"Uncle Rock" is a story written by Dagobert Gilb about a young boy named Erick who is eleven years old Mexican American. Erick lives in L.A with her lovely mother who is unable to provide for him and herself. Erick seems disturbed by the men that keep on befriending her mother. He has watched and witnessed countless relationship his mother has been into and he is finally convinced that his mother has found the right one to suit her.
Erick has to wait at the restaurant where his mother works as a hostess or kill time at offices where she works while the untrue and unreliable men take advantage of her. Men hitting on his mother would try to start up a conversation by asking silly questions like, "how old is he eight or nine? (Parekh, 2015). Erick knew well that he is being used as the icebreaker, and these men are not the right one for his mother. Erick had noticed that his mother went for the healthy men who would be wearing a buttoned suit, a pinned tie, and decorous white shirt. Men with sports coat would not get her phone number.
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Erick would not say anything when the men were around not that because he did know English as her mother gave as a reason, but because he considered them a nuisance. The writer states that Erick could imagine how he would be sitting in the comfort of his mother when all over sudden that is overturned by a man who starts a conversation with his mother. This shows that Erick only enjoys the comfort of his mother and not anyone else (van Kuijk, Verkoeijen, Dijkstra, & Zwaan, 2018). His mother lack option of what she is provided with and the author says that she is compelled to take what she can get.
Amidst all the men Erick's mother come across with, Rogue the "Uncle Rock" is necessarily a good man who seems not to take advantage of her. Erick's mother calls Rogue after she lost her job and since she needed a shoulder to cry on, Rogue was the man who she would call when everything fails. He is described as the good in the story simply because Rogue is not as bad as other men. Gilb writes of how he is kind, a man who does not show off, wear flashy clothes or have a buzzcut like the other men. The writer describes how Rogue dedicated himself to Erick's mother- going where she asked, being there for her and going back whenever asked. The most exciting part comes when Uncle Rock decides to take Erick and his mother for a baseball game. Rogue loves boxing, and in spite of that, he decides to take them to a baseball game just because it was Erick's favorite game.
While watching the game, a ball goes through the bat and luckily, Erick manage to catch it when it lands on his hand. He makes an effort to let the players' sign the ball in his hand, and it is at this point when one of the player's hands over a letter to him inviting his mother for a date ( Parekh, 2015). Erick thinks about handing over the letter to his mother, but he notices how Rogue was proud and full of joy because of his mother. The writer says how Erick thought of how it was not Rogue's fault for not being an engineer, his mother's friend. Although Rogue had less money compared to the engineer, Erick had realized that Rogue's love was genuine.
Gilb reveals what Erick decided to do with the note, when he writes that, by the time he got where Rogue and his mother was, the letter was already somewhere on the asphalt parking lot. The first occasion when Erick speaks is when he asks them to see how all players had signed the ball. In the beginning, we are told that Erick silence because he considered the men who came to his mother as a nuisance. Here, the reason he decides to talk symbolizes that he is finally contented and did not want any other man to come to his mother anymore. Erick would often pray that God answers their prayers, and this seemed to be the answer.
References
Parekh, M. D. (2015). Media and literary representations of Latinos in baseball and baseball fiction. The University of Texas at Arlington.
Van Kuijk, I., Verkoeijen, P., Dijkstra, K., & Zwaan, R. A. (2018). The effect of reading a short passage of literary fiction on Theory of Mind: A replication of Kidd and Castano (2013). Collabra: Psychology, 4(1).
