As Tim and his friend race into Tim's father's detached workshop to build a birdhouse for a school project, Tim is hoping that his father is not there drinking his booze and embarrasses him. Luckily, once they get there, his father was no where visible. They get started on the birdhouse. Tim reaches into his father's toolbox to find nails and a hammer and his little fingers graze over something cold, hard, and smooth. As he looks into the drawer and realizes it is one of his father's stashed beer bottles, he closes the drawer immediately to not let his family's secret get out to his unaware friend. Unfortunately, as Tim is trying to come up with an excuse to leave the workshop, his friend decides to have a seat on a cushioned workshop stool. They suddenly heard a crunch sound and the friend gets up immediately. The secret is out as bits of crushed, dark brown glass fall out from underneath the cushion. Tim feels shameful, embarrassed, and appalled. Tim's childhood experience with the drinking is comparable to Scott Russell Sanders" upbringing. Scott Russell Sanders grew up in the fifties and sixties in the Midwest, had a sometimes verbally abusive alcoholic father, and experienced feelings guilt, embarrassment, and disappointment. Sanders" conveyed that an alcoholic father affects family members and everybody else he encounters, usually in a bad way through secrets and lies. Alcoholics are consumed by the alcohol, and it transforms the close people to the alcoholic and the alcoholic themselves. Sanders conveyed this by using descriptive words and images and allowing the reader to interpret their own meaning to analogies.
Sanders uses diction to demonstrate how the drinking was a family secret. Words like "hidden, slips, and stashes" in long, descriptive sentences to allow the reader to interpret what one would feel witnessing these events and to show the secretiveness of alcoholism (138).
... . One example, a name known throughout the states, is Charles Manson. Charles Manson's home life was not what we would call normal. In fact, he was the son of a teenage, bisexual, alcholic prostitute, and once was traded for a single pitcher of beer. Another example is Henry Lee Lucas, a famous serial killer who, as a child, lost an eye after a severe beating by his ... ...
... . If all members of the family, or at least both adults are in recovery, there is explicit or tacit approval for the process of change (Brown and Lewis 123). The alcholic is going through change and dealing with problems that they would have normally turn to a glass of drink to get of the problem. If both partners are not in recovery ... ...
