The Lame Shall Enter First

I find it interesting that Sheppard, the father, makes a comment or thought about his son regarding his wife's death and it had only been a year since his mother's death and the boy was almost 11years ago. To me in this one passage of this story sums up what the story is about. How can anyone expect a 10 year old to fully copy with the death of their mother? This thought in itself tells me that the father is not coping at all with the death of his wife. The father so paralyzed with grief..thrusts himself into his work and helping who he deems as needing, in this case a boy named Rufus. The interest the father seems to have in this other boy is that he is needy. He has a clubbed foot, one leg is shorter then the other. However, the descriptions of his own son are not any better. His son had large round ears that hung down, and faded out blue eyes and one was a lazy eye. So in the descriptions of the boys they are the same, however one has his needs met, which in the eyes of Sheppard equates to having EVERYTHING and other boy has nothing but an IQ. The theme of the story to me would be that you do not know what you have until it is gone. This can been seen in the next to last paragraph of the story. I personally did not enjoy this story and at the beginning of my 1102 class and this one, I was really starting to enjoy what I was reading to really going back to hating it because the stories in my opinion are sooo blase and blantenly obvious.