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From: Autobiography of a Face

By: Lucy Grealy

Memoir

At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer.  When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates.

I had finished chemotherapy only a few months before I started looking in the Yellow Pages for stables where I might work.  Just fourteen and still unclear about the exact details of my surgery, I made my way down the listings.  It was the July Fourth weekend, and Mrs. Daniels, typically overbooked, said I had called at exactly the right moment.  Overjoyed, I went into the kitchen to tell my mother I had a job at a stable.  She looked at me dubiously.

“Did you tell them about yourself?”

“I hesitated, and lied.  “Yes, of course I did.”

“Are you sure they know you were sick?  Will you be up for this?”

“Of course I am,” I replied in my most petulant adolescent tone.

In actuality it hadn’t even occurred to me to mention cancer, or my face, to Mrs. Daniels. I was still blissfully unaware, somehow believing that the only reason people stared at me was because my hair was still growing in.  So my mother drove me down to Diamond D, where my pale and misshapen face seemed to surprise all of us.  They let me water a few horses, imagining I wouldn’t last more than a day.  I stayed for four years.

That first day I walked a small pinto in circle after circle.  But with each circle, each new child lifted into the tiny saddle, I became more and more uncomfortable, and with each circuit my head dropped just a little bit further in shame.

I knew that these children lived apart from me.  Through them I learned the language of paranoia: every whisper I heard was a comment about the way I looked, every laugh a joke at my expense.

Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient to last me the rest of my life.  Partly I was right: they were staring at me, laughing at me.  The cruelty of children is immense, almost startling in its precision. They rarely made cruel remarks outright. But their open, uncensored stares were more painful than the deliberate taunts of my peers at school, where insecurities drove everything and everyone like some looming, evil presence in a haunted machine.

My feelings of being an outsider were strengthened by the reminder of what my family didn’t have: money.  Despite my father’s good job with a major television network, we were barraged by collection agencies, and our house was falling apart around us.  When dealing with my mother, one always had to act in a delicate and specific way, though the exact rules of protocol seemed to shift frequently and without advanced notice.

Though our whole family shared the burden of my mother’s anger, in my heart I suspected that part of it was my fault and my fault alone.  Cancer is an obscenely expensive illness; I saw the bills, I heard their fights.  There was no doubt that I was personally responsible for a great deal of my family’s money problems: so, I was responsible for my mother’s unhappy life.

I am filled with questions I rarely allow myself, such as, how do we go about turning into the people we are meant to be?  What relation do the human beings in picture have to the people they are now? How is it that all of us were caught together in that brief moment of time, me standing there pretending I wasn’t hurt by a single thing in this world while they lined up for their turn on the pony, some of them excited and some of them scared.

I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I’ve spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else.  It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly which I always viewed as the greatest tragedy of my life.  The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.

From: A Dog Year

By: Jon Katz

Memoir

Welcome to Newark Airport:

He was a two-year-old border collie of Australian lineage, well-bred but high-strung, and in big trouble.  He had been shown at obedience trials in the Southwest.  But something had gone very wrong with this arrangement and his breeder had taken him back and was working to find him a home.  He needed one badly, she told me.  That was all I knew about Devon when I drove to Newark Airport to pick him up.

I already had two sweet dogs and I had plenty of non-dog-related responsibilities as well. I wasn’t particularly keen on taking in a third dog.

[But] I’d been fascinated by border collies for years, poring over books . . . They were such intelligent dogs, I’d read, and somehow exotic.  But everyone I consulted said more or less the same thing: unless you have a hundred acres right outside your back door, don’t do it. I had only a normal suburban New Jersey yard – and did I mention that I already had two large dogs?

So I hemmed and hawed about adopting a border collie, especially one with more than the usual . . . issues.  A part of me was drawn to the idea, but the rational part said: Stop! Danger ahead!

After a few weeks . . . he was put on a plane and shipped from Lubbock, Texas, eastward to his new life.

I had put a bowl and a jug of water in my minivan, along with a small bag of biscuits. I was holding a new blue leash and collar, to which I’d already attached a dog tag with Devon’s name and my phone numbers.

An hour after I arrived, the plane landed.  Pacing nervously outside the freight office, I asked every five minutes or so if a dog was on board.  I called the breeder on my cell phone to tell her that Devon had arrived.  I called my wife, Paula, for reassurance; convinced that three dogs was at least one too many, she didn’t offer much.  I called my daughter at college.  “He’s almost here,” I announced.  She signed a familiar sight.  “Call back and let me know what he’s like.”

A half-hour after touchdown – it was by now nine P.M. – I saw two baggage handlers pulling a large dog crate, dragging and bumping it noisily across the tiled floor.

