Afternoon Pages
What does the word ‘parental care’ mean for you? Are there any words which you desire to tell your parents, but you are enable to do for some reasons?
We don’t choose our parents, and personally I don’t want to do this. I love my parents very much, I respect them, I can’t even imagine the other married couple as my parents. I don’t want to change anything. I appreciate my parents’ care, but even if they overdo with it, I can’t hurt them by saying: “I don’t want to hear you anymore. Let me do my own thing.” I’m especially close with my mum, she is a wise and a very kind woman who loves as no one else in this world. I’m thankful to her. My father is an ordinary man with his own merits and drawbacks. But he loves my mum and me and treats us like his two princesses. The only words I’d like to say to say to them and which I tell them very often are: “Thank you. Thank you for everything which you have done for me: for my education, for my well-being and for your efforts that you had put to make especially what I am by to date.” I do it without shyness. And we, children should remember that the words ‘I love you’ are the beat rewarding and the best cure for our parents.

The Book which Has Taught Me a Lot…
Well, to tell the truth, I am not the one who reads a lot. Maybe this is due to the lack of time, may be to my personal laziness, but I fully appreciate the valuable experience which we gain from reading books. A book is the right companion when you are alone, when you want to escape from this noisy world. Each book creates a special, intimate space, which may be absolutely different: comic, romantic, fantastic, dramatic, tragic, mysterious, fairy…I can enumerate endlessly. However, whatever the difference is, there is one clear factor: the right book is a good lesson; it’s like a school of life with its own bad and good examples, with its own patterns of human relationship, and with its own views upon life.
At present I’m reading a book by Theodore Dreiser “An American Tragedy”. I have read only one hundred and thirty pages, it is very little to attain the real understanding of the authorial idea, but I can tell that this book has taught me a lot. First of all this book has struck with it’s precise descriptive passages which build up an overwhelming sense of tragic inevitability, they show how tightly bounds the knot of human misconceptions of life and emphasize personal weaknesses which result from dangerous attaining of that fabulous ‘American Dream’. The main hero- Clyde Griffiths is a boy of weak will and little self-awareness, but the one of a very high ambition. His appetite to succeed has a destructive power, in attempts to reach his ‘American Dream’ and selection of possible ways of attain it he ruins his kind innate capacities and rescues other people who love him. But these negative features cannot be compared to the terrible sense of being ashamed of what you are, of your background and of course, which must be mentioned of your parents. At first this boy has made me fill disgustion for him, because for me it’s the worst sin in this world. I never understand such kind of people. How can you be ashamed of people who gave birth to you, who brought you to life? For me it is absolutely unbearable. Clyde’s parents were ordinary people, they weren’t heavy-drinkers, they were just poor and couldn’t give him all the trappings of wealth and even their religious occupation and ascetic lifestyle didn’t entitled the boy to be ashamed of them, to vanish the mentioning of his background.
Theodore Dreiser is a master of description, by means of precise descriptive passages we don’t only get the meaning of the plot in details, but also gain the hint of the authorial thought. This book has taught me two main things: never be ashamed of what you are, and follow straight to your aim, but while achieving this or that goal, chose very thoroughly the possible means of realizing your dreams. “Don’t harm” as it is said in the Bible.