Why Finding Fish by Antoine Fisher Is My Favorite Book

¶ … Fisher

If I follow the path of memory back to its start, I begin life looking out my upstairs bedroom window. It's here I have my best daydreams and where I can make up stories I like to think about. In my mind's first flash of light, I am here, on the inside looking out of the Picketts' two-story house on a street at the edge of Glenville, the second house from the corner, a block from (Public School) 105. This is a snow-covered morning when the other kids, already school age, are gone and I'm alone, staring out into the blinding whiteness, thinking it's no fun being left behind, no one to play with."

Antwone Fisher's autobiography starts with these words. The book caught and held my attention from the first pages until the final period, not because I had personally experienced the events of Mr. Fishers' life, but because his story is one which included elements which all of us face as we grow from childhood to adulthood. I live in a stable, 2 parent home, and haven't experienced the loneliness of being raised in institutions because my mother gave birth in prison. I haven't lived in an orphanage, or in a temporary foster home. I can't fathom the depth of loneliness that someone would face while spending most of his maturation in the impersonal foster care system. I get up every day, and am greeted by my parents in a warm home filled with my personal stuff. I know it will be here when I come home; a sense of security that Antwone may have never felt.

However, I do know what is like to be alone. There are times when I feel that my feelings are understood by no one. I wonder how I will ever make the transition into the working world as an adult, when my teen age life is full of struggles that seem larger than life itself. There are times when I try my best, and fail miserably. It's at those times that I find pieces of my life written in the pages of Fishers'.

Somehow, though convinced he was unwanted and unworthy, Fish refused to allow his spirit to be broken. He refused to believe that failure was a person. He found courage, and faith which stood against everything he had experience. Fish choose to believe that failure was an event, not a person.

By looking beyond the difficulty of today, he became determined to raise himself, to listen to social workers and teachers who intervened on his behalf, and to nurture a courageous heart, a scathing sense of humor, and a wondrous imagination. All of these things sustained him with big dreams, that eventually there would be a better day.