Sage, is this film in theaters now? I generally have to wait for them to get to video since theaters tend to run captioned films rarely or not at all.

That's an interesting comment Witbee made about not getting the whole "finding yourself" mentality and that you though might be a blessing of a solid foundation.

I'm reminded of a poem called, "I Want to be a Tory" that reminds me of this same, in my mind, perplexing difference between people who look inward their entire lives versus those who don't seem to know what you're talking about when you tell them looking inward is something you do.  In case people are familiar with "I Want to be a Tory" I'm not talking about the poem's political context. I'm talking about human temperment and how, say, Witbee for example, perceived looking inward as conceptualizing the idea that finding oneself is some kind of search for a career path (pardon me Witbee, I'm just guessing so I don't really know how you perceive this concept. It's just good fodder for thought.).

For me "finding myself" or "looking inward" has always meant to be locked in a war with my prejudices or my sacred beliefs. I'm talking about "doubt", really. Things happen in life that cause you to question that person on the pedestal, or that definition of what "good" is.

Is this film about that kind of questioning?

HM~ it is out on DVD. The young man is questioning societies role that has been laid out for him,also exploring the effects of his families dynamics on him.So yes ,he is wondering about where he came from,where to go next,how to be better. There is much comparison  among the critics with "On the Road", "Walden"... For me it has touches of those earlier work,but I long ago learned we bring to a film our own perspectives.Each will find something different.

In that case, I'll look into it. I've seen the title but going to a movie theater is a relic of my past. It's on of the frustration of being deaf because you may read about all the shouting and attention a currently-running film is getting, but you don't get to join in the fun of that attention until it's all over with, or about the time people say of the movie, "Oh yeah, I saw that."  One of the movies I've been reading about that is in the shout/attention stage is "Momma Mia". Apparently it's a musical that has background music from old recordings of ABBA, whom I'm very familiar with from my days as a hearing person. Sometimes, when I go into a Karioke bar and pick up the book that lists all the songs, I get hit with some powerful sentimental emotion for a couple of reason: 1) I remember the song. 2) I'd forgotten about it.  I wondered if the musical film would ever come back again. So when "Chicago" was a huge hit and got all that attention, I had to suspect that it had a strong story line. That always mattered to me. So I watched it, even though the music is as important to the story as the interaction and dialogue and was surprised that I enjoyed it a great deal, even without hearing a note. I'm just glad that films are accessible. I spend an awful lot of time watching foreign films when I first became deaf because they were the only readily available media that at least had subtitles. It was an enriching experience. I learned a good deal about cultural mores of France, China, Japan, Russia and Italy. But I got homesick for the good ole USA.

I've often wondered if the deaf find the Internet phenomena of videos without closed captioning annoying. I just have broken audio on my current computer system, so I can't listen to videos and I know I find it annoying when someone posts a video link without any further explanation. The technology exists to add closed captioning to these videos too, it just seems most people posting videos on the Internet have neglected it. I hadn't thought until now about how movie theatres are the same.

I always waited for the DVD of any movie Kelsey would enjoy~ especially after another child with CP got kicked out of a child's matinee at the Valley Plaza  theater. It was just easier for us both and he would not "disturb" anyone else. I'd pay all the worlds gold to hear his laugh again.

It's a problem, universally, with video. But I shouldn't have brought it up here and diverted the context of the conversation. The real point I'm making is a personal one. I spent two SOLID years studying film, so it's HUGE interest of mine, but I'm out in left field a lot because when film is being discussed, it's almost always at the time when the buzz is in full gear, meaning, the film isn't in DVD yet, so I miss out on the discussion unless someone brings the film up for discussion later, like Sage did. That permits me to dwell on the art of a film when others actually want to talk about it.  One of things that seems to go on in my head on a daily basis is my habit of thinking about how a particular piece of art is constructed. It can be a film, but it can just as well be a song I remember. Just this week I had an endless loop of an old song sung by Bobbie Gentry going in my head. The song was, "Ode to Billy Joe" and it, I think, is a masterpiece of storytelling because of the many intertwined themes in it. Another song that hits me the same way is, "You're So Vain" by Charley Simon.  These songs are as much story as music and the spareness of words is in them is no barriers to what the imagination conjures up when listening to the story.  The theme of "Into the Wild" as described by Sage, absolutely enthralls me. It's a genre of film I am magnetically drawn to. So, I wish I had already viewed it just so I could enjoy the discussion of it with Sage and others.

