compare and contrast: Steven wappenstein

Hello everyone!

The nonfiction story I read was “The Burnt Plane” by John T. Price. In it he describes how he went to his friend’s house (his friend was Jason Murphy) after Jason’s father had died in a plane crash. John had expected the house to be unkept due to this, but to his surprise the house was being cared for by a relative. This relative would often make the boys go and work on old junkers. While they were working Jason showed John the plane that his father died in. Then the two sat down for a while in the plane in a solemn moment of remembrance and looked at the sky. This shares some similar parallels to “The only rule that counts” when the author describes going out into nature and talks with his friend about basically anything on his mind. Both works have the same similarity of the death of a loved one, but their approach to the topic is subtle in a few key ways.

In “The Only Rule That Counts” the story starts off with the character that dies being alive at the beginning then revealing that Jeff died during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It is a story about how the author regrets not sending a reply to his friends letter, and how he wishes that he would have tried to send him a letter so that he would not have broken “The Only Rule That Counts” which is to live life to its fullest and try to spend time and stay in contact with the people you car about because you never know when or how they will die until it is too late. “We had a lot of catching up to do, and Jeff did his part. That I did not immediately write him back is something that I will regret till the day I die.”

In “The Burnt Plane” the story starts off with the death of Jason’s father, which  also from a plane crash, and deals with how to deal with extreme loss. In this story Jason and John deal with this loss by going to the plane that Mr. Murphy died in and simply sitting there in silence and forgetting about the world together. “Up there the plane skeleton vanished, along with my own until there was nothing but sky.”

If one takes both author’s works into consideration and see what morals could be taken away from these stories you may see a common theme between the two pieces that life should be spent with the people you care about because at some point that may be the most valuable thing they leave you.