Rough Draft

Orosco 1

Zack Orosco

Ms. Knapp

English 1B

3/8/11

The Flowers

What shapes people’s characters that makes them who they are today? Family and friends are factors that can make or break people’s futures. If relationships with family and friends are broken then the chances of having a stable future is slim. If they are functional then having a bright future are greater. The Flowers, by Dagoberto Gilb, shows how a child can have a bad functional family with bad events surrounding him. Sonny is a teenager that lives with his mom Silvia and his step-father Cloyd  in Los Angeles. Silvia and Cloyd play big roles that shape Sonny in who he is with some help from his love interest Nica.

Sonny is a Mexican boy that is living in East Side Los Angeles with his single parent mom Silvia in an apartment complex named Los Flores. Silvia is fairly good looking woman for her age. Sonny sees the way men that date his mom look at her as if they were in a desert and they just found water. “...I was always seeing how men looked at her....How pretty she was in the way men are flipping through pages of dirty magazines” (Gilb 10). He sees men come and never grows too attached to them because he knows that there is going to be another guy that will come in. Silvia has a close relationship with her son. She is the only one that has taken care of him through out his life and always comforts and supports him. Until Cloyd comes in the the picture and marries Silvia.

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Cloyd is the owner of the complex, marries Silvia, and has Sonny and Silvia move in with him.  Sonny has never had a father figure in his life and does not like Cloyd from the start. “He was a fake blue suit and tie” (Gilb 9). He believes that Cloyd is just like all of the other guys that  will be around for a little while, everything that Cloyd says goes through one ear and out the other, and when he does listen to him Sonny gives Cloyd a one or few word answer reply. Cloyd wants to impress Silvia by showing her that he cares what Sonny does and to become the father figure that her son never had. But he isn’t the only one that is trying to impress someone. Silvia is trying to impress Cloyd by showing him that she is the wife that he wants. She tries to cook, wear sexy clothes, and be a stay at home wife that makes the house clean. “My mom was cooking food. Really. She was making something Mexican, even if she didn’t know how to cook it ant better than anything else” Sonny does not like how both Cloyd and his mom are trying to impress each other. He believes that they are trying to hard to be something that they are not and not showing who they really are. They’re are not the only ones that are forming how Sonny thinks.

Another character that impact Sonny’s life also live in the same complex. Nica is a girl that he likes and wants to spend more time with but she is stuck at home babysitting her brother. ”I wished I could kiss her. I didn’t know how I could.... My mind kissed her lips and cheeks and around her nose and around her eyes” (Gilb 61)Sonny goes over and encourages her to go out with him. She can’t leave because her parents will get mad if they found out she left her brother by himself. Sonny never stops trying, continues to visit her just to see her, and he can not stop thinking about her. His love for her grows as he wants to free Nica from her father’s grasp by 

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sending her to Mexico. “...where I was wishing Nica....no, not here in this greasy shit with me staring up! That’s the  best I had? She had to go, she had to go” (Gilb 240). If you love something you have to let it go. He loved her enough to set her free from the world that she once lived in. If Nice were to come back then it was meant to be and if she doesn’t then it was not meant to be.

The Flowers really shows how a teenager can get something positive out of something that is totally bad. Silvia will always be his mom even if she tries to be somebody she is not, Cloyd will be another guy that is in his mom’s life but he will soon appreciate what he does for his them, and Nica was once trapped in a prison set by her father and released by Sonny to be free from the life that she doesn’t deserve. People come and go but the ones that stick around are worth having.

Week Two Scene

The scene that I really liked was when he was walking home and the car was following him. Sonny then ran to Nica's apartment to get away from the guy that was following him. Nica and Sonny were talking when Sonny got the urge to want to kiss Nica. He went in to depth about how it would be and then he wakes up or he just remembered what the twins were talking about if Sonny has ever been with a girl. I found this part interesting because it goes from suspicious to intimate then to a random conversation with the twins. I can connect with this passage because I was trying to get away from problems in school that I was having when I met a girl that I liked at the time and I imagined having her as my girlfriend and how wonderful it would be. We talked and then I find out that she is only talking to me and other guys to piss of her boyfriend.

Gilb, Dagiberto Flowers (pg 56--61)

Flowers Prediction

I think that Sonny is going to run away from home and realize that he misses his mom too much. He shows that he is getting mad with the things that he has gone through and yet he still loves his mom more than anyone in his life. I believe that once a bad event that triggers his conscience to leave that he would be so pissed off that in order for him to forget about it that running away would be his only options in his eyes. He is lost in the world and yet he knows that his mom is the only person that has been with him from the time he was born until now. Another reason why I think that he is going to run away is that he wants to find his dad. Even though his dad left, I believe that he is still looking for a father figure that he never had.

I Am

I am Zack Orosco. I have been at Gav too long, but I am still in school trying to reach my academic goal of getting a B.A. in English and minor in Administration of Justice. For my career goal, I am going to become a police officer. I fell in love with that job after a ride along in downtown San Jose. I consider myself a bit of a sports freak because I play sports, watch sports, and I know sports. If something changes my mind about not becoming a police officer then I would like to become a sports writer for ESPN or a sports company. I am the oldest of three siblings and was raised by my parents in Gilroy my entire life. I did not really like writing or reading when I was growing up but the last couple of years I have seen that writing gets me to a place that makes me relax. I write about memories and things that are on my mind. I am pretty open to basically everything and I like to meet to people.