Thanks sage, put it at the top of my queue.  Your suggestions are almost always better than my picks.

 I'm talking about human temperment and how, say, Witbee for example, perceived looking inward as conceptualizing the idea that finding oneself is some kind of search for a career path (pardon me Witbee, I'm just guessing so I don't really know how you perceive this concept. It's just good fodder for thought.).

Not really a career thing. I just don't understand how you know "who you are." I've always known fundamentally what kind of person I was. And as the sage Sage pointed out, I had a solid foundation at home. My family wasn't perfect, but they were relatively supportive and still are. 

Ah. So Sage's observation about you was on track. This reminds me of one of the most bizarre experiences I ever had.  In college I earned a second BA in creative writing and one of the classes I took was "Autobiography", perhaps one of my favorite classes of all time; favorite because it allows you to write without having to go outside your own life experiences to formulate a story.

So, you know, Sage already said it; that some people grow up, "...in a family consumed with violence and lies, that often leads to confusion about oneself."

Story of my life. I had endless amount of fodder for that kind of writing and at the point in which I was taking the class, I had developed a fairly competent hand for articulating the mass confusion that existed in my home and relationships. I was pretty flattered that people gave me such positive feedback when we'd sit and talk about each others progress in writing our autobiography. I had a classmate who was married to the Dean of Admissions at Fresno State and her autobiography read like one of the Brady Bunch kids; two parents, pimples, making the cheerleading squad and being the homecoming queen while making straight "A's" in every subject.

So, imagine my surprise when she remarked one day that I has so much misery going on in my family, she felt a sense of envy, like she'd lived such a sheltered life, she grew up being very naive about what happens in the lives of other people. She had nothing interesting to write about, in other words.  Other classmates chimed in to agree with her about my work. They said they always looked forward to reading my next installment because it was so far removed from their lives; lives that seemed to match the Brady Bunch of Father Knows Best.

So this theme about finding yourself really resonates with me. I hit a LOT of blind alleys, violence was a given, abuse was the rule, emotional confusion fought with one's innate longing to demonstrate allegiance to one's parent; poverty, joblessness, illness was just an everyday burden that, growing up, would make you swear you'd never, ever wanted  these things to continue when you get out on your own. So, looking at Into The Wild, it suggests almost the opposite of what something like "The Wizard of Oz" teaches children; not "There's no place like home" to find yourself, but "There's no place like getting AWAY from home to find yourself."

Anglo~ Thanks!

HM~ well said,my family life,if not for much soul searching ,would have lead me to become violent,abusive and generally a bad Mom /person. But to change,for me at least,I needed to understand "why". I let you know when my knowledge gels ;-)

Sage, have you read the book? I have a copy if you'd like to borrow it.  It was better than the movie.   I cried at points.  The book goes into more detail about the family's issues and how the main character impacted those who he ran across in Alaska (and back home).  Let me know if you want to borrow the book. I can drop it in the mail for you or something.

Possummomma~ that would be great! I really would love to read it~ but promise to cry so that the pages will not be marred...books are generally better than films,because of the detail.This story really got to me~ reminded me of my childhood,my self as a younger person and then about loss. I will send you an email. 

I could hardly sleep thinking about this because - a miracle occurred!  I surfed the Pay-Per-View on local cable and found "Into The Wild" and stayed awake to almost 1:30 this AM and watched it.  So I'm "down" on this conversation.

