#333 Taped to the Sky- Luis Alberto Urrea

#333 Taped to the Sky- Luis Alberto Urrea

Hubbard is in a bad way. His wife, the woman he bought a car and an education for, the woman he just helped get through an AA program, left with her sponsor. He decided to take the car back and drive his troubles away.

South to Louisiana, West to Texas, North to Colorado, etc…“This whole chunk of the map was written in poems and liquor bottle labels.”

His grief subsided with each state, each dumb roadside attraction, each violence run-in with the local drunks. As the sky got bigger, his head got clearer:

“There were patterns moving across the sky, high, where small scallops of cloud shimmered like mother-of-pearl. He felt a part of the great becoming, the revelation of the West.”

Sometimes when you feel abandoned, maybe you’ve really been set free. Sometimes, you still need to be taught a lesson.

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#328 The Key- Eudora Welty

#328 The Key- Eudora Welty

Albert and Ellie are in train station waiting to travel to Niagara Falls. It is a long awaited wedding trip they have worked hard and saved for. Ellie is skeptical that this trip will change what’s wrong with their marriage.

Albert is “too shy for this world.” “He looked homemade, as though his wife had self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.”

Sitting in the station, lost in his shyness, a key suddenly slip on the floor into his vision. Most of the rest of the passengers witnessed the key being dropped by another man, but not Albert. He saw it as a sign, a way to change his life.

“Now you can stop being ashamed of me, for being so cautious and slow all my life, for taking my own time…You can take hope. Because it was I who found the key.”

The Key was happiness, a change for the better, and it was all his. Ellie, at first liked the change, but then resented it, seeing Albert’s love of happiness as a challenge to her, as if she herself wasn’t enough for Albert. To her, Albert’s happiness was selfish unless she also possessed it:

“Happiness…is something that appears to you suddenly, that it is meant for you, a thing for which you reach for and pick up and hide at your breast, a shiny thing that reminds you of something alive and leaping.”

Rating: 7-7-7-6 Total= 27