Charlie Postman 802
The short story “Ashes” by Susan Beth Pfeffer is about a girl nicknamed Ashes, a child of divorce, who is trying to figure out how she feels about her father. He is a dreamer which Ashes admires, but an unreliable parent. In the story, you see Ashes wrestle with what she wants as a child versus what she needs. I believe the story’s claim is that having your needs met is more important than having your wants satisfied, but it’s a painful truth for a child to learn.
Ashes’ feeling towards her father can often sound like worship. “That winter, it felt like every time I saw my father, the sun cast off just a little more warmth than it had the day before,” says Ashes. ”When I was little, Dad used to promise me the stars for a necklace...” These quotes strongly show how Ashes views her dad as bigger than life, the person who can make her dreams come true. This is in contrast to how Ashes sees her mother, who she describes as “the most practical person I know.” Ashes can’t even figure out how her parents were ever married or in love.
However, Ashes is grown up enough to see her father more clearly than she did when she was younger. Yes, her father would promise her the stars for a necklace, “but like most of his promises, that one never quite happened,” she observes sadly. She also has heard what her mother thinks of her father: “an irresponsible bum” is how the mother refers to Ashes’ dad. He doesn’t always send his child support checks on time, he sometimes forgets to pick Ashes up on time at school, and can generally be pretty selfish. For example, he sometimes “got all his favorite kinds of chinese and none of Mom’s and mine.” Over the course of the story, Ashes becomes a more matured person through truly discovering her fathers flaws, especially when he tests her loyalty by asking Ashes to steal her mother’s money for his own use.
Maybe the best example of how torn Ashes feels about how her father makes her feel special, on one hand, and acts completely selfishly, on the other, is her nickname: Ashes. Her given name is Ashleigh, which her mother calls her, and doesn’t even like, but her dad calls her Ashes, which makes her feel special, but as her mother points out, “ashes are cold, gray, dead things…You’re calling your daughter something dead!” And one night, when Ashes makes a list of all the words that rhyme with her nickname - “smashes and crashes, trashes and bashes, clashes and mashes” - Ashes is less happy with having a special nickname.
I believe that the short story “Ashes” is trying to highlight the concept that children have a hard time distinguishing what they want against what they need. Like everyone they want both, but with growing older, comes the tough epiphany that you can’t have it all.
