In the lesson ‘Little Bobby’, Bobby picked up the small statue of Mary, the mother of God. You are James, Bobby’s friend and you didn’t like the idea.Write a possible conversation between Bobby and James.
Answers
We each have different versions of ourselves, depending on the story. There’s one of me at camp, crying in the bathroom all night so my bunkmates wouldn’t see me homesick. Another time, I was a bully, putting a frog in a sad girl’s bed. And there’s the brave me who jumped off Split Rock Gorge four years straight until, at age twelve, a cowardly me stared too long at the rocks thirty feet below and backed away.
None of these girls is false. Each comes forth, intact, from a pocket of memory—unless something, often small, shakes her authenticity like tectonic plates shifting. This happened to a friend of mine, who found old letters showing she was not the loveless high school misfit she’d grown so fond of recalling. And to another, who discovered in an album of college photos that she was way too thin, not fat at all. And to me, while writing about Bobby the beagle and my grandparents who lived together on the perfect farm, where I felt perfect, too.
Everyone called it “The Farm,” but it was actually an acre or two of meadow, an old Long Island farmhouse with a screen door I’d forget not to slam and a copse of woods big enough to hide in for a while. Plus the chicken coops by the stream, where my grandmother, Omi, went every morning and night to sing in German to her American chickens. She and my grandfather, Opi, raised chickens there for as long as I could remember in those 1940s days when I was five, six, and seven, and we visited them every weekend