The Book vs. The Film: I lay awake thinking, guessing really, that Sage had read the book (I didn't notice if she said so before) and I thought that was probably the reason she connected on this so much. When I first started watching and learned the film was based on a book, I had an expectation that it wouldn't come across as well as in film. There's a reason for that, especially for this kind of film. Consider that John Kennedy's Toole's Pulitzer Prize winning book, "A Confederacy of Dunces" was never made into a film. People who have read the book and know it as the most screamingly funny story that, in my opinion, exceeds Catch-22 by light years, just don't understand why someone didn't make a film of it.

Here's why and it's the reason why this book doesn't work well in film:  The book is mostly about what goes on in the head of the main character. That was exactly the case in "...Dunces" and it accounts for the absence of the many thematic layers in the book that don't make it to film.  The problem is that filmmakers, even the best of the best, have a very hard time SHOWING what is going on in interior monolog inside someone's head.

That Sean Penn even did this film amazes me. It was a huge challenge to convey this boys anguish and I'm going to stick my neck out and say that Penn probably tried to compensate for all the missing interior monolog with his use of background music. 

As difficult as it is to translate this kind of literature to film, I do believe the greatest success was due to having the boy's sister narrate in voice-over to fill in the blanks on what otherwise was not shown by the boy's actions. To me, absent the sister's narration, the boy wasn't justified in his actions.  WITH the narration, YES.  It's just terribly difficult to SHOW the emotional angst of this guy, from an upper middle class family in which he had every material need he did (and didn't) desire handed to him. The sister helped the viewer understand why the material part were actually a symptom of the underlying family problem in a way the main character could not.

This film may be my favorite Hal Holbrook films.  I'm not a fan of his because he's such a name in film that when I see him I usually think, "That's Hal Holbrook playing the part of a [fill in blank]."  In this film, and maybe the only time in my memory I thought, "That man is so real and he looks like Hal Holbrook."  i was knocked out by this character. he stole the show for me.  I wanted the main character back with him soooooo bad, I couldn't think of anything else.

I admire this young man for living the way he chose.  The fact that it also caused his death is immaterial. 

I've always been too afraid to try anything risky.   This is the thing I like the least about myself. 

As far as reading the book or watching the movie goes, I have too much sadness going on in my life right now to risk reading something heart wrenching.   I've got to guard against depression.

I read a review that said Penn related to this young man "there but the grace of God go I" kinda thing. The music does help,but it really was the narration.

Personally,after my first son died,I had a terrible nightmare about him,where I clearly heard him screaming from being burnt...that and where the daughter says her parents grief changed their faces.I was also this kind of young person~ go off hiking,camping and foraging all by myself with out a care,never to the extent he did though.In the end I felt as if I knew all these people.As if I had been them myself.

Really glad you got to see this HM. "Angel From Montgomery" is one of my favorite all time songs~ sure wish you could "hear it". Hal Holbrook was never better.

Audrey~ the ending really shows just how at Peace this man was at the end.Simply because he chose to be himself...however short a life that was or was not. 

Audrey, I feel you pain.  Sometimes I have to get OFF the net, stop reading the newspapers, and just do something normal like dig in the garden or wash clothes or clean out some mess I've made in the refrigerator or a kitchen drawer: all designed to just check out from something that's bugging me.  The film isn't hard to take and I think you'd agree. On thing I find off-putting about film is something this film deliberately uses - it's only on film because it happened in an upper middle-class family.

In other words, the same context as soap operas is preferred because by filmmakers, presumably, know the riff-raff likes to know that rich people have sordid lives, too, and that nothing is more satisfying to the masses than seeing the mighty knocked off their pedestal.  There's something of that in this movie.

