Meghan Merrill
Alford
English 2308-005
18 November 2013 Prompt one: The Fathers We grow up in life living the social norm of having a mom and dad in our lives. Whether they stay married or end up divorcing, the majority of us have a mother and a father in our life. It seems to be our human nature to search for that figure we are missing in our life if we don’t have one of our own. In the memoir The Mountains and the Fathers by Joe Wilkins, we follow a boy search for a father figure he so desperately wants to find. He develops many father figures throughout the memoir, some are good figures and others are bad. In the end he still learns valuable lessons from each one, shaping him into the man he becomes by the end of his memoir. As it might seem apparent, the man that is considered the good figure in the memoir didn’t share all the lessons Wilkins would learn throughout his story. He would learn a lot from both the good and the bad and attempt to fill the void he formed when his father passed away. A figure that begins to take a big role I thought would be Wilkins grandfather. After his father died he had his mother to raise him which was hard at times. Wilkins would spend a lot of long hard days working with his grandfather on the farm learning how to ranch. His grandfather would teach him lessons that at the time might not have hit Wilkin as much as it did when he got older and could better understand what seemed as senseless things at the time, really meant. Wilkins would look to his grandfather to fill that father figure he is longing for. Being that his grandfather is a family member makes it easier for Wilkins to relate to his grandfather and find pieces he uses to have in his dad in someone else. As him and his grandpa spend time together working on the farm ranching, his