Longing

In all three of tomorrow’s works the characters have feelings of longing, and most often longing to “fit in.” In Bharati Mukherjee’s “A Father,” the main character, Mr. Bhowmick longs to have his family fit in and be happy in America while his daughter longs to be like other women her age and have a child. In Joy Harjo’s “The Path to the Milky Way Leads through Los Angeles” the speaker mentions how there are so many people in the city and each person is longing for something different. And in Mitsuye Yamada’s “A Bedtime Story” the main character of the Japanese legend is looking for a place to stay, while the speaker is looking for more to the story he/she is being told.

This sense of longing can also be illustrated in a benefit that I volunteered at this past weekend. I am part of the dance team and this past Saturday we volunteered at a benefit for the Casey Cares Foundation, which is a foundation for terminally ill children. We did simple things such as selling raffle tickets and getting people to go onto the dance floor when the band started playing, but what impacted us most about the evening was hearing about the children’s stories and interacting with the families. Many of these children have diseases that can be cured while others unfortunately can not. As a result, the families of these children are not only longing for a cure, but simply longing for their happiness and comfort. That is what the Casey Cares Foundation strives to do, they try to make each child as happy and comfortable as they possibly can be during this terrible time in their life.

Happiness is what was also longed for by Mr. Bhowmick. He strongly longed for the happiness of his family and for the possibility of them all to fit in as well as they possibly could here in America. In fact, it was his wife’s longing to be in America that brought them to live there permanently. Mr. Bhowmick’s daughter also longs to find her place in America. She is 26 years old and lives at home with her parents with no male prospects that her parents see. She has many wonderful friends but longs for something more, something that many women of her age have, a child. Because she does not have a boyfriend/fiancé she looks to what other options she has, which would be through in vitro fertilization. Unfortunately, this is not something her parents want to hear and they are not happy about her decision.

In “A Bedtime Story” the speaker of the poem is also very disappointed in the end. They are being told a bedtime story by their father about a woman longing for a place to sleep. She goes up to each house inside a village searching for a place to sleep with no luck. However, while she is outside the village the moon appears out of the clouds, a sight that she would not have seen that clearly, and if at all if she was in the village. She finds this feeling of contentment as what she was longing for. The speaker of the poem is not as content, they are looking for more at the end of the story.

The speaker in “The Path to the Milky Way Leads through Los Angeles” is also longing for more. They talk about how L.A. is full of celebrities and that it is “perpetually summer”(6) but it is lacking of the more meaningful things of life. L.A. is what we as humans have made it to be, but it is lacking the natural beauty that God had created everywhere in the beginning. The speaker states how they “collect the shine of anything beautiful [they] can find”(28.) Not the shine of gold and diamonds and the monetary riches of Los Angeles, but the natural beauty, which is becoming even rarer.

Longing is something that we all feel sometime in our lives. Whether it is longing to fit in such as the Bhowmick family, or the longing for happiness that Mr. Bhowmick has for his wife and daughter and the Casey Cares Foundation has along with the families of the sick children have for their children. As well as the longing for more, which I believe is the most common form of longing, which is what both speakers are yearning for in “The Path to the Milky Way…” as well as “A Bedtime Story.”