Russell Baker Growing USmmary

In Growing Up by Russell Baker, the author repeatedly uses the ideas of traveling back in time to connect to a message where a parent’s exciting future is deemed a boring past to children until it is often too late to learn about it. From Baker’s perspective, his mother’s mental deterioration makes him realize how much he doesn’t know about his own heritage and family, and it pushes him to learn more. “I soon stopped trying to wrest her back to what I considered the real world and tried to travel along with her on those fantastic swoops into the past” (59). When Baker decides to follow his mother’s train of thoughts to learn about his heritage, he can only guess at the truth because “of my mother’s childhood and her people, of their time and place, I knew very little” (59). He realizes that as his mother is in her current condition, he is isolated from his own family past even though his source of information is right in front of him. Baker feels sadness when he interprets the scenario as a loss

The experience of mental time travel gives the reader a sense of sympathy for the author because soon, everyone will start to wonder about their past and sometimes it may be too late to learn about it from their parents; Baker wants readers to realize how heartbreaking it is to lose a chance which was always easily accessible to them. “About her father, my grandfather, I could only guess, and indeed, about the girl on the wharf with the bow in her hair, I was merely sentimentalizing” (59). Baker wants to know more about his family heritage because all he knew from that specific experience was from a picture, but the chance he had to