I couldn’t see much through the front grill, just flashes of black and white that seemed to circle frantically, like a pinwheel.  He was throwing himself against the door and the sides.  I winced at the loud bumping; he needed to get out of there.

My van was parked a few hundred yards from the door.  My plan was to reach into the crate and leash Devon, then walk him with one hand while I toted the crate in the other; we’d get away from this madness and save our bonding for the quieter, darker parking lot.

“Devon,” I called.  “Devon, I’m going to open the door, boy.  It’s going to be okay.”

The thumping stopped, and I saw a pair of wild, ink-dark eyes.

I knelt, pulled up the latch on the crate, and the gate slammed open into my face. Before I could move, a blur shot past me and into a crowd, its force knocking me off my heels onto my back. Devon was out of sight before I could scramble to my feet.  A flurry of shrieks and shouts behind me told which way he’d headed.

It took me, two baggage handlers, and three very unhappy Port Authority police officers nearly half an hour to track and corral Devon as he ricocheted through the jammed terminal, scaring travelers out of their wits as he dashed in panic. He had no bearings, no reference points or instincts but flight.

He sprinted from one baggage carousel to another, then back again.  He seemed to be desperately looking for some running room, or perhaps a familiar sight.  He couldn’t find either.

Whenever we’d get close, he’d turn and bolt, vanishing into the crowds. . . . But eventually we seemed to have driven him more or less into a corner near a Hertz counter, a cop on either side behind me.  I was out front, moving slowly toward him.

I knelt in front of him, leaving a few yards between us.  It was my first good look at him.  Devon was a beautiful creature, sleek and black with a needle nose, a narrow white blaze on his forehead, a white chest.

I pulled a dog biscuit out of my pants pocket.  His darting eyes focused on me, then glanced at the biscuit.  I put it on the ground and nudged it toward him.  He ignored it, looking almost disdainful. Could I possibly think he could be bought off that cheaply?  He seemed offended.

And I could see him calculating, calculating, and calculating.  Can I run for it?  Can I get past this jerk and all these people?  A baggage carousel sputtering into motion caught his eye for a moment . . . I inched forward on my knees . . .

“Stay,” I said, raising my palm, firming my voice.  “Stay, Devon. It’s okay.”  He seemed mildly amused now, and began concentrating on me, taking me in, pondering my technique, tilting his head curiously as I gestured.  He was definitely listening to me, sizing me up.

I get closer, close enough to reach behind his ear and scratch him gently.  I felt for his collar and slipped the leash onto the metal ring.  He didn’t resist or run, he just kept staring at me.

I held the leash on my left, and Devon walked along hesitantly as I pulled the crate behind us.  He wanted nothing to do with it.

I opened the door [to the van] and Devon jumped up onto the front seat as if he’d done it a million times.  I lowered the front window a bit – he stuck his nose out.

Fifteen minutes later, we pulled into my driveway.  The Labs came lumbering over to the fence, tails wagging.

I decided to take Devon for a short walk before introducing him to Paula and the house.

. . . With a sharp jerk of the leash from my hand, Devon was gone.  I spun around in all directions and saw no trace of him – until I happened to glance at a passing minivan and saw he perched on the roof as it drove slowly down the street.  I didn’t believe it.  I couldn’t believe it.  Dogs don’t fly.

“Hey! Hey stop! Stop, there’s a dog on the car!”

I stopped and shouted as loudly as I ever have, “Devon, come!  Now!” . . . he hopped off as nimbly as if the van were a small step stool and landed on the sidewalk.

“Sit!” I screamed.  He did, looking up at me in some bewilderment, perhaps wondering why I was making so much noise.  Then he averted his face, as if in shame or fear that I would strike him.  He remained absolutely still as I grabbed his leash, and we headed back to the house.

My dog year had begun.

From: Always Running

By, Luis J. Rodriguez

Autobiography

Although we moved around the Watts area, the house on 105th Street near McKinley Avenue held my earliest memories, my earliest fears and questions. It was a small matchbox of a place. Next to it stood a tiny garage with holes through the walls an unpainted barnlike quality.  The weather battered it into a leaning shed.  The backyard was a jungle.  Vegetation appeared to grow down from the sky.  There were banana trees . . . huge weeds, foxtails and yellowed grass.  An avocado tree grew in the middle of the yard and its roots covered every bit of ground, tearing up cement walks while its branches scraped the bedroom windows. A sway of clothes on some lines filled the little bit of grassy areas just behind the house.

