The Boy in the Straw Hat

Not being very special had become a habit by the time I was fifteen years old. The summer before tenth grade, the world had broken my trust with it and now it just looked grey with shades of blue. I didn’t care much for food the way I had before. My relatives commented on how thin I was getting with a concerned look shot to my parents at the end of the summer barbecue.

Needless to say, I had low expectations from my tenth grade English class. We were assigned to read three chapters from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn our first day. After school my classmates hung back for sports and hang outs. I got on the bus and rode home, watching the last vestiges of summer pass me by through the window. I lugged my heavy backpack all the way up to my bedroom after I got home and emptied the contents onto my bed. My eyes landed on the book. I scrutinized the cover with the red-faced boy in the straw hat.

When the first three chapters had passed, my mother called for dinner. I tried my usual routine of taking a couple bites and then rolling around my food until she started clearing plates. She would not have it. Now that I was starting school again, she insisted that I finish what was on my plate or I couldn’t leave. I really wasn’t hungry. But Chapter 4 hung over my head. I had already grown attached to the mischievous ragamuffin. And I needed to know what predicaments he would get himself into. So I ate. And ate. To my mother’s surprise, I finished my plate. She showed a rare smile to my father and gestured that I could go.

My belly was full, but with the time apart from Huckleberry’s world I had grown voracious. I crawled in my bed and fell back into Missouri.

You don’t expect things to change you until they do. Huckleberry Finn was just a kid who refused to grow up. He refused to let people try to change him. He wasn’t perfect, but he was admirable because he let himself make mistakes and learn from them. His life was an adventure, not because of the events that transpired in his story but of who he was. Someone like him - life could be nothing but an adventure.

The book laid to rest beside me finally in the early hours of the next morning. Huckleberry Finn’s story, for now, was at an end. But finally, I felt my own story was beginning.