English 1540 EL 10 Take-Home Exam: Please

English 1540 EL 10 Take-Home Exam:

Please read the short essay called "Something from the Sixties" reproduced for you below. Feel free to make notes as you read if this helps you to understand it. Then, complete the following questions in complete sentences and paragraphs.

Something from the Sixties

About five o'clock last Sunday evening, my son burst into the kitchen and said, "I didn't know it was so late!" He was due at a party immediately -- a sixties party, he said -- and he needed something from the sixties to wear. My son is almost fifteen years old, the size of a grown man, and when he bursts into a room glassware rattles and the cat on your lap grabs on to your knees and leaps from the starting block. I used to think the phrase "burst into the room" was only for detective fiction, until my son got his growth.

He can burst in a way that, done by an older fellow, would mean that angels had descended into the front yard and were eating apples off the tree, and he does it whenever he's late -- as being my son, he often is. I have so little sense of time that when he said he needed something from the sixties it took me a moment to place that decade. It's the one he was born toward the end of. I asked, "What sort of stuff you want to wear?" He said, "I don't know. Whatever they wore then."

We went up to the attic, into a long, low room under the eaves where I've squirreled away some boxes of old stuff; I dug into one box, and the first thing I hauled out was the very thing he wanted. A thigh-length leather vest covered with fringe and studded with silver, it dates from around 1967, a fanciful time in college-boy fashions. Like many boys, I grew up in nice clothes my mother bought, but was meanwhile admiring Roy Rogers, Sergeant Rock, the Cisco Kid, and other sharp dressers, so when I left home I was ready to step out and be somebody.

Military Surplus was the basic style then -- olive drab, and navy-blue pea jackets -- with a touch of Common Man in the work boots and blue work shirts, but if you showed up in Riverboat Gambler or Spanish Peasant or Rodeo King, nobody blinked, nobody laughed. I haven't worn the vest in ten years, but a few weeks ago, seeing a picture of Michael Jackson wearing a fancy band jacket like the ones the Beatles wore on the cover of "Sgt. Pepper," I missed the fun I used to have getting dressed in the morning.

Pull on the jeans, a shirt with brilliant-red roses, a pair of Red Wing boots. A denim jacket. Rose-tinted glasses. A cowboy hat. Or an engineer's cap. Or, instead of jeans, bib overalls. Or white trousers with blue stripes. Take off the denim jacket, take off the rose shirt, try the neon-green bowling shirt with "Moose" stitched on the pocket, the black dinner jacket. Now the dark-green Chinese Army cap. And an orange tie with hula dancers and palm trees.

Then presto! I pulled the rose shirt out. He put it on, and the vest, which weighs about fifteen pounds, and by then I had found him a hat -- a broad-brimmed panama that ought to make you think of a cotton planter enjoying a Sazerac on a veranda in New Orleans. I followed him down to his bedroom, where he admired himself in a full-length mirror.

"Who wore this?" he asked.

I said that I did.

"Did you really? This? You?

Yes, I really did. After he was born, in 1969, I wore it less and less, finally settling down with what I think of as the Dad look, and now I would no sooner wear my old fringed vest in public than walk around in a taffeta tutu. I loved the fact that it fitted him so well, though, and his pleasure at the heft and extravagance of the poses he struck in front of the mirror.

Later, when he got home and reported that his costume was a big hit and that all his friends had tried on the vest, it made me happy again. You squirrel away old stuff on the principle of its being useful and interesting someday; it's wonderful when the day finally arrives. That vest was waiting for a boy to come along -- a boy who has a flair for the dramatic, who bursts into rooms -- and to jump right into the part. I'm happy to be the audience.

Question 1:

Identify two passages from the essay where the author uses description effectively. For each passage, explain the impact or effect of this description.

Answer.

"My son is almost fifteen years old, the size of a grown man, and when he bursts into a room glassware rattles and the cat on your lap grabs on to your knees and leaps from the starting block. I used to think the phrase "burst into the room" was only for detective fiction, until my son got his growth."

This is a powerful description because here the father is explaining the character of the son and how he changed by becoming a grown man. The son in the father's eye is still a child but he now looks like a grown up man. In a certain way, the son still behaves like a child by suddenly "bursting into the room," scaring away the cat and making glassware rattle. By saying that the son burst into the kitchen, the father explains that the son is a teenager -- somewhere between being a child and grown up man. There is something child-like in his behavior but also impulsiveness of a teenager and the look of a grown up man. To make his point, however, the father is also speaking with a bit of hyperbole.