Legacy

Zhaozhao Li Professor Susan Browne English 122 23 August, 2011 Legacy In the memoir Shooting Dad, Sarah Vowell told us the story between her dad and herself. *I don’t think Sarah’s family is either happy or unhappy. The family is just normally having some misunderstanding between members. The story is about Sarah’s process of understanding her father in years, with both happiness and unhappiness. It is hard to understand our previous generation – our parents - especially during our young ages. Is it possible for a 6-year-old little girl to realize and understand the fascination part of firearms' Most girls growing up like a typical girl probably won’t, like Sarah: “It felt like it just went off by itself, as if I had no say in the matter, as if the gun just had this need. The sound it made was as big as God. I t kicked little me back to the ground like a bully, like a foe. I hurt. I don’t know if I dropped it or just handed it back over to my dad, but I do know that I never wanted to touch another one again.” There are not many girls like Sarah’s twin sister, who has spent a lot of times with her father while growing up, and enjoys the same thing with her father. As a male, I would like to consider guns as men’s staff. It’s not usual for a little girl playing with a real gun; even it’s really cool to play with. Somehow, a boy in the same age may also be scared by the huge sound and the power of the shooting gun. In my opinion, it’s never a good idea to let such a young child play with real guns. As written in the memoir, we know that Sarah was interested in arts, and Sarah’s father was interested in firearms. And both of them reject to get in each other’s area. They had never talked with other deeply for years and years. In a society requires people to be a strong independent person, relationship between families members is very easy to be weakened. In such society, people hardly try to understand others on their own. If Sarah was the only child in the family, and I was the father, I will probably fell very lonely at home, since my child will never understand me. I can always feel that my dad is so lonely, waiting for somebody to fully understand him. He did put high expectation on me, to do something that he had never had a chance to do so. About a few years before, I used to think my dad was so strict and it was so hard to find a good topic in our conversation. He didn’t care about my education too much. And I didn’t think that I could understand what he was thinking. But now, I feel like I know what he is expecting, not by language, but by heart. There is a moment that we will realize our dad and ourselves are just the same kind of people, just like the time Sarah spent the first cannon shot with her dad: “… I stare back at him, then I look over at my father’s cannon, then down at my microphone, and I think, oh. My. God. My dad and I are the same person. We’re both smart-alecky loners with goofy projects and weird equipment. And since this whole target practice outing was my idea, I was no longer his adversary. I was his accomplice. What’s worse, I was liking it.” After I open my heart to my dad, I found that there are so many things that I’m familiar with, which are on both him and me. Maybe, we are not the same kind of person. But there are something on me is from him, not only DNA or those biological stuffs. It’s the way we think, the way we live, the way we like. There is a legacy goes all the way down, by the families, between fathers and children.