My brother and I played often in our jungle, even pretending Tarzan (Rano mastered the Tarzan yell from the movies).  The problem, however, was I usually ended up being the monkey who got thrown off the trees. In fact, I remember my brother as the most dangerous person alive.  He seemed to be wracked with a scream that never let out.  His face was dark with meanness.  What my mother called maldad.  He also took delight in seeing me writhe in pain, or cry or cower, vulnerable to his own inflated sense of power.  This hunger for cruelty included his ability to take my mom’s most wicked whippings – without crying or wincing.  He’d just sit there and stare at a wall, forcing Mama, to resort to resort to other implements of pain – but Rano would not show any emotion.

Yet, in the streets, neighborhood kids often chased from play or jumped him.  Many times he came home mangled, his face swollen. Once somebody threw a rock at him which cut a gash across his forehead, leaving a scar Rano has to this day. Another time a neighbor’s kid smashed a metal bucket over Rano’s head, slicing the skin over his skull and creating a horrifying scene with blood everywhere.  My mother in her broken English could remedy few of the injustices, but she tried.  When this one happened, she ran next door to confront that kid’s mother.  The woman had been sitting on her porch and saw everything.

“Que paso aqui?”  Mama, asked.

“I don’t know what you want,” the woman said.

“All I Know is your boy picked up that bucket and hit himself over the head – that’s all I know.”

In school, they placed Rano in classes with retarded children because he didn’t speak much English.  They even held him back a year in the 2nd grade.

For all this, Rano took his rage out on me.  I recall hiding from him when he came around looking for a playmate.  My mother actually forced me out of the closets with a belt in her hand and made me play with him.

One day we were playing on the rooftop of our house.

“Grillo, come over here,” he said from the roof’s edge.  “Man, look at this on the ground.”

I should have known better, but I leaned over to see.  Rano then pushed me and I struck the ground on my back with a loud thump and lost my breath, laying deathly still in suffocating agony, until I slowly gained it back.

Another time he made me the Indian to his cowboy, tossed a rope around my neck and pulled me around the yard.  He stopped barely before it choked the life out of me.  I had rope burns around my neck for a week.

One day, my mother asked Rano and me to go to the grocery store.  We decided to go across the railroad tracks into South Gate. In those days, South Gate was an Anglo neighborhood, filled with the families of workers of the auto plant and other nearby industry.  Like Lynwood or Huntington Park, it was forbidden territory for the people of Watts.

My brother insisted we go.  I don’t know what possessed him, but then I never did.  It was useless to argue; he’d force me anyway.  He was nine then, I was six.  So without ceremony, we started over the tracks, climbing over discarded market carts and torn-up sofas, across Alameda Street, into South Gate: all-white, all-American.

We entered the first small corner grocery store we found.  Everything was cool at first.  We bought some bread, milk,  soup cans, and candy.  We each walked out with a bag filled with food.  We barely got a few feet, though, when five teenagers on bikes approached. We tried not to pay attention and proceed to our side of the tracks.  But the youths pulled up in front of us.  While two of them stood nearby on their bikes, three of them jumped off theirs and walked over to us.

“What do we got here?”  one of the boys said . .  .

He pushed me to the ground; the groceries splattered onto the asphalt.  I felt melted gum and chips of broken beer bottle on my lips and cheek.  Then somebody picked me up and held me, while the others seized my brother, tossed his groceries out, and pounded on him.  They punched him in the face, in the stomach, then his face again, cutting his lip, causing him to vomit.

I remember the shrill, maddening laughter of one of the kids on a bike, this laughing like a raven’s wail, a harsh wind’s shriek, a laugh that I would hear in countless beatings thereafter.  I watched the others take turns on my brother; this terror of a brother, and he doubled over, had blood and spew on his shirt, and tears down his face.  I wanted to do something, but they held me and I just looked on, as every strike against Rano opened me up inside.

They finally let my brother go and he slid to the ground, like a rotten banana squeezed out of its peeling.  They threw us back over the tracks.  In the sunset I could see the Watts Towers, shimmers of seventy thousand pieces of broken bottles, seashells, ceramic and metal on spiraling points puncturing the heavens, which reflected back the rays of a falling sun.  My brother and I then picked ourselves up saw the teenagers take off, still laughing, still talking about those stupid greasers who dared to cross over to South Gate.

Up until then my brother had never shown any emotion to me other than disdain.  He had never asked me anything, unless it was a demand, an expectation, an obligation to be his throwaway boy-doll.  But for this once he looked at me, tears welled in his eyes, blood streamed from several cuts – lips and cheeks swollen.

“Swear – you got swear – you’ll never tell anybody how I cried,” he said.

I suppose I did promise.  It was his one last thing to hang onto, his rep as someone who could take a belt whipping, who could take a beating in the neighborhood and still go back risking more – it was this pathetic plea from the pavement I remember.  I must have promised.

