Aliza Franceschelli
12th grade
Auburn High School

How much of whom we are and will become is determined by what we were and where we came from? To what degree does the influence of the environment in which a person is raised, alter their personality? Do our life experiences as children set the course for the path of our lives and the direction of our futures? I believe that all of us are influenced by our upbringing, but it is the characteristics that lie within us that help determine who we will become.

In the memoir, The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, Ms. Walls tells the incredible story of her childhood with her grossly dysfunctional family. By most people’s standards, Jeannette Walls lived a childhood of severe poverty, neglect, and abuse. She faced countless adverse experiences that were often intensified by her parent’s lack of basic parental duty. While I do believe Jeannette’s father, in his own way, loved his children and taught them to embrace life and all of its wonders, his efforts were overshadowed by his excessive abuse of alcohol which was brought about by his own childhood upbringing. Jeannette’s mother, on the other hand, was selfish, unable to face life’s realities, and was void of a true love and attachment to her children, leaving them to fend for themselves.

When Jeannette was a young girl, her father forced her to learn to swim by using what he referred to as the “sink or swim” method. Rex, continually threw his daughter into the water, calling out, “sink or swim” and Jeannette finally swam. Much of Jeannette’s life experiences mimic the sink or swim method. She would be thrown into the most difficult situations but because of something within herself, she was able to swim to the surface. I believe that most people would not be able to draw upon the strength that lies within, as did Jeannette.

It would be nearly impossible for me to relate to Jeannette and the way she was raised. I am fortunate enough to have a loving, supportive, caring family that provides for my safety and well-being. However, I believe each of us faces a time in our lives when we encounter a “sink or swim” situation. In Jeannette’s case, I believe in an odd way the adversity of her situation provided an avenue for her strength to surface. Would she be the strong, independent, determined self-reliant person she is today without having experienced the life she led? I do not think so. However, in contrast, I believe that being raised in the environment that I experience, with love, support, and encouragement has provided me with the foundation I need to be strong, independent, determined, and self-reliant as well.

Whether or not a person “sinks or swims” is not ultimately decided by their upbringing. While, the influences of childhood leave an indelible mark, the strength of character can erase the scars. How someone is raised plays a significant part of the direction their lives might take; it is what lies within that will determine the destination of their journey.

Cayuga Reads Essay Contest
2nd place

Michael Terry
12th grade
Auburn High School

Jeannette Walls and her siblings suffered through extreme poverty in their youth, and the Glass Castle is a great inquiry into looking at how poverty and privilege coexist in the United States. Even though we are the richest nation on earth, we still have such problems as poverty. Poverty and privilege exist in all countries, including the United States. Although I have never experienced poverty myself, I have seen poverty and privilege co-exist on the streets of Manhattan.

One of the most glaring examples of poverty and privilege coexisting is in New York City. I was in Times Square, and like a typical tourist, looking at all the bright lights and tall buildings. While I made my way around Manhattan Island, I noticed all the lawyers, investors and business people who work high-powered and high-paying jobs. You could just tell by their stature, their suits and their cars, that these people are quite wealthy. Although there were many well-to-do people in Manhattan, I couldn’t help but notice all the homeless people living on the Manhattan streets. These people have all their belongings on their backs, much like the way Rex and Rose Mary Walls lived when they were in New York City.

There was a staggering contrast between these two groups, this is a definite problem in our society. There have been efforts to improve the lives of those under the poverty line, with welfare and Medicaid. These systems imply the same premise as Robin Hood: take from the rich and give to the poor. With that said, the gap between the rich and poor is still growing in America. Just one example of the injustices between the rich and poor is enlistment in the armed forces. The rich kids are removed from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because they have the money to go to college, while the underprivileged kids sacrifice their lives everyday.

There are many institutions that are trying to make a difference in our society, but their task is not easy. They are challenged with breaking an age-old cycle of poverty and privilege in the United States. People such as Jeannette Walls, who are straight out of a Horatio Alger novel, are an inspiration to people everywhere. As a society, we can make the necessary changes to pull impoverished people all across the United States up to a higher quality of life. These changes will take hard work and dedication, however, our country as a whole has risen to every challenge in our past, and there is nothing to suggest that we can’t do the same in the twenty-first century.