Watching it, I had several jolts over where the action took place. The boy worked in South Dakota cutting wheat. Hey. So did I when I was a teen ager, and everything in the film looked authentic in that context. Well, maybe one scene had a little slip up: they were cutting wheat, but when the truck pulled up to the grain elevator, it dumped corn.  Where they go corn in a wheat-growing area of South Dakota I'll never know because the whole reason wheat is grown there is because there isn't enough rain in the summer time to produce a viable corn crop. Wheat is like a weed. Give it a few rain showers and it grows like a weed.

The Alaska stuff was absolutely authentic and, by the way, I also lived 30 miles south of Fairbanks, Alaska when I was in the Air Force. So those scenes were DEAD ON real and you can tell because Fairbanks is situated on the Tanana River in a large geographical area whose main features are miles and miles of rolling hills covered by forests.  Not your typical forests. But forests in which the tree doen't grow very high.  The weather is so powerfully COLD in the winter that it destroys the tree tops. The film showed that very vividly.  Where they did fudge was when they gave the impression that the boy could walk to a mountain side and see the principle mountain ranges in Alaska.  Those mountain in the movie was several hundred miles south of Fairbanks. The Fairbanks area doesn't have mountains of that size anywhere.

Finally, I now live 30 minutes drive from the Salton Sea where, on the eastern shore, that place called Slab City where the boy met up a second time with a hippie couple. It's as real as it gets and so real, in fact, that man who give the boy and girl a tour of that hillside that was painted up in a religious theme was the *actual* guy who did the painting and not an actor. 

So, in a way I thought the film was following ME around from one place to another. The boy graduated from Emory University and I have an old, old friend who also graduated from there and have heard the stories of his college days a gazillion times. 

I'm not making quibble about the geographical foibles. Those setting really helped expand the main theme of this boy's evolving retreat from the world and what he came to understand about making the journey. He HAD to go to those places to find the closure he experiences in the end of the movie. The further away he got from contact with people, the more it made him come to the conclusion he did; that happiness can only be found with share your life with someone.  He father refused to share a dark corner of his life with his family and because of that refusal, the entire family was locked into a position of having to act as accomplices to the the father's past. The had to, in effect, lie for him in order to give an image of normalcy to their family.  People kept trying to tell the boy that the best kind of life is one in which you share it with others, but the boy was really just repeating the error his father made, by distancing himself from the truth. 

Wow  HM

This film must really hit a note with you. 

I read Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air when it first came out.    I had bronchitis at the time and the discriptions of breathlessness distrubed me a lot.   I could hardly finish the book.

 If Into the Wild is as discriptive and Into Thin Air,  I'd better stay away from it.  Considering my present state of mind.

I know Audrey~ keep this great analysis up HM and I will have to stop doing movie reviews! j/k  

 Sage wrote:  Personally,after my first son died,I had a terrible nightmare about him,where I clearly heard him screaming from being burnt...that and where the daughter says her parents grief changed their faces.I was also this kind of young person~ go off hiking,camping and foraging all by myself with out a care,never to the extent he did though.In the end I felt as if I knew all these people.As if I had been them myself.

Shivers. Awakening from a dream in which you heard the voice of someone you love.

I had that kind of dream with my mother. It's what made me realize I "dream in sound" because I hadn't even considered the idea of how people who are born deaf only dream in images. No soundtrack, no voices, not sound effects.  I remember being jolted from my sleep upon hearing my mother's voice. I wonder, Sage, if you've had the experience of FINALY dreaming about someone in your family after not having a memory of every having dreamed about them your whole life long.  I had such an experience with my dad. I remember clearly dreaming about him when I was only six years old. But between age 6 and 54, not ONE single time until I was 54. It was a shock. I felt as if I'd somehow broken through some kind of emotional barrier, as if everything I knew and felt about him had been settled so I could safely allow him into my dreams.

No HM~ I am a pretty vivid epic- saga type of dreamer,so anybody can show up.Read here if you care to... 

