Damaged
The protagonist wonders if he is “too damaged.” James Baldwin once wrote about a person who suffered from “a wound that he would never recover from,” but he doesn’t remember where. He also wrote “about a missing member that was lost but still aching.” “Maybe” something inside of him was “no longer intact.” Perhaps “something had been cut off or broken down.” However, Marco seems to be “intact.” Perhaps he “was damaged, too.” He wonders if he is “too damaged.” This imagery evokes a feeling of sadness. It is clear that the protagonist has rather serious emotional problems and needs help.
The reasons
There are plenty of reasons why he feels “too damaged.” At the tender age of six he had been “treed by an angry mob of adults who hadn’t liked the idea of Boston busing.” They threw “rocks” at him, yelling, “Nigger go home!” He had been “sodomized in the bathroom of the Brighton Boys Club” when he was seven. Later that year, his mother, “divorced and broke,” began telling him that she “should’ve” flushed him down the toilet when she’d had the chance. He told Sally, his high school girlfriend, that the day they met. He’d been writing poems about it all, for her, which he then gave to her. She held “the book of words” like it was “a cold brick.” This imagery frightens, for the horrors the narrator describes could break any person.
Quietness
There is “something about children sleeping in cars.” Perhaps “something felt by parents,” and perhaps “by the parents of multiple children.” As a rule, children look so peaceful and innocent when they sleep that it feels like a crime to disturb them. Their heads are “tilted,” their mouths “open,” their eyes are “closed.” “The stillness and the quiet” that had vanished from parents’ life “returns,” but they “must be quiet,” they have to respect their children’s “stillness, their silence.” Parents must “also make most of it.” It’s the time when you speak about “important things” that you “don’t want them to hear: money, time, death.” This imagery evokes a feeling of tenderness. There is something special and heart-warming about these family road trips.