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Autobiography of a Face INSTRUCTIONS: Complete the following set of cornel notes as you read this autobiography.  Answers should be done on your own paper and should be finished using complete sentences.

1.      Why does it seem important to the narrator’s mother that she tell the stable owners about her illness?  Do you think she is being realistic or mean spirited?  Why?   Realistic, because she wants the people to know her daughter has an illness.   2.      After being hired, why do the owners of the Diamond D Stables think the narrator will only last a single day on the job?  How long does she actually last?   Because they think she is super weak and will not be able to do anything. She actually stays 4 years.   3.      On her first day on the job, why does the narrator begin to feel so much shame?  Do you think you would have reacted differently than the children she was working with/for?  Explain.   Because she was mad that all of the kids would stare and make comments.   4.      Using context clues in the passage, what do you think a possible definition for “honing” might be?   Luring.   5.      Aside from her appearance, what made the narrator feel different and like an outsider?   Her attitude.   6.       Do you think this really makes her different? Explain.   Yes because there is no spirit when she walks them.   7.      Why does the narrator feel like her family’s problems are her fault?  Do you agree with her?  Why or why not?   Yes because money can split families.   8.      Using context clues, what is a possible definition for the word, “obscenely?” Use the word in a sentence of your own.   Amazingly or greatly. I obscenely won the championships!   9.      In the end the narrator asks, “How do we go about becoming the people we are meant to be?” If she asked you that question what would your answer be?   It doesn’t matter what people think. It’s called your actions and attitude that makes you, well YOU!   10.  What does the narrator see as the greatest tragedy of her life?  Why might this seem strange to people?  Do you think this was the greatest tragedy of her life? Explain.   She sees the kids whispering about her face as the tragedy of her life. They have not seen a face like it. I think it was because she was very embarrassed.   Always Running INSTRUCTIONS: Complete the following set of cornel notes as you read this autobiography.  Answers should be done on your own paper and should be finished using complete sentences.

1.      What is the author’s purpose in the first paragraph of this selection? What is he doing for the reader?   To introduce us to the main characters and show how bad the new town is.   2.      Why does the narrator call Rano the most dangerous person alive?   Because no matter what he would never cry or be scared to do anything.   3.      Using context clues explain what you think the word “remedy” means.  Explain what clues you used to help you write your definition.   Solve. It used broken English and some which made me guess the synonym solve.   4.      Why do you think the mother makes the boy play with his brother, Rano?   Because his mom does not want Rano to feel like a monster. So she had only one kid she could force to play with Rano.   5.      Using context clues explain what you think the word “Anglo” means.  Explain what clues from the story helped you write your definition.   White, American, Perfect English Speaking. The context clues auto plant and other nearby industries gave it away.   6.      What is a main difference between the people in South Gate from those of Watts?  How do you know?   South Gate is more of a well behaved, no crime (suspected at least), and American neighborhood. Watts is more of a Hispanic, many crimes, (not being racist) HOOD!    7.      The narrator says, “I wanted to do something, but they held me and I just looked on, as every strike against Rano opened me up inside.” What do you think he meant by this? What would you have done?   I think he meant he couldn’t look away as if looking straight ahead would help at all. I would have struggled all I could to get out of their hold.   8.      Why was it so important to Rano that his brother not tell anyone that he cried? Would you have felt the same? Why or why not?   Because he was the toughest and he had to keep his title. I would have felt the same. Because I wouldn’t want to lose an amazing title like that!   A Dog Year INSTRUCTIONS: Complete the following set of cornel notes as you read this autobiography.  Answers should be done on your own paper and should be finished using complete sentences.

1.      Based on context clues in the second paragraph, what is a possible definition for the word, “keen?”

Sure or okay.

2.      What caused Devon to need a new home?  Is the narrator excited about taking on a new dog?  How do you know?

He was in big trouble at an obedience trial.

3.      Give an example of foreshadowing that takes place in the first five paragraphs.

So I hemmed and hawed about adopting a border collie, especially one with more than the usual . . . issues.

4.      Why was it a good idea to get the dog outside and into the parking lot before beginning to get to know him?

So he would not hurt many people and it was more peaceful and darker so he would not get scared.

5.      Based on context clues in the text what is a possible definition for the word, “ricocheted?”

Bouncing from one direction to another.

6.      Why do you think Devon reacted to the airport in the way he did?

There were many people, it was louder, and it was a big space to run in.

7.      What did Devon do when the narrator arrived at home and got ready to take him in the house?

He jumped on the other vehicle which was moving.

8.      The passage ends with “My dog year had begun.”  What do you think the future holds for the narrator and Devon?

A lot of training and discipline.

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