Revisiting My Past Life Essays

Revisiting My Past Life Essays Revisiting My Past Life Essay Revisiting My Past Life Essay Essay Topic: The Visit Back then, it was a military town that focused primarily on the base. At the tender age of 18, I was plucked from my life in the suburb of Lincoln Park, Mi. And taken to this small town, not knowing anyone, this was a traumatic experience for me. Though, I was happy to be married to the person I loved, I was not happy about leaving my family and friends behind. When I arrived in Soda, it was worse than I expected. There was nothing up there, not for me anyway. Remember, I was only 18 and used to life in the big city. There was no department store, no mall, no big movie theater, what was I to do? Sure, it was beautiful and peaceful and serene, but I was 18, I did not care about that. If I wanted so much as a whopper, the nearest Burger King was 50 miles away in Alpine! I relied primarily on my husband to keep me occupied and entertained because I knew no one. I envied him because he had the opportunity to go to work and interact with people on a daily basis. In the meantime, I was stuck in this little cottage on the shores of Lake Huron all day, with no one to talk to. I would call my mother and grandmother every day and talk for hours. Soon, I became friends with some of the other military wives, which in itself, is a very tight knit relationship. It was more than friendship, it was like family. We took care of each other and were each others support group. The very kind of friendship that I wish I had today. My husband and I lived in a very tiny cottage on US 23, on the shores of Lake Huron. Very quiet, and peaceful and beautiful. I wouldnt say I hated it, but I would much rather have been in Lincoln Park. The cottage was very quaint and cute. Its walls were made of knotty pine, which was typical of all the houses up there. It had two small bedrooms, a bath with a shower stall, no bathtub, a tiny kitchen and a small living room. A hunters paradise. I brought my first born home to this cottage in 1985, which was very challenging because I knew nothing about motherhood at that tender age. My mother came up for a week to help. When she left, I had to figure things out on my own. I was now a woman and had grown up, although, I still longed for home. The time came in 1986, my now ex-husband was discharged from the Air Force and I was boring town. Happiness, Rejoice! I did not realize at that time, I was leaving what I always wanted behind. Things were more simple up there and I Just did not see it then. My husband and I were never as close as we were when we lived there. We ere forced to deal with problems we faced because all we had were each other. Our marriage fell apart in 1999 and I had not been to Soda since our divorce. I decided to go up there for the first time in 27 years. Things have changed since then, the base has closed down and is now home to the former race car driver Connie Galatia, he houses his planes on base. They have also sold the base housing to families. They have a Burger King now and a Smart and a few other businesses that were not there then. I was haunted by my memories. Everywhere I went, I could picture myself being 27 years earlier. It was like I was standing beside myself in a efferent time and I almost wanted to reach out to my former self and say see, all this time you wanted to get away and this is exactly where you wanted to be the whole time I actually was able to stay in the very same cottage I had lived in when I was 18, the lady was renting it out. This time I had a very different perspective of my cottage. I noticed things that I did not notice before. As soon as I walked in the door of my former home, all these memories came rushing towards me, overwhelming me. Oh, how I have missed this place and longed to be part of it again. It was almost as if it had been waiting for me all these years. I stood there for which seemed like an eternity, taking in every detail I could of my old life. I sat down on the couch for literally a few hours taking in the sounds of the waves from Lake Huron crashing against the shore. The cool breeze blowing in through the open windows. Taking in the smell of the nice clean, crisp, air. I stood up and started walking from room to room, gliding my hands along the walls, remembering every single memory each room had to offer. I could actually hear the voices and laughter of my ex-husband and me. I could see us walking in the front door with our newborn baby girl and asking her in the room a placing her in the crib. It was like a movie where the person has died and can see everything happening around them, haunting, really. The old expression you never really know what you have until its gone never rang more true. I did not want to go to sleep, I Just wanted to enjoy all the time I could there, not wanting it to end. I was frozen in time and wanted to stay that way. But of course, two days later, it was time for me to come back to reality. I wrote a little note to myself and hid it in the cabin as I intend to visit it once again. Soda will always be forever frozen in time for me. My forever home.

