More than Junk

    There are many things that happen in life. Some people don’t realize why or what happened immediately but may realize what happened later on. My mom always tells me that I'll realize later on in life when I am older that what she says and does happens for a reason. We all interpret things differently, which is why I do not understand what she is getting at right away. 

    The book I am reading, The Seventh Most Important Thing by Shelley Pearsall, goes deep and shows things that I would have never thought of from a kid’s perspective. For example, the “Junk Man” in the story is seen as just a guy who goes around and takes things from people’s trash cans. No one knows why or what he is collecting these things for, but to him all this "junk" is like money to him. 

    Arthur, the main character, ends up getting in trouble because he threw a brick at the "Junk Man" named Mr. Hampton, out of anger. Because of this, Arthur has to complete a certain number of service hours instead of going to juvie. His task is to help Mr. Hampton collect all the junk on his list (cardboard, lightbulbs, mirrors, foil, etc). Arthur is really confused by this list of junk. As he is collecting this junk, he gets a lamp instead of light bulbs, and he gets a toaster instead of foil. This was not good enough for Mr. Hampton. He was specific with his list, and Arthur did not follow it. This was one of the things that caught my attention right away when reading this book. It implies that is better to go above and beyond and get what is asked, than to half and it not be good enough. Arthur just thinks that all this stuff is junk, but in reality, it means a lot more to Mr. Hampton. "...There could be a lot of reasons why people decided to save some things and why they threw others away-- reasons that might not make any sense until you dug much deeper" (Pearsall). This quote really stuck out to me. You never really know the reasoning behind something until the reasoning is said. The toaster that Arthur got for Mr. Hampton instead of foil was not good for what he needed, but it was good for something else. Mr. Hampton took the toaster knob off of the toaster and gave it to Arthur's little sister. "He gave me a pretty silver bead to keep." And there, in his sister's pink mitten, was the missing silver temperature knob from the toaster" (Pearsall). To Arthur, it was junk, but to his sister and Mr. Hampton, it was special. 

    This idea of junk meaning something valuable reminds me of a project I did in middle school. We had to go through a bucket of random "junk" like little toy cars, legos, broken pencils, popsicle sticks, etc. and pick out what we wanted to put on our project. We than had to glue them all down on this little wooden platform that we made out of popsicle sticks. After everything was glued down, we painted the whole thing a color we wanted. I painted mine gold. By the end of it, it all looked so cool even though it was just a bunch of junk glued down on a popsicle sticks. There’s a lot more thought into something then what someone may see it as.