Generations Through Time


    A passage that stood out to me in the second half of the book, was the one called “Teeth.” This passage stood out to me because even though it jumps throughout different points in time, there is a lead narrative that weaves and connects all those times together, even though they are from different centuries and vastly different. If anything, this passage can show how trauma is dealt with and passed through generations. Grampy’s family story particularly stood out to me, because Phil starts it in 1906 with Grampy’s father growing up as a Jewish person in Poland during the Nazi period, and the lasting psychological effects it had on him.  If Phil is writing about Grampy’s father’s experience around 100 years later, then that shows the effect of Grampy’s father’s trauma that is passed down through the family.

            Then Phil goes back even further in time, tracing Grampy’s lineage all the way back to 1771, to a time where Grampy’s ancestors were being discriminated against, and not being given proper burials. To add on, I found it interesting how Phil also managed to weave in his father’s stories in-between Grampy’s. For example, right after this burial scene, the time moves forward again to a happier time (at the time), Phil’s parent's wedding. At this point in the book, however, the audience knows that Phil’s parent’s marriage is doomed, so we can take the wedding news as either happy for the time being, or with a grain of irony.

After this wedding passage, Phil takes us farther into the future, where the theme of family lineage is once again brought up but this time by Grampy’s cousin. Grampy’s cousin talks about how after so many years, he still harbors hate towards the people that cut short his family tree, and once again this shows how a disturbance in one generation can have a ripple effect that affects others after it. Even Phil ends the passage by saying that he will “never forget” what happened to his family, even though he personally never lived through it and has only heard of it through stories. Grampy though, wants Phil to forget, in order to finally stop the cycle of trauma.

Just like how Phil manipulates time in order to prove a point or tell a story, I feel like time is manipulated as well when I teach my student for service learning. For some reason, I feel like time passes by extremely fast when I’m doing Spanish homework with her. Once we finish, I always say, “what do you want to learn next?” but when I look at the time, I realize that we usually only have a couple of minutes left until the meeting is over. One thing that I really admire about my student is that she makes use of every minute of our time. Even when we have three- or two-minutes left, she suggests going over vocabulary or something that we talked about last class. She definitely makes good use of her time.


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