I can ,mostly' lucid dream,so if someone is bugging me~off they go! I have had only one dream where I woke myself up screaming~ with no memory of what it was,after son #2s death. I kept a journal while my mom was dying~ those dreams are just too scary to share,but I got much healing done through them...and some foreshadowing of what was to come,which,thankfully I did not understand at the time.But they helped after wards..heh,can you tell I am "into" dreaming..lol

It's not that I really connected on a personal level. It's that I have training in creative writing, screenwriting and film making, so I have a framework in which to discuss ANY film with great intimacy. Having those tools are sometimes a burden because it makes it difficult to watch a film without automatically jumping in and deconstructing how the created the emotional dynamics that make a scene, sequence, act, or the entire story work.

I just fell right into using my tools on this film and I know from experience I only do that when the story, itself, doesn't do the job of suspending my disbelief.  Of the recent films I've seen, where the story just grabbed me and made me forget out disecting it scene-by-scene, I'd have to say that Dustin Hoffman in Rainman made me forget it was Dustin Hoffman.  I forgot that it was John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction.  That was Joan Crawford in "Mommy Dearest", not Faye Dunaway.

In this film, it was successful because of the order in which the story was told. Usually, a screenwriter knocks an *original* screenplay in chronological order then manipulate the order of presentation to create higher degrees of conflict.  The film establishes the question at the beginning, that you long to have an answer to: Why is this kid in Alaska trying to isolate himself. From there, his entire BACKSTORY is the story of the movie. The backstory is key to emotional closure for this kind of film. The backstory tells WHY this boy had to go to Alaska.

While in literature the term "protagonist" is used to identify a boy like this, in film the boy is referred to as the "Main Character". The main character in film can be the protagonist OR one of EIGHT other kinds of characters that conflict is built upon.  The sister in this story is a "Sidekick" character and that means she is always faithful to the Main Character. If the Main Character is the Protagonist, or Antagonist, it doesn't matter to the Sidekick because the Sidekick's job is to ALWAYS be faithful to the Main Character.

A film is build upon a highly complex interweaving of jobs a character do. So from that understanding, you can learn to pull apart the fine thematic hairs in a film just by knowing the Job a particular character is doing.

The "Angel From Montgomery" thing.

I brought up that topic of using music to convey inner turmoil for a reason. I watch the captions when they show the lyrics of the songs in order to know how the music is being used to heighten conflict. Often times, people who caption films with simply substitute the words, "Musical theme playing in background." or  maybe "Sentimental song playing" rather than show the lyrics of the song that is being played.  With film music, a couple of things are essential about the music: either the melody OR the lyrics MUST convey the emotional element the scene is striving for. In the best of all film music, BOTH the lyrics and the melody have a powerful effect to create that emotional effect. I starteded commenting on this blog by mentioning how "Ode To Billy Joe" was a fine example of story-telling, but it is also an example in which the melody is powerfully intertwines with the song's story, one without the other would have made the song less satisfying.  In Bobby Gentry's very voice we hear the sound of the south, but in the music we hear the relentless rhythm of the river that is central to the tragedy of Billy Joe McCalister and the unrequited love of the girl who could never speak of him to her family.  Rivers? They don't care much for the emotions of human beings. They just do what the do and they are an indominable force that cannot be stopped. They are TIMELESS and for as many tragedies that occur among people, those tragedies are just water under a bridge (in this case, the Tallahatchie Bridge) to the river. The river doesn't think about it. It just keeps on moving.  That's the melody of Ode to Billy Joe and it has a way of telling a parallel story of how the girls family, especially her mother, doesn't understand her daughter:

"My mamma said to me, "Child, what's happened to your appetite? I've been cooking all morning and you haven't touched a single bite."

later,

"There was a virus goin 'round, Papa caught it and he died last spring. And now Momma don't seem to want to do much of anything."

