TOW #2 "Filter Fish" (nonfiction)

Oliver Sacks, famed neurologist and idol to many,  recently wrote a short personal memoir, reflecting on his childhood and how it seemed to be shaped around his love for gefilte fish.  On the surface, it seems uninteresting, because who cares about gefilte fish?  However, as he recently was diagnosed with terminal cancer, his reflection of the fish is a symbol for the joyful life he lived.  Not only did he enjoy the gefilte balls, but they reminded him of his mother, and everything that she provided for him.  They reminded him of how he could not bare to eat anyone else's cooked fish, as none were as good as his mother's homemade style balls.  His audience, anyone from readers of the New York Times, but also those near the end of their lives, wanting to relive their joyful childhood memories are drawn into his writing through his appeal to pathos.  His use of the short stories he describes ensues his purpose of wanting the reader to think back on their special childhood memories.  While he was writing on how the only other gefilte fish besides his mother's he could eat was that made by his housekeeper, he gave emotional appeal while describing the situation.  His housekeeper, an African American catholic, would make the fish balls for her church, as he described the situation, "I loved to think of her fellow-Baptists gorging on gefilte fish at their church socials."  This appeal to emotion gives the reader something to chuckle at, while they think of little things that made their childhood unique.  To conclude, Sacks's legendary life full of achievement will be missed, but his short memoir published in the Times is achieving every purpose that it has.  When I am sitting on my front porch in sixty years, pondering the little things that shaped the man I will have become (just as Oliver is pictured in the article), I will think similar thoughts as Sacks did, realizing every little positive occurrence in life adds up to your overall happiness, just as Sacks wanted his readers to think.