Connections

          The piece of work I feel connects well to the memoir, They Cage the Animals at Night by Jennings Michael Burch, is the song Time We Had by The Mother Hips. The tone is calm and hopeful matching Jennings’s inner emotions at the beginning and towards the end of the novel. The memoir itself although written in a child-like tone, also portrays a hopeful and struggling expression.

            Throughout the novel, Jennings runs away many times from the foster homes he is forced to stay at. Instead of going to where his family is although the location is always changing, he runs to the zoo, which becomes his new home. This matches the lyrics “on the way home” in the song. Another time Jennings is running away, he walks through a graveyard in the dead of night attempting to cross the Whitestone Bridge. As he walks through, a man, acting as a ghost frightens him out of the graveyard, going with the line “I heard a ghost laughing in the trees, moving inside the midnight breeze”. On his journeys away from his house, Jennings begins to realize how important some things are and how others that had seemed so crucial are now silly.

            In the song, the singer says, “It’s a long way back to the place where we used to sit when you and I were just little kids”. In the memoir, it is a long time since Jennings and his brothers could be unaware of all the other pain in the world and just be as carefree as possible just like a little kid: “I fell asleep thinking about how nice it was when I had friends, and when all my brothers talked to each other, and when Mom wasn’t sick. I thought about how long ago it was when I only cried because I hurt my knee or didn’t want to go to bed. I wished things were like that again”(177).  The paths each of the brothers had taken had been long ones. George took the path of drinking and smoking along with Larry. Walter took the path of education, Jerome was born on the path of sickness and Jennings was put down the path that led through homes and loneliness. Despite this, Jennings tries to stay optimistic. His mother’s sickness, which causes him to begin his journey through the homes, was still continuing, but he tries not to be miserable, and to make the best of it. As Jennings travels through the streets, he knows where he is going. The “rainbow flowing over the street” in the song, symbolizes how Jennings’s path is so clear, it is leading him to his pot of gold on the other side: his home.