Passive Voice Definition and Examples

Passive Voice Definition and Examples In traditional grammar, the term passive voice refers to a type of sentence or clause in which the subject receives the action of the verb. For example, A good time was had by all. Contrast with active voice. The most common form of the passive in English is the short passive or agentless passive: a construction in which the agent (that is, the performer of an action) is not identified. For example, Mistakes were made. (In a long passive, the object of the verb in an active sentence becomes the subject.) See the discussion of the passive gradient in Examples and Observations below. Often the passive voice is formed by using the appropriate form of the verb to be (for example, is) and a past participle (for example, formed). However, passive constructions arent always made up of be and a past participle. For example, see the discussion of the get-passive. Though many style guides discourage use of the passive, the construction can be quite useful, especially when the performer of an action is unknown or unimportant. Passive constructions can also enhance cohesion. Examples and Observations Last week our dogwood tree was struck by lightning.Pandora, from Greek mythology, was given a box with all the worlds evils in it.(Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture, 2008)It is believed that in the elementary school a class of fifteen pupils for one teacher gives better results than either a class of three or a class of thirty.(Psychological Foundations of Educational Technology, ed. by W.C. Trow and E.E. Haddan, 1976)[Fern] found an old milking stool that had been discarded, and she placed the stool in the sheepfold next to Wilburs pen.(E.B. White, Charlottes Web, 1952)America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else . . .. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.(Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, 1965)Her bones were foundround thirty years laterwhen they razedher building toput up a parking lot.(Maya Angelou, Chicken-Licken. Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, 1975) In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.(Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, 1979)Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.(attributed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez)The young gentleman was later seen by me in front of the gare Saint-Lazare.(Raymond Queneau, Passive. Exercises in Style, 1947) In Defense of the Passive Voice The proportion of passive verbs varies with the type of prose: scientific prose, for instance, may show far more passives than narrative prose. But to point this out is not to denigrate scientific writing. The difference merely reflects the different natures of content, purpose, and audience. . . . Not only is the passive voice a significantly frequent option in modern prose, but it is also often the clearest and briefest way to convey information. . . . Indiscriminate slandering of the passive voice ought to be stopped. The passive should be recognized as a quite decent and respectable structure of English grammar, neither better nor worse than other structures. When it is properly chosen, wordiness and obscurity are no more increased than when the active voice is properly chosen. Its effective and appropriate use can be taught. (Jane R. Walpole, Why Must the Passive Be Damned? College Composition and Communication, 1979) True Passives, Semi-Passives, and the Passive Gradient The statistic from corpus analyses that four-fifths of passive sentences in texts occur without the agentive by-phrase makes a nonsense out of deriving passives from actives. In the active subjects are obligatory; there can be no active sentences without a subject. So where do all these passives with no agent come from whereby the agent is unknown? Not from an underlying active, obviously. It is common practice to assume a dummy subject in such cases, equivalent to someone, i.e. underlying My house was burgled is the sentence Someone burgled my house. But that is stretching a point beyond credibility. . . . [Randolph] Quirk et al. [in A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, 1985] attempt to get over this problem by presenting a passive gradient and the notion of semi-passive, exemplified by the following sentences: (33) This violin was made by my father.(34) This conclusion is hardly justified by the results.(35) Coal has been replaced by oil.(36) This difficulty can be avoided in several ways.- - - - - - - - - - -(37) We are encouraged to go on with the project.(38) Leonard was interested in linguistics.(39) The building is already demolished.(40) The modern world is getting more highly industrialized and mechanized.(41) My uncle was/got/seemed tired. The dotted line indicates the break between real passives and semi-passives. Those above the line are real passives, those below the line are increasingly remote from the ideal passive with a unique active paraphrase, and are not real passives at allthey are semi-passives. (Christopher Beedham, Language And Meaning: The Structural Creation of Reality. John Benjamins, 2005) Rise of the Get-Passive The passive in English is usually formed with the verb to be, yielding they were fired or the tourist was robbed. But we also have the get passive, giving us they got fired and the tourist got robbed. The get-passive goes back at least 300 years, but it has been on a rapid rise during the past 50 years. It is strongly associated with situations which are bad news for the subject- getting fired, getting robbed- but also situations that give some kind of benefit. (They got promoted. The tourist got paid.) However, the restrictions on its use may be relaxing over time and get-passives could get a whole lot bigger. (Arika Okrent, Four Changes to English So Subtle We Hardly Notice Theyre Happening. The Week, June 27, 2013) When to Use the Passive Voice in Journalistic Writing Lauren Kessler and Duncan McDonald [in When Words Collide, 8th ed., Wadsworth, 2012] offer two situations in which the passive voice must be used. First, passive voice is justified if the receiver of the action is more important than the creator of the action. They use this example: A priceless Rembrandt painting was stolen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday by three men posing as janitors. In this case, the Rembrandt should remain the subject of the sentence even though it receives the action. The painting is obviously more importantmore newsworthythan the three men who stole it.Kessler and McDonalds second reason for using passive voice is if the writer has no choice. Thats when the writer does not know who what the actor, or the creator of the action, is. The example they use: The cargo was damaged during the trans-Atlantic flight. Air turbulence? Sabotage? Was the cargo strapped in properly? The writer doesnt know, so the voice must be passive. (Robert M. Knight, A Journalistic Approach to Good Writing: The Craft of Clarity, 2nd ed. Iowa State Press, 2003) Evasive Uses of the Passive Voice: Mistakes Were Made [W]hen [New Jersey Governor Chris Christie] said mistakes were made, did he know he was quoting Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, or did that particular obfuscatory use of the passive voice just pop into his head? (Katha Pollitt, Christie: A Bully’s Bully. The Nation, February 3, 2014)Mistakes were made. I didnt make them. (Chief of Staff and later Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Jr., on the Watergate scandals, January 1981)We did not achieve what we wished, and serious mistakes were made in trying to do so. (President Ronald Reagan, regarding the Iran-Contra affair, January 1987)Clearly, no one regrets more than I do the appearance of impropriety. Obviously, some mistakes were made.† (Chief of Staff John Sununu, when caught using government military aircraft for personal trips, December 1991)Mistakes were made here by people who either did it deliberately or inadvertently. (President Bill Clinton, when it was discovered that he had invited the countrys senior bankin g regulator to a meeting with the Democratic Party’s senior fund-raiser, January 1997) I acknowledge that mistakes were made here. (Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, regarding the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, March 2007)We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voicethat is, until we have stopped saying It got lost, and say, I lost it. (Sidney J. Harris, On the Contrary, 1962)