The Grapes of Wrath, is an oldie but a goodie. Periodically, as you may have read in my bio, my daughters will get tired of me reading my favorite action/thriller authors to try and provide me with a semblance of culture and literary background that they have been blessed to receive. As I thrived on “Cliff Notes” during my high school years, my girls, for the most part, will read books cover to cover and it shows in their depth of knowledge as they grow through the years. My true love of reading was spawned during my military days and never subsided, though being a parent continuously pulls and tugs at one’s time, I will fight for my reading time as I wait outside in the parking lot for the kid’s Karate, swim or tennis practice.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck was handed to me by my older daughter not too long ago that hit a particularly sensitive nerve in me. You see, I was laid-off in late 2008 and have endured the tremendous stress and worry that one experiences as a provider for a family and a parent whose children looks to them for security and comfort . Security comes in many forms including shelter and food, and those things children take for granted including medical coverage and the ever so available parent taxi driver. As most of you know, the timing of my unfortunate event was at the beginning of the recession, which borders on a depression, but never seems to hit all the necessary benchmarks to be called a depression. The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family as they are forced to leave their farm in Oklahoma as the dust bowl had ravished so many farms in the mid-states, including Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and more of course were affected. In the midst of the Great Depression and with an unprecedented nationwide drought, the Joad family along with hundreds of thousands of other displaced farmers migrated west to the land of opportunity, California.
Now stop and envision yourself almost penniless, slaughtering the last of your pigs for food and hoping that would last long enough until you possibly land a job, driving in a warn-down pieced together car with your entire living lineage from Grandpa and Grandma right down to the youngest, piled every which-way on the so-called vehicle, hoping you’re going to make it just to the next town. The dialogue Steinbeck uses is representative of the broken rural English of yester year and is trying at first to understand, but your mind soon makes the adjustment as you are pulled in as part of the Joad family as you stop for a night’s rest along a long lonely road and ask strangers politely to join them for the night. It is soon found out that the poor are the most giving and hospitable and makes what seems as an impossible trek possible. The Grapes of Wrath is not about the fleeing from one’s decimated farm life, but of hopes and dreams and family and a stark reminder that things aren’t truly as bad as they seem at times, and that a great and timeless novelist such as John Steinbeck can pull you in and turn you around and make you a better person for having shared an important piece of Americana. I would highly recommend it to the young and the old and the middle-aged, such as myself, for it takes a lot to move me, and The Grapes of Wrath surely has.
