Exploration Two

Holding On is a compilation of 56 profiles interviewed by David Isay. This book is a tribute to some of America's greatest characters, people holding on to unique ways of life at all costs. From our reading and in class discussion I admire the profile of Miles Mahan most so far from all the readings. Because the Folk artist Miles Mahan lived along the highway among a jumble of signs and bottle sculptures.  Mahan's Half Hulaville was an outdoor folk art environment of wine and beer bottle tree sculptures and desert sandblasted painted wooden signs. The large wooden sign of a dancing Hula Girl, a business discard rescued and erected by Mahan.

Scott Russell Sanders’ essay was to tell people about alcoholic and its influence to the family. In the essay he talks about his father being an alcoholic and how his childhood was in worriless and fear and it also examination of his youth under the influence of his father’s alcoholism, and how this influence has not only effected Sanders and his family, but also how it is affecting his own children as well. First, he talks in detail about his father’s excessive abuse of alcohol, emphasizing the transformation of this father every time he had a drink. Sanders loved his father but his dual personality caused Sanders to blame himself. He explains his father's actions from deceitful to a man you can trust, violent to gentle, Angry to happy, and lastly being hateful to loving.  I think Sanders was fearful that he might become an alcoholic like his father. He said, ‘I knew the odds of my becoming an alcoholic were four times higher than for the sons of nonalcoholic fathers’. In that sentence I felt that he was scared he might do the same thing his father did to him to his own son.