Ocean Chapter 5!

Welcome back for the final post for the course! Today we will be delving back into "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" for another look into the fascinating childhood of our Hero. I just wanted to take a moment to say the class has been a pleasure and I hope to continue the blog if time allows!

Now, without further ado...

Chapter Five

What Happens

The boy was looking at his foot. He noticed a pink scar; one of his earliest memories was of stepping on some glass and getting a cut on his foot. He prodded the scar with his finger and noticed there was a hole. He felt something retreating inside the hole after he had touched it. He went to the bathroom and got some tweezers to pull whatever it was out. He dug in and tried to grasp it, and realized it was a worm. The worm refused to budge so he ran his foot under hot water to get it to release the walls of the hole. Eventually he was able to extract it and held it up to observe it. The boy did not kill animals, but he knew he needed to get rid of the worm. It was dangerous.

He held the worm above the drain in the tub and watched it wriggle around in the tweezers. Then he dropped it down and plugged the drain so it would not be able to crawl back up. Putting a Band-Aid on his foot and the tweezers back in the medicine cabinet, he stopped to peer at himself in the mirror.

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly as looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?

He returned to his bedroom, waited until his sister was asleep, and read a mystery until he fell asleep.

Commentary

This was a short chapter with not a lot going on. What I found really interesting was that it was so relatable. No, I had never had a worm inside my foot, but I do remember as a child, not asking a lot of help from my parents. I didn't want to bug them. I was curious and I wanted to figure things out for myself.

The boy also does not want to bother his parents with questions. He sees the problem and fixes it. He had a wart once on his knee, and pulled it out with his penknife. By doing do, he learned his tolerance for superficial pain and also found out what a wart root looked like. Being independent, he learned a lot more from that experiment, than just asking his folks.

The last scene in front of the mirror was very familiar too. Even to this day I will sometimes catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and just wonder. Who is that? Who am I? Sometimes I feel like I am outside of my body, just watching for what it will do. The expressions my face makes, the intricate movement of my muscles; I just feel very detached from it all.

Anyways, enough of my rambling, thank you for reading!!!