Momma did not recognize in her owe child what she would be devestated into inaction over when she lost her husband. To Momma, Billy Joe McCalister was just water under the bridge. To the daugher, Billy Joe was the motivation of sit and an pick flowers and throw them into the river in rememberance of the boy she loved, a practice she carried from childhood into adulthood. She never got over the tragedy.

So, the music COMBINES with the lyrics to make a dramtic story. I could not glean that from Into The Wild.  What I saw of the lyrics did not impress me as something that could carry the emotional weight of the scene. So, I guessed that it was the music, the melody, that carried the weight in the scene and that's almost always the case because lyrics have a strong tendency to be either dumbed down or the are so "coded" by the writer's personal experience, they don't reach the experience of listeners.

I'd say that Sean Penn probably frets a lot when he gets to the job of adding musical enhancement to a film. It's probably a part of his list of things he doesn't like about his skill as producer, director and writer.

Here  you go HM,the lyrics.

Sage, I did read about your dream and am speechless; both from the painful depths of the description but with the colossal elegance of how you expressed it in word. What you wrote is so incredibly rare and beautifully woven, I can't tell you how humbled I am by it. I've witness many of your layers of compassion and insight, but this is a whole new high bar in the expression of what it means to be human and feel.

Aw shucks,now I am blushing,but thanks. I am not really sure how I got into that kind of place to write,but being so crazy from grief and pain  seemed to help.The further I get from those days,I don't know how to say this...the writing is just not that good.But that's just fine.

Hell, Angel From Montgomery *IS* Ode to Billy Joe. It's the story of  Into the Wild.

I hear you.  1986. My paper was due the following day and I didn't even know what I was going to write about. The class was in advanced fiction writing and I was toying with the idea of trying to write a story in which you could not tell whose side the narrator was on. It's one of the challenges teachers present to students. I was desparate for something to write about and I had worked hard to stay away from my own life experiences. So I had this idea of writing about something elementary school teachers use to get kids to thinking.  They use the things kids like to think about. So Halloween is one of the best days of the school year to use to get kids to express themselves.  What if, relying upon an upcoming Halloween celebration, a teacher told her students to write a story about the thing that scared them the most? So, what if one of the kids took her literally and wrote from the heart? What might the story say.  Well, this is what one kid did. It turned out to be not so much a Halloween story. This is a little kid from Oklahoma, ten years old, writing a ONE day in his life that happened in 1963. It's not the "according to Hoyle" truth. It's the "how it felt" truth. I sat in Lyons Restaurant all night writing this and the waitress kept coming over to me asking if I was okay because I cried from the moment I first touch the page with my pen, until I put a period at the end of the sentence of the last word in the story.

"The Scaredest I Ever Was - By Solomon" 

This is the scaredest I ever was. Me and Donny Lee was going home fast and something was different at our house. That I could see from down the road. Smoke was coming from out the garage stove and they was some chickens in the yard. We jumped the ditch out front of the house to run inside and tell. Jewell was playing with Joel in the livingroom floor so they was OK. When Mama heard us coming she yelled from the kitchen, "Solomon you boys keep your coats on and come here! Right now!" 

Then Donnie Lee said, "Mama, why are the chickens all out?" like he forgot to lock the pen and it is his job to do it. When we got in the kitchen Mama was opening the can of commodities and Ruby, who is my big sister, was washing some dishes up. 

Mama said, "Where have you boys been?" I started not to cry, but I did and told her all about it. We had to stay after school and write dictionary cause I was jumping rope with some girls and a boy started making fun of my shoes cause they was girls' and Donnie Lee had to beat him up. 

Then I remember Ruby started to cry and she said "Don't y'all know nothing?" And she ran over and hugged Mama and wouldn't stop hugging her. Then Mama started crying and we all was crying and hugging Mama and Donnie Lee said, "Mama what is the matter." And we knew it was Daddy. Mama just got down on her knees and she hugged us all up tight for a minute and then she told us real quiet your Daddy is sick again and he is out there in the garage with his night watchman's gun on his belt and Solomon I want you to stay away from there. 

