Around 6:30 on a hot Houston Saturday morning my Mother burst into my room calmly telling me that my Father had experienced a stroke and she needed my help getting him into the car. An ambulance would have taken to long, for we lived in an isolated neighborhood roughly twenty-five miles away from downtown and at least twenty minutes from the nearest hospital. I offered to go to the hospital with them; my Mom declined my offer and told me to go back to bed. Somehow, I managed to go back to sleep, only to be awoken by the phone-my Mom informed me that the situation was graver than she feared and that my Father was being airlifted to another area hospital that was better equipped to handle his illness. I was to get ready for the day and she would be coming home to shower and dress and we would go to the hospital together. I was waiting at the door when she arrived home. I spent the next half an hour just trying to take care of little details - anything to keep me busy - gathering up cell phones, my Mom's phone book, getting cash from the ATM, and getting gas. Finally we were on our way.
The day felt surreal, as if I was having one of those horribly vivid nightmares and soon I would awaken. I had not even cried yet. Granted, my Sister and I were raised to be emotionally strong and independent, the truth was I really had not come to grasp what was happening around me and crying would only make reality set in. Yeah, we would threaten my Dad that something like this would happen if he did not at least cut down on the cigarettes, quit his stressful job, and stop with the vodka. Now the threats were coming true-something I could still not fathom. I guess my Father, thought of himself as an unstoppable juggernaut. Looking back I thing we believed it as well.
My Father and I didn't always get along, he did not even really get to know me until I was eighteen years old, even though I lived under his roof.
A Sense of Redemption Isaac Singer's Gimpel The Fool is the story of a Jewish man who is as nave as a child. Gimpel is portrayed as the town fool and is considered unworldly. For his ignorance he is underestimated and exploited by his peers, yet he always seems to prevail. He shows through...
Shylock's speech is "directly responsive to this burden of personal and racial experience, with the result that his humanity is so much more fully present to us "to bait fish withal!"". ... A.D.Moody believes the play is "about the manner in which the Christians succeed in the world by not practising their ideals of love and mercy; that it is about their exploitation of an assumed unworldliness to gain the wordly disadvantage over Shylock the play does not celebrate their Christian virtues so much as expose their absence." ...
Kandinsky sought a universal spiritual abstraction, transcending the self, and the human experience. ... [See Appendix D] This painting is most certainly based on his experience at this concert, as the most "realistic" sketches he did show the accompanying musicians and the singer (who is in the third and fourth movements of the Second String Quartet), at the right of the piano. ...
