Personal Narrative: The Giving Tree By Shel Silverstein

Six-year-old children do not make good doctors. This statement may seem fairly obvious, but my six-year-old-self was ignorant to this fact. Sitting in the middle of a carpet floor of a white-walled classroom, my best friend Gracie and I were using mechanical pencils to give each other ‘shots’. After cleaning our arms, hands, thighs and any other body parts that desperately needed medical attention with hand sanitizer and tissues, we traded turns being the doctor and administering the ‘shots’. We would pull all of the lead out of the tip of the pencil, press the eraser down, and inject the ‘medicine’ into each other’s skin. By following the procedure in that way, the lead would disappear back into the pencil instead of puncturing the other’s …show more content…
The premise of the book is how a boy and a tree have a forever lasting relationship, but soon the boy grows up and begins to need things from the tree. Eventually he uses all that the tree can give him, her apples, her branches, her trunk, until she is nothing but a stump. Defeated and sad was the tree until one day the boy came again, now an old man, looking for a quiet, resting place. Again the tree was able to provide for the boy; giving both comfort and joy to both the tree and old …show more content…
I previously posed a question asking why trust is so easily broken, but so difficult to build, but in the story of The Giving Tree the answer seems so simple: forgiveness. Growing up in a predominately Christian world, one would think that forgiveness would be easy as it is so heavily stressed in religious teachings. Forgiveness, however, is a lot easier said than done. Do people forgive to save their own soul, or to save the one seeking forgiveness? Is it true forgiveness if you are not doing so with a pure heart and for all of the right reasons? If one wants to rebuild a relationship based on trust, then one must fully commit to forgiving the