Then Ruby said Daddy shot at Mama today and let out all the chickens and we are going to move again. 

So Mama started shushing Ruby. "Be quiet, be quiet Ruby! We all got to be quiet tonight and we ain't moving nowhere. You kids got to help me. We got to do something about them chickens. Tonight! We got to gather them up or if we don't they will everyone freeze to death. Solomon and Donnie Lee I want you to go out there and catch all them chickens you can and put them back in the chicken house." 

And I said, "...but Mama I need some tape for my shoes and it is in the garage." And I showed Mama where the soles of Ruby's shoes flapped and I said I did not want to go in where Daddy was. So Mama was not too scared and got the tape and fixed my shoes. But that is not the scaredest I ever was yet. 

Then Mama said for Ruby to watch the babies who are Jewel and Joel. Then Mama wrapped up me and Donnie Lee tight and warm and said don't worry about nothing and stay away from the garage. 

Then Mama stayed there and was doing stuff for Daddy while me and Donnie Lee chased chickens. But Donnie Lee could not even catch one chicken and he is bigger than me. And it got too dark and cold for me and Donnie Lee to find the chickens any more. So then we went back in the house and got warm and Ruby said Daddy was drinking Four Roses wine that was bad for his sugar diabetes. Ruby said we ain't going to have Christmas now and that Daddy said all day long there ain't a Jesus. So Donnie Lee saId to Ruby she is a liar. And I told her Daddy sings church songs all the time too, and Christmas songs. 

So Ruby told us Daddy cut a Christmas tree down but he burned it in the garage stove after he had a fuss with the chicken man. Ruby said the chicken man told Daddy he would pay twenty five cents a chicken if we would pull the feathers off and take out the guts and bring them to Oklahoma City. Ruby said Daddy called the chicken man a name. A cheater. Then Daddy said the man stole Christmas from his kids. Then I think we cried when Ruby said that. Then Ruby said Daddy threw a rock at the chicken man's car. 

Ruby said Daddy was crazy again and he has to go back to the V.A. Hospital and stay there a year again on the top floor with the bars on the windows. Then Donnie Lee and Ruby started a fight when Donnie Lee said Daddy ain't crazy, he is just sad about those little kids he burned up when he was fighting for General MacArthur. And Ruby said "crazy" and Donnie Lee said "sad" and Ruby said Donnie Lee is a Daddy's baby.

Then Mama came in and stopped thern from hitting and made me go take out the scraps. So then I was afraid to walk out the door by the garage and I took the wrong pot of scraps to the dogs and when Mama came back in from the garage she started crying about me feeding the commodities to the dogs and she hit me in the back and said we did not have any supper now because of me. 

When I started crying, Mama said she was sorry and hugged me and then Daddy came to the door by the garage and said why was that little girl crying. Daddy started saying for me to come here little girl, come here little girl, and one of his crutches slipped off the porch step and he fell on the cement. Then he was real, real mad and he yelled for me to come there right then. So Mama said don't be afraid and I was still crying because I was. But I did. 

It was real cold outside and Daddy told Mama to stay there cause he is going to make a man out of me. Then me and Daddy went out behind the chicken house and on the way Daddy shot twice at the moon and Mama screamed DON'T DON'T in the house. Then Daddy took me to a big hole in back of the chicken house and said get in it and I did not know why. So I did and I could see the moon behind Daddy's head and he was just standing there looking down at me for a minute. So after a minute I said what do you want me to do Daddy? And he gave me a shovel and said to dig and I did and then I could not cry no more. Then Daddy shot a shot right by me and said to dig fast cause times is hard. And I stood up straight and thought how Mama said don't be afraid and I said to Daddy ain't there a Jesus somewhere, Daddy? Ain't there a Jesus in that moon, Daddy?, like I was not afraid. But he did not say nothing and I started digging the sand again and wanting a way to not be afraid and I just started singing Jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so, little ones to him belong, they are weak but he is strong. Then my Daddy sat on the dirt pile and was crying and I got out of the hole and kissed my Daddy and hugged him and said I love him and times is hard, times is hard, real quiet like. Then Daddy said the calf died and it was over in the dark and we dragged it over and we put it in the hole. 

