Summary of Rita Dove's Loose Ends

In “Loose Ends,” Rita Dove’s main focus is to help explain why sometimes life has many loose ends. Dove starts off by explaining that when her daughter would come home from school she would not have much to say, usually one word answers. It did not matter what the question was, “How was school?” Her daughter would then answer, “Fine.” For whatever reason her daughter did not feel the need to give a long sophisticated answer for something so boring as school. However when Dove asked her daughter about “MathNet” or the gossip on “Lois and Clark” her daughter would go into great detail.
When you come home from school, I think the last thing you want to do is talk to your parents about your day. Days at school are boring and lack the creativeness that TV show writers capture. The first few days of the new school year you probably would go into more detail about your day because it’s something new and exciting. Life is so repetitive so that might also be a reason why Dove’s daughter did not go into great detail about her day. If life had all the dramas, like in most television shows, people would be more willing to gossip about it. When life is new it is great, it is wonderful but when life is same-old, same-old who would want to talk about it?
Television always seems to get it right so-to-speak. Every show, for the most part, always seems to capture all drama right on the button. When you watch a show on TV you expect that to happen, but in reality the loose ends are not always wrapped up. Why does life seem to always lack the climax or the perfect ending? After watching TV for most of our lives we seem to strive for the perfect ending but for most of us, the perfect ending never comes. Dove believes that it is effortless to talk about the “salient points [because] there are there for the plucking” (p.578). You simply just have to recall the events and that is sometimes easier than talking about your own reality.
The television offers an easier tale to tell and reality does lack the climax but as Dove said, “Life, friends is ragged. Loose ends are the rule” (p.578). You cannot live your life to tie up all the loose ends because frankly that is impossible. Your life will not have all the Hollywood endings because after all life is not Hollywood. You must live your life to the fullest and forget about getting that perfect girl or getting the dream job because that might not happen.