The Men We Carry In Our Minds Summary

“The Men We Carry in Our Minds” In the passage of “The Men We Carry in Our Minds” by Scott Russell Sanders, the author discusses about his view on men and women. “When the women I met at college thought about the joys and privileges of men, they did not carry in their minds the sort of men I had known in my childhood” (172), the meaning is the way one believes women and men are about, along with their experiences with women and men throughout their lives. The author’s perception on men is the absolute opposite of what the women in his class think. When the women thought of men,, they thought of men like their fathers, “who were bankers, physicians, architects, stockbrokers, and the big wheels of the big cities” (172). During his childhood, he encountered the kind of men the women in his class didn’t think of to become. He knew the kind of men who labored with their bodies, from marginal farmers to welders, and carpenters. They were the kind of men who were just getting by in life trying to survive. These were the men who worked all day in any kind of weather. Because of working so long around machines they had hard hearing. The skin on their face became to look a lot like “the leather of old work gloves” (169) from all the squinting for not being able to see correctly. “The fathers of my friends always
Even though he pushed himself to better his life, and get away from the unappreciated work, his body still remembered the hard work he went through. After the years of all the difficult work, his body “began to give out on him in his fifties, and it quit on him entirely before he turned sixty-five” (170). For most boys, they just followed in their father’s footsteps, taking those hard, body aching jobs. “They were bound to work as their fathers had worked, killing themselves or preparing to kill other”