“An American Childhood”

I enjoyed the excerpt from Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood” for a few different reasons. The first reason was her enthusiasm and eagerness to learn from the microscope. Even if I had no interest in what she was studying, I couldn’t help enjoy reading about it because of they way she expressed her enthusiasm. Secondly, I could relate a bit to the role her parents chose to play in her development. Growing up, I was the only child of my parent’s marriage (a second marriage for both) and I was the youngest child by eight years. Like Dillard’s parents, they supported my various endeavors and supplied me with whatever it was I needed, they were not what I refer to as “driving parents”. By “driving parents” I mean they were never the parents to drive or pick up my friends from various events or activities, nor were they sideline/bleacher parents at my different sporting events or school activities. They cared about what I was doing, but they were not their holding my hand through everything. While I would not describe my parents lack of involvement to be quite as disengaged (perhaps not the right word), as Dillards, but they certainly allowed me to foster my own strong sense of independence and enabled me to learn from my (many) mistakes and experiences.
I did a bit of background reading on Dillard and I found a few more similarities. Her parents instilled in her the ability to have a sense of humor, mine did as well. And while my parents were not in attendance at school events, they did instill in me many other useful traits and skills.
I also read that Dillard was very much into Emerson and Thoreau. That caught my eye because I began to think back to “Walden Pond” and then, who do you think began running through my mind? PERCY!!!