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Consequently, in that way, we are always coming of age, always-losing innocence, gaining understanding, and always discovering new truths about ourselves, emotionally, intellectually, and sexually. Perfecto Flores lives the unfortunate existence of a migrant worker. Pefecto, in his late sixties, has also taken on much more than his younger lover Petra.
He has accepted her five children as well, including the eldest Estrella, our beautiful and moving protagonist. He reluctantly becomes the head of a physically and emotionally abandoned family and it seems oddly some form of poetic justice for Perfecto Flores: Perfecto lived a travesty of laws. He knew nothing of their source but it seemed his very existence contradicted the laws of others, so that everything he did like eat and sleep and work and love was prohibited.
After a confrontation, in a less than adequate medical clinic, Estrella makes a dramatic, violent yet understandable, choice to save her dying boyfriend, Alejo.
Pefecto plays a crucial role in getting Alejo to a hospital. After this dramatic event, Estrella has a brief encounter with Perfecto and this synapse changes his life forever. Perfecto, for the first time in his difficult existence, felt validated. One can only hope, Perfecto, toolbox in hand, decided to remain with this newfound family. We hope his memories of what was and could have been became less frequent and not as painful; his present and future now held a special place in his heart.
Perfecto and Ray are similar only in the dual suffering of extreme adversity and abuse. Ray Falke, a flawed, seemingly cruel, father of four, cannot let go of his painful past. Ray was constantly abused as a child and subconsciously chose to continue the cycle of brutality, thrusting it like a tornado upon his own flesh and blood. Ray seems as well to have been a product of the stereotypical behavior that was unfortunately the norm for too many fathers in the Southern fifties.
It is not until the last act of this beautifully crafted gothic novel that Ray has a coming of age, when he finds himself on the precipice of good and evil. He finally realizes he is about to cross the line into the dark side, from which he will never be able to return.
After an abusive and incredibly powerful confrontation with his young son Will, Ray is able to finally come to terms with the past and we hope move towards a more peaceful life. And from the distance between them, marked by the oak posts and barbed wire of their time together thus far, each knew the other as much as was allowed their willing hearts. Ray experienced an extraordinarily powerful coming of age moment, and although life would probably never be ideal or perfect for the Falke clan, one can only assume and pray the worst was over.
It is forever, does not discriminate and is irrefutable. Similar to Ray Falke and Perfecto Flores, I too had my most profound coming of age experience as an adult. It was a chilly grey Monday morning and I was in my kitchen, frying chicken. I had been cooking all morning, pot roast, butter beans, biscuits, key lime pie, and of course, my famous apple crisp. I was preparing these southern culinary delights because my brother-in-law Steven had called the night before to let me know that my best friend, his wife Candy, was not feeling well.
I phoned Candy and told her that I would come over the following day with enough food and tons of hugs to last a week. She sounded tired, but compos mentis. Candy had stage four cancer and we had learned that it had just spread to her liver. I had never had anyone die in my life who was less than ninety-four, so I naively thought everything would be fine. At noon on that grey Monday, my brother-in-law called to tell me they were on their way to the hospital; Candy was vomiting blood. I drove the thirty-seven minutes to St.
That drive marked the start of what would become the most difficult, painful, life-changing week of my life. I felt not sadness. We were children no longer. And we never would be again. And he didn't cry.
He lay there on the earth, realizing and accepting and hardening. That was the night that James Hook began to grow up. For he had gone away and he could never come back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusions, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. You were for me the necessary exemplary figure of dedication and endurance.
Whatever your inner life truly was it was ardently pursued. You observed with acute imagination. When you spoke you drove to the heart of things though sometimes through wry indirection. You manifested the value of the life dedicated to an art. Whatever terrors you underwent they may have been very great you did not evince them.
You were never indecent. Of course in making this thing about you or around you I am talking about my youth and homesick for it. But that is not the point. The point is that at one time in one place I met someone who became to me a living conscience.
Justice didn't stand a chance. And I hate that. I hate that I stopped believing in things I didn't even know were matters of belief, like justice and fairness. Or the promises people make to each other. Of all the things Cal took from me, that's when I think I miss the most: You know what the prosecutor told me? It bears the memory of possibility, of unknown forests, unchartered territories, and a heart light and skipping, hell-bent as the captain of any of the three ships, determined at all costs to prevail to the new world. Turning back was no option. Whatever the gales, whatever the emaciation, whatever the casualty to self, onward I kept my course.
From this meaning comes the usage of innocent as a noun to refer to a child under the age of reason , or a person, of any age, who is severely mentally disabled. The subjects of coming-of-age stories are typically males in their mid teens, although sometimes females are the protagonists. More popular coming of age books Yale University Press, Innocence can imply lesser experience in either a relative view to social peers, or by an absolute comparison to a more common normative scale. Zander Rice to strip her of her humanity and turn her into an emotionless killing machine.
My heart felt the magnetism of its own compass guiding me on—its direction constant and sure. There was no other way through.
George Motz grew up in Northern Wisconsin durnig the 's. He attended Northland College. George has been a farmer, teacher, editor, columnist. Innocence Lost - A Coming of Age (Paperback) / Author: George G. Motz ; ; Historical fiction, Genre fiction, Fiction, Books.
I feel it again as once it had been, before it was broken-in; its strength and resolute ardency. The years of solitude were nothing compared to what lay ahead. In sailing for the horizon that part of my life had been sealed up, a gentle eddy, a trough of gentle waves diminishing further, receding away. Whatever loneliness and pain went with the years between the ages of 14 and 20, was closed, irretrievable—I was already cast in form and direction in a certain course.
When I open the little bottle of eau de toilette five hundred different days unfold within me, conversations so strained, breaking slowly, so painstakingly, to a comfortable place. A place so warm and inviting after the years of silence and introspect, of hiding.
A place in the sun that would burn me alive before I let it cast a shadow on me. Until that time I had not known, I had not been conscious of my loneliness. Yes, I had been taciturn in school, alone, I had set myself apart when others tried to engage. But though I was alone, I had not felt the pangs of loneliness.