Jonathan Schillace
12th grade
Auburn High School

In the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls recalls a conversation with her mother about the Joshua tree in the desert. “I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight.” Her mother frowned at this, telling her daughter that it’s the “struggle that gives it (the Joshua tree) its beauty.” This, in essence, describes Jeannette’s upbringing. Although suffering is looked upon as a negative thing, it is this pain that makes someone unique and beautiful without her unorthodox childhood and personal perseverance, Jeannette wouldn’t be who she is.

When the Walls’ moved to Welch on the east coast, they subjected their children to a humiliating and uncomfortable lifestyle. The shack they called home lacked the utilities many of us use without a second thought. Jeannette’s struggle to overcome these challenges allowed her to learn values and skills that many people lack. When her mother left the children in the care of Rex, Jeannette was convinced her mother was a weak person who could never provide food for the family or keep their father in check. During this time period, Jeannette was able to make a budget, which made her able to feed the kids, but she eventually came to understand her mother’s weakness. As soon as Rex asked for money she handed it over because she didn’t want to disappoint or infuriate him. Jeannette came to see that she and her mother shared the same weakness, and she accepted it. Later when Jeannette and her siblings decided to start making their own money, she got a job at the jewelry store. When she felt she was being treated unfairly, she decided to steal a watch from the jewelry case. After a day, she felt guilty about the theft, not because she stole it but because she didn’t want to compromise her integrity or pride that had been instilled by her parents. As senior year approached, Jeannette decided she wanted to get away from Welch. Knowing she could take care of herself, she set her heart on New York City. Once she arrived, Jeannette used what she had learned to get an apartment and a job. She was far better off in this environment than if she had stayed in Welch. This was due to the fact that she had been self-reliant from an early age. Thus the way her parents had forced her to be on her own made it possible to succeed in New York.

Much like Jeannette Walls, we owe our outlook to our upbringing. From an early age experiences impact the way we thin and act. It is, however, up to the individual to positively convey their hardships. If Jeannette was less determined, she could have ended up lost like her younger sister or trapped in Welch. But because of her own drive she was able to overcome adversity and grow. Only with both components may someone truly be successful.

Cayuga Reads Essay Contest
Honorable Mention

Brittany Rabuano
12th grade
Auburn High School

While walking down the busy streets of our capital, Washington, DC, my family and I walked among the busy people in suits racing to their meetings. While admiring one of the buildings I noticed a cup hovering in my face. On the other end of this mysterious cup I found a mangled mess, a man whose appearance was striking and odor unexplainable. His hair was matted down, he had few teeth and he wore a beat up woolly coat. He asked quiveringly, “May I have some change?” I was in such shock that I quickly gave him all that I had in my pockets, seventy-two cents, then hurried away to catch up with my parents.

That evening I began to have this awkward feeling. I glanced out the window and noticed it was raining and I started to think of that man. I imagined him clasping his knees to his chest on some bench desperate to find warmth. Also then I realized how poverty in our country has increased in mass of numbers. A person may ask oneself, “Don’t we all choose our own fate and destiny?” In Jeanette Walls’ case we come to an understanding that her past was unusual in many ways and wrong in respect to certain parenting methods. However, look at the type of person she became, and most importantly, what obstacles she overcame to become who she is today.

Families like Jeannette’s still exist today and the government can only support so much. We must open doors to the poor, to allow them to better themselves as citizens, and to let them choose their own fate or destiny. Jeannette’s mother had her paintings, she believed herself to be an excellent artist, but she was stuck as to how to sell her paintings. If someone had noticed her talent and allowed her to sell them, who knows what road they could have gone down for the better.

