How the environment may change individuals Hugh Rigby Devry University

Hugh Rigby English 108 Professor Monaghan How the environment may change individuals

No Matter where you live the people you live around can be very influential to you. The attitudes of the people who live around you can greatly impact you, and transform you into someone that you are not. In both essays, The Old house, by David Sedaris and, They All Just went away, by Joyce Carol Oates the neighbors tend to stand out as a memory more than the authors own families, hence influencing their identities. David Sedaris, in the beginning of his essay lived in a house with his family, but for some reason he didnt think that the space which his parents were providing was fitting for him. In his mind, an ideal home was, a home where history was respected,(Sedaris) the author didnt feel this way living with his parents, so he found a job as a dishwasher and as soon as he got his first paycheck he started looking for a place that suited him. After getting my first paycheck, I scouted out a place to live. My two requirements were that it be cheap and close to where I worked, and on both counts I succeeded. The author finds what he thinks of as his ideal spot in a boarding house where he met the owner, Rosemary Dowd adjusting her, Room For Rent, sign as he passed by. I couldn't have dreamed that it would also be old and untouched, an actual boarding house. The owner was adjusting her "Room for Rent" sign as I passed(Sedaris) In the essay, They All Just Went Away, by Joyce Carol Oates we see a young girl who becomes aware of her surroundings at a very early age. She was able to roam free and explore the neighborhood, especially the abandoned buildings, which she seemed to be very fascinated with. I was an articulate, verbal child. Yet I could not have explained what drew me to the abandoned houses, barns, silos,

corncribs. Oates, in her essay also gives a perfect analogy for a house and a home. A house: a structural arrangement of space, geometrically laid out to provide what are called rooms, these divided from one another by verticals and horizontals called walls, ceilings, floors. The house contains the home but is not identical with it. The house anticipates the home and will very likely survive it, reverting again simply to house when home (that is, life) departs. For only where there is life can there be home. She goes on to explain the story about the Weidels and clearly paints the uprising of their dysfunctional family and how they became such. It ends in her befriending Ruth Weidels in hopes to finding answers to questions she had. The author took a look at the outside of the building and knew that that was the place for him, he even agreed to take the room before taking a look at it. Paint chipping off of the sides of the building, shingles missing from the roof, what others would call a dump was enticing to Sedaris. I hadn't even crossed the threshold when I agreed to take the room. What sold me was the look of the place. Some might have found it shabby-"a dump," my father would eventually call it-but, unless you ate them, a few thousand paint chips never hurt anyone. The same could be said for the groaning front porch and the occasional missing shingle. It was easy to imagine that the house, set as it was, on the lip of a student parking lot, had dropped from the sky, like Dorothy's in "The Wizard of Oz," It is apparent that this author doesnt really like nice things, the way his parents did, he preferred old and broken down. A total eye sore. The front door opened into a living room, or, as Rosemary called it, "the parlor." The word was old-fashioned, but fitting. Velvet curtains framed the windows. The walls were papered in a faint, floral pattern, and doilies were everywhere, laid flat on tabletops and sagging like cobwebs from the backs of overstuffed chairs. My eyes moved from one thing to another In both stories, we see parallels that bring both authors to differing levels of maturation. Two points namely are awareness and sense of responsibility. The young lady in They All Just Went Away,

vividly expresses the beauties that she experiences through the lenses of her life. Because of her liberty from an early age to roam free, she had an early onset on awareness. She was in the prime of her curiosity as a child. Abandoned buildings were not just buildings. These were structures buried with rich history; stories of its once inhabitants. The narrator writes, Where a house has been abandoned unworthy of being sold to new tenants, very likely seized by the county for default on taxes and the properly held in escrowyou can be sure there has been a sad story. There have been devastated lives. Lives to be spoken of pityingly. How they went wrong. In The Old House, Sedaris started noticing the changes when his landlord (Rosemary) rented a room to a young man named Chazz and moved her mother and daughter back in. Her mother was a psychic and her daughter was just released from a mental institution. Before Chaz moved in, the upstairs was fairly quiet. Now I heard the sound of his radio through the wall, a rock station that made it all the harder to pretend I was living in gentler times. When he was bored, he'd knock on my door and demand that I give him a cigarette. Then he'd stand there and smoke it, complaining that my room was too clean, my sketches were too sketchy, my old-fashioned bathrobe was too old-fashioned. "Well, enough of this," he'd say. "I have my own life to lead." Three or four times a night this would happen. Chazz was beginning to get annoying at this point, to make things worst things downstairs were also different. Rosemary was not the same person that he met when renting the room, as a result of her mom moving in, she now dressed like anyone else, no jewelry or make up, she wasnt as colorful anymore she was just plain. The parlor as Rosemarie called it was now full of iced-tea mix cans, boxed pots and pans piled up in the corner. I went to check my mail one morning and found Rosemary dressed just like anyone else her age: no hat or costume jewelry, just a pair of slacks and a hohum blouse with unpadded shoulders. She wasn't wearing makeup, either, and had neglected to curl her hair. "What can I tell you?" she said. "That kind of dazzle takes time, and I just don't seem to have any lately." The parlor, which had always been just so, had gone downhill as well. Now there were cans of

iced-tea mix sitting on the Victrola, and boxed pots and pans parked in the corner where the credenza used to be. There was no more listening to Jack Benny, because that was Sister Sykes's bath time. The people who we turn out to be is greatly influenced by the environment and the type of people that we surround ourselves with. Our environment can be used as a way to train us to become better individuals in society