Connection Essay

Connection Essay

Families are a complicated web of associations, always changing and adapting to various situations.   The bridge between old and young, male and female, adult and child, is not a static link.   As families evolve, members form connections which shift over time.   Each generation fills a definite role in contributing to the strength of a family: student, teacher, disciplinarian, breadwinner, caregiver and the one who needs the care.   These connections and their opposite disconnections become the story of the family.   In “The Stare” by Billy Collins and “Nino Leading an Old Man to Market” by Leonard Nathan, the connections between sons and fathers and grandfathers disconnect from the traditional concept of family dynamics and reconnect in different roles as dictated by time.
Traditionally, male family members occupy roles that are strictly defined by society.   Fathers care for their sons; they are the teacher, the disciplinarian, and the breadwinner.   However, in some instances the roles reverse as the son and the father grow older.   In “The Stare,” by Billy Collins, the son no longer receives his father’s care.   He must now provide care for his father.   In the opening lines, the son explains, “I am shaving my father/ late on a summer afternoon.”   On a typical summer afternoon, the father would be teaching his son how to fish or how to prepare for a date.   In the poem these conventional roles have disconnected and reconnected so that the son is now caring for his father.   The son is providing intimate personal care for his father who appears to no longer be able to provide for himself.   The son relates his father’s response to this care: “he screws up his face this way and that/ to make way for the razor,/ as someone passes with a tray.”   It appears as if the father remembers the act of shaving but can no longer shave independently and is not responsive to his surroundings.   Moreover, the son comments that, “it is impossible to remember/ such closeness.”   While the...