The Walls taught their children the ways of life, lessons that they would most definitely need in the future. However, they were foreshadowing their poverty. They knew that they were poor but they knew how to deal with it. Once her father told Jeannette she could have any star in the sky she wanted that Christmas, she stated that it was the most precious gift that anyone could receive. Her parents told their children that all those myths of holidays were unrealistic so they wouldn’t be drawn into society and its lies. Many families like Jeanette’s are still out there. Some choose to gather help from our government through welfare so they can afford food. Others choose not to take the help, like the man I witnessed in Washington, DC. That man may have had a family. Begging for money on the busy streets of our capital may have been what he considered his job, and my measly change may have afforded him and his family a little food for that rainy night. No one really knows the whole story of poverty because we don’t seem to get involved as much as we should.

In the end we understand that families are out there today scrounging for money on the streets just to get by and we have to realize that it’s not always fate that puts them there. We must be able to create a destiny for people to become who they truly are. In Jeannette Walls’s story she stands up for herself and motivates herself to be all that she can. That is how she made her destiny, and that is how she became the successful woman she deserves to be.

Cayuga Reads Essay Contest
Adult
1st place

Diana Jacob

Once again the outer cold of that harsh Central New York winter had crept inside our house during the night and filled my waking moment with dread. I knew I was eventually going to have to slither out from under the covers of my bed, but after a long night of shifting and tucking the blankets under my chin and around my feet, the last thing I wanted to do was thrust my shivering body into the even colder air of my bedroom. This had been a pretty routine scene on these winter mornings so, even at 6 years old, I knew there was no avoiding the blast. But I waited.

The sound of my mother’s voice enticing me from the kitchen was just the reassurance I needed to finally take the plunge. I jumped out of bed; pulled severely at one of my blankets until it came loose from the mangled mess I had made during the night and wrapped it around my body. I rushed out of my room, down the long hallway and around the sharp corner into the kitchen where I joined my mother and my two-year-old brother already warming themselves in front of the open oven door. We held each other and bathed ourselves in the radiant heat. A shivering giggle exploded from my body and my brother began to wriggle next to me. Mom wrapped her arms around both of us, each in our own blankets, and began to move her arms rapidly up and down our bodies. I don’t know if it was the friction, or the loving touch of my mother that melted away the last bit of chill. All I know is that I was warm. Really warm.

This is one of the fondest memories of my childhood. I don’t know why it was so cold that winter. My guess is that the heat bill was difficult for a single mom to pay and we had to keep it very low, or risk going without any heat at all. In my memory, though, the conditions are insignificant. I have other memories of Christmas mornings, birthday parties and Girl Scout camping trips… events that I know caused my mother to labor over every detail in order to insure that I would grow up experiencing memorable moments… but this memory, the one of us huddled around the oven on an unbearably cold winter morning… this memory is one of intense happiness and love. The conditions may not have been perfect, but the memory is.

Jeanette Walls remembers looking up at the stars with her father and receiving a gift like no other, absolutely unique and given with love. She remembers sharing the vision of a glass castle and embracing the hope that it represented. She remembers her brother’s courage to stand up for her despite the odds against him. She remembers leaving home knowing she was fully prepared to take on whatever obstacle she would encounter. She knew she would be triumphant, and so did her parents… they had raised her to be. Of course, there are limits to how close we allow our children to come to drowning in a “sing or swim” approach to parenting. But the way Walls tells it… I’d be sadder for her if she missed out on the love, the commitment to family, the unyielding desire to learn and create than I am for her now. Heat in the winter is nice, but some things are essential.

Cayuga Reads Essay Contest
Adult - 2nd place

Marcella Didio

Through the memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls provides a reader with a first-hand account of what it means to live a “tough life.” Walls allows us to feel the instability of her home(s) and family, the poverty she lived in and the starvation she felt on countless nights. In today’s world, what Jeannette Walls lived though, on account of her parents, would be considered child abuse by many (how many three-year-olds do you know cook for themselves?). Better yet, some may consider it a miracle that Walls actually survived her childhood and “turned out to be okay.” If we stop to contemplate how Walls grew to become the accomplished woman she is, it is clearly seen that she owes some of her success to her parents.

