Volar/Things they carried

Once I saw our landlord, whom I knew my parents feared, sitting in a treasure room dressed in an ermine coat and a large gold crown. He sat on the floor counting his dollar bills. I played a trick on him. Going up to his building’s chimney, I blew a little puff of my super- breath into his fireplace, scattering his stacks of money so that he had to start counting all over again, I could more or less program my Supergirl dreams in those days by focusing on the object of my current obsession.

I choose this passage because it shows that although the author was a child at the time that she had insight to the world/financial issues that her parents may have faced. In this passage she brings the real issues into her dreams but deals with them in a fantasy sort of way. She also states that she could program or control her dreams of this nature so she at least wanted to help her parents out.

The object that stood out to me in "The Things They carried" was the severed thumb that Norman Bowker carried. The thumb was given to him by Henry Dobbins a fellow memeber of his platoon. The thumb to me signfied itself as spoils of war being cut from a VC boy pressumbly a solider. Which made it stick out even more was the fact that Norman one of the gentler soliders religiously kept it with him as a sign of good luck.