So we went back to the house and Daddy went in the garage and drank some more Four Roses wine and had a diabetes fit and had to go to the V. A. Hospital. I thought he was gonna die. And that is the scaredest I ever was. 

Wow... but that is just how some of my "best " stuff happened.For two weeks i did not sleep,then I finally collapsed but kept waking up exactly at the time the eldest died...every freaking night.Finally I just got up and cried,and wrote and cried..it just emerged from me. Blew my margins all to heck,your story did lol 

Off topic, any idea why this blog only, shows itself as about 4 times wider all of a sudden.  Checked the others and they are normal size.  Any help would be appreciated.

Okay so, here's the deal, Sage. You said the further you get from those days the writing is just not as good.  That's how I felt after I wrote this story.  I put ME in the story. I gave ME to write it.  I'm reminded of the movie, "Infamous" which is one of two movies that appeared about the same time that dealt with the life of Truman Capote. I much prefer "Infamous" to "Capote" because it just had a heart to it that "Capote" didn't seem to have.

In Infamous, near the end of the movie there were several cameo shots of people talking about Truman Capote's life and career in retrospect. One, I think it was his publisher, said that the reason Capote never wrote another masterpiece like "In Cold Blood" was that it took so much out of him and that was a common problem for just about all writers.  Well, I think there's an element of wisdom in that insight. I had MUCH to resolve with my father and since he died when I was only 18, I never got a chance as an adult to achieve any sense of closure with him.  So, when I wrote about him, and forced myself to see what HIS life was influenced by, It took a lot of the pain out of me.  I didn't know how to express it all in any way other than using the voice of a child, so that's why I don't have the psychological distance of third person narration in that story. I just put my nose right into it all and made myself look at what I can't stand to remember. I saw my dad on crutches. I saw he sick with diabetes. I saw him struggling to feed us. I saw he reach the end of his rope. I saw him fall down and not have the strength to get up again, right under my nose. I saw five kids cry over him while at the same moment being terrified of him. I was as scared of him dying as I was of his violence. I couldn't ran away from my own father and I couldn't be around him because he scared me every minute of every day. It is the TRAP of loving your parent that you remember; that is evoked by "Into The Wild".

Mine isn't showing wider. I thought maybe that would have to do with the formatting of my story, but that post is in rich text format. Usually the thing that creates a WIDE HTML page is using a fixed-width font and coding the page with the "<pre> </pre> markup people use with they want columns or tab stops to align. Since I can't see any formatting or stretching effects on my browser (Safari, Mac), I'll try reformatting my story and see if that makes any difference for you.

Is there any particular comment or any specific section of the header area that is stretched?

Looks as if the blog width is set by the post at top It's in need of being reset

Well. I just demolished the formatting on my story. Did that help with the margins on this web page?

Now I am on Firefox3 (YES! Finally)and all seems well, with the margins and commenting.

Thanks for explaining it that way~ makes sense. I was raw during that time,no filters on at all~ which is generally true of me anyway. I learned along time ago, there are hills and dales with most things in life,so it follows writing would be the same.

How does it look now? It had tab stops set up on it and I removed those, Hope that helps.

Mine is still very wide.  I was wrong it's closer to 20 times wider.  Murph is that a job for Jason?  I just use this as a toy. No clue on repairs.

Nevermind, it's ok now.  Thanks to who or what.

Thanks to me for both creating the problem and remembering how to fix it (a miracle in and of itself).

You know as well that I do, that of you wait on Jason, you'll be waiting for a VERY long time. ;=)))