remake of beauty

C.J. Helweg

Micah Robbins

ENG1310.115

1 September 2007

Word Count: 535
The Beauty of Simplicity
In the complexities of today’s world and society, who has time to stop and admire the beauty of things? But who defines what beauty is? Beauty all depends on how people define what beauty is, so therefore beauty can be just about anything. In today’s complex American society, I find my grandma’s farm to be the most beautiful place I know. She lives right outside of Brenham, Texas in a little town called Industry. The way that the landscape comes together and forms this beautiful scenery that never ceases to amaze me. Everything from the old peach trees behind the house to the pond in the woods is as near to perfect as I have ever seen.
She lives on the very end of a dirt and gravel road that winds back in to the countryside. Coming down over a small hill, you can see her house settled in a small grove of trees on the edge of a forest. It is a perfect looking farm house. There is a large front porch that stretches the entire length of the house and a tin roof that is perfect for listening to the rain under. As soon as I walk in I get an immediate sense of home. Everything is just so inviting and beautiful. Right when I walk in to the front door, I am greeted with an overwhelming stimulation of the senses. There is a great feeling of warmth and belonging. Sunlight is flooding in through the large windows that overlook the property, and reflects off the original hardwood floor. As you walk in you start to smell the goodness of home cooked food made from scratch. My grandma makes everything imaginable from rolls, cookies, cakes, soups, casseroles and an infinite amount of other delicious foods that stimulate the nostrils and make the mouth water. It is all so beautiful in so many different ways.
Her property spans out over the countryside. Acres and acres of land are laid out over hills, streams, and ponds in the country. Off to the side of her house is a forest which has a road winding back to a pond. Walking down this path, silence falls except for the crunch of leaves under your feet. You can smell the trees and the fresh air, and you can literally breathe in the beauty that surrounds you. Once the path opens up, the pond is full of fish and turtles. Again, this is pure beauty at its finest. Walking back towards the front of the house, there is the road that comes over the hill and a field that opens up with a barn just off to the right. Again, it’s another picture perfect scene. It’s so simple and so beautiful. The solitude of walking through the old peach trees makes you feel at one with yourself and nature allowing you to see the unimaginable beauty that is surrounding you. After night falls, my family and I will sit out on the back porch and relax in the warm night and watch the stars and fireflies. Nobody is talking much. We’re all just sitting and absorbing everything in that we can. All of the senses are stimulated. Everything that I feel and sense is so amazing, so simple, and so beautiful.

The Graduate

In Norman Rockwell's The Graduate, I think that Norman put the student in front of the paper to relate the era and the major events going on at the time. In my opinion, the headlines show how scary and dangerous the real world can be. Atomic weapons, inflation, and job woes are just some of the things that the young graduate must now face. I think the posture of the graduate signifies the realization that his simple life that he had enjoyed during school has now come to an end. He must go out in to the cold, and very real, world where he has to deal with problems he had not had to face before. We are fortunate these days, as recent high school graduates, that all we have to worry about after graduating is going to college. The majority of the high school population does not have to worry about going out in to the work force for another couple of years. Very few of us are completly dependent on ourselves, unlike the graduate who will soon be.

Let's Talk About College

One of the things that bothered me the most was a passage from Michael Moore's Idiot Nation. He talks about once you get a degree from a top school such as Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth or Stanford that you are set for life. However, at these schools, seventy percent of the students had not heard of the Voting Rights act or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. These are supposed to be the top schools in the nation and they can't recall high school material. I'm not saying i remember everything from high school, but i like to think i retained a fair amount. These are our leaders of major corporations and government that can barely pass a high school test. Something wrong with this picture? I think so.

Back in the Day...

When I started high school, I moved from a different district and therefore I knew nobody at my new school. I had always been a big sports fan and was planning on playing sports throughout my high school career. I started out in football in August of 2002 not knowing a single person. Going through the one hundred plus degree heat with all of my teammates brought us all closer together and got people talking to eachother. We would talk after games about what happened and what we could do to improve during class and in the hallways. By talking to them, I started to branch out my connections and talk to other people until by my senior year, I knew and talked to, 90 percent of my senior class and a majority of underclassmen. So for me, football was the best thing to happen to me during high school.