Part I: The Horror/Purity of Accidentally Calling Your Teacher ‘Mom’

[ Photo of James Island County Dog Park on their official website]

I went to James Island County Park on Saturday. My destination was the dog park, which is located inside the whole facility. It really was gorgeous that day, with the sky being a clear blue and the weather being cool but hot enough for me to roll the windows down without catching a chill. It was a day made for being outside. The only downside of the park is that it costs two dollars per person. While not the end of the world, two dollars to a broke college student is equivalent to one hundred dollars. Nevertheless, I was there for my dog, so I reluctantly handed over my two crumpled dollars to the older employee working the booth. I was then rewarded with a bright smile and a dog treat for my pup in the back.

The exchange was so happy and pure that my mind went blank for a moment. The person turned to me with the same smile and said, “Enjoy your time!” I replied with the same amount of enthusiasm, “You too!” It was not until a few seconds after I drove away that I caught my slip-up and felt my cheeks flush. That was not the first time I said something like that to an employee when I was the customer; most likely it would not be the last as well. But instead of letting the little incident go, I let it fester some more and thought about why that is a common occurrence in society. It’s almost on the same level as accidentally calling your teacher ‘mom’, not on an embarrassing scale (in my opinion, the latter takes the cake by a mile), but in how often it occurs in society.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that when I have that slip-up, it is usually when I am interacting with a person that I genuinely feel comfortable around. This conclusion came from me realizing that when I would call a teacher ‘mom’, it would be because I felt safe around them. The interaction with the park worker was so pure that I felt genuine about wanting them to have a great time, whatever that might look like.

Part II: Little Exercise by Elizabeth Bishop

My name is Mallery McKay, and I was completely clueless as to which piece of prose or poetry truly spoke to me to analyze. I decided to choose a piece of work that dealt with the struggles of mental health, mainly anxiety, as I struggle with a great deal of it. I thought it was so interesting develing into a writer’s mindset of anxiety and how the struggles from it play out in the work itself, format-wise and symbolic.

[ Play Ballerina: Yehezkel Raz]

I love how metaphorical this poem truly gets; it really makes you work for the true meaning of these lines through symbols mainly relating to the natural world. Bishop uses our knowledge and usage of the natural world as a vessel to reflect on one’s personal mental struggles living in our society today.

 Bishop starts the first stanza off with immediate tension through the imagery of an approaching storm; this could be symbolizing worries that a person can deal with, looming in the person’s mind, making it all they think about. Then describing the storm as a dog seems to derive the storm from its power, almost domesticating it for the reader.

Bishop uses elements of the sea as the main symbols of her metaphors, like when she mentions the strengths of a mangrove. That refers to a type of tropical tree that is adapted to live on the shoreline and thrive on saltwater when the tide comes and floods its roots. I believe Bishop uses the roots to symbolize how a person can find strength in another, and the beauty of that statement is that it does not have to be just a human. I think the second stanza can be read as finding solace in the natural world or finding something that makes you stronger, whether it be a human or anything else.

I think the most interesting part of this poem for me is how Bishop shows this mental health battle through the storm and how the natural world around it reacts. How the different elements’ reactions showcase different people with their different struggles, like the mangroves and their tough support system or the heron, who flies away but the water still shines behind it, implies that it looks for the best in the worst circumstances. To me, Bishop’s work showcases how people of the same environment can deal with struggles differently because of their own mindset and their own advantages.