It is fair to say that Walls’ parents did not provide the bright, stable life a child deserves. In their eyes, the way they chose to live their life was the right way, while everyone else’s way of life was wrong. The constant moving, better known as the skedaddle, the hope of the family car making it from one desert town to the next, and the persistent need for food, were all just part of the Walls “adventure”. Yet, can it be said that Rex Walls and his wife did not provide their children with the life lessons they needed to attain success? The Walls parents were not always able to provide their children with basic needs and lacked material possessions, but there were valuable life lessons that Jeannette recalls receiving, from these same parents, through her life that would benefit any child (or individual for that matter).

One such life lesson was taught the day that Jeannette Walls learned how to swim. Where most parents would stand by their child’s side in a body of water, in order to ensure their safety, Rex Walls continuously threw Jeannette back into the water until she understood what needed to be done in order to be a successful swimmer. Rex Walls made his daughter understand that, “if you don’t want to sink, you better figure out how to swim” (66). The power and resonance of that statement is an essential ingredient to reaching success in life. A parent would never hope to see his child in danger or fail at anything she set out to accomplish. Yet, often times, a child may never know that danger or failure actually exists in the real world because she has always had a parent there to protect her from these realities. If a child only knows how to “swim”, will she be able to handle life if she begins to “sink”?

With this said, the “sinking” that Jeannette Walls faced through her childhood appeared to empower her to “swim” to success. Walls figured out that she hoped for a different and better life. Thanks to her upbringing, Jeannette figured out what she had to do in order to “turn out okay”.

Cayuga Reads Poetry Contest
1st place

Jennifer Farrell
12th grade
Auburn High School

Such a wonder, is who I am,
What made me, me today?

The critics, and his drinking,
The arguments every day,

But something strong, that binds us near,
Is a fortress to shut out our fear.

This is the power of power,
The strongest castle of strength,

The journey to continue on,
And conquer, no matter what the length.

If you argue back, I will turn from you,
If you don’t want my mind, I’ll go away.

Don’t shut yourself in out of selfishness,
Because look, we’ve made it to another day.

Whether we are freezing to death,
Or suffering and starving almost ready to die,

You built us this castle with your heart,
And in its walls is where safety lies.

So if I am I for one day longer,
If you helped me to walk one step stronger

Family comes with such a treat,
A different adventure, never knowing what I’ll meet.

Cayuga Reads Poetry Contest
2nd place

Jennifer Currier
7th grade
Auburn High School

The Glass Castle

Growing up, a hard life they faced,
Moving around,
In different homes, they were placed.
Time to time they slept in cars,
On Christmas, no money
Their father gave them stars.
When their father was drunk,
He was a dangerous guy,
But, when sober, gentle and sly.
Their mother, carefree,
Spontaneous artist,
The decisions she made weren't the smartest.
In a family that barely got by,
Lived for the moment,
That just had to try,
Although the castle never did arrive,
The children managed to survive,
They all though, finally fended
And made this memoir happily ended.

Cayuga Reads Poetry Contest
3rd place

Eric Gould
12th grade
Auburn High School

A man of such inspiration,
Of great knowledge and wisdom,
He who can lead others,
But cannot lead himself,
He seems to have all the answers,
But when he needs them the most,
He will search in desperation,
And at the bottom of the bottle,
The answer will never be found.
Will he ever pick himself up
From the ground that holds him down?
Or can he turn his back and walk away,
On everyone that depends on him?
But depend on him they always will.
But he will always depend,
On the one little thing,
Just one more drink.

Cayuga Reads Poetry Contest
Honorable Mention

Maggie Race
12th grade
Auburn High School

The city lights shine in the night
The cars fly by beside me
I stop and stare at the woman
Who was walking down the alley.

No shoes, dirty face
Ripped holes all through her jeans
No one around seemed to care
I watched the woman as she reached the dumpster
And stuck her hand inside.

As I looked closer and closer
My heart sank to the floor
I realized who the woman was
My own flesh and blood.

Thoughts started racing through my head
I hid my face in the seat
I feared that she would see me,
Calling out, "Jeannette”.

I despise myself for hiding
But I froze right into place
No one around me knew
The connection she had to me.