Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 43

'-ub; "7' y- "i A Section Tf if" advice 2D -iUUOll TV HIGHLIGHTS 60 Saturday DECEMBER 25, 1993 v. I Kt I'M i a. t. ill, Giving and receiving can both be blessed experiences, as more than 300 of you told us in our Christmas Essay Contest -r" "1 H' -t Jf-, t. 'yyyV A EVER RECEIVED -i, i.

-i -ih t. kik A child's lost plea for presents finds its way to a perfect stranger EVER GIVEN The pillow for Grandma was a ray of sunshine and hope The pillow really wasn't much to look at, but after six weeks of rug-hooking, I wasn't about to abandon it. So there I sat on Christmas Eve in the back room of my grandmother's house, hurriedly making the final touches. I wanted it to be a great present for my grandmother, but as I wrapped it, the pillow didn't quite seem to say all I wanted it to. Then Grandma opened it.

Quietly she ran her hand over it and then smiled. "It's a sunrise," she announced as she held it up for all to see. At that moment I was satisfied that the pillow had served its purpose. It had told Grandma how important she was to me. But that moment is only part of the story.

My grandmother had just had her leg amputated at Thanksgiving. This pillow was supposed to let her know I loved her and that I wanted her to be comfortable in her wheelchair. In January, with my pillow in her grasp, she began therapy. The doctors assumed this 71 -year-old woman with severe arthritis would never walk again, but she was given the option of getting an artif icial leg. Grandma not only took the option but went through very painful, laborious sessions to learn to walk again.

The pillow went to every session during the year she spent learning to walk with a cane. The pillow was also there four months after her achievement, when she fell to the ground, gripping her chest, from a heart attack. As my aunt waited for an ambulance, she placed the pillow under Grandma's head. But Grandma pulled it out and gripped it in her arms. Then she lost consciousness.

She died three hours later. My aunt tearfully returned the pillow to me. "This is the greatest Christmas present you've ever given anyone," she said. "I wanted to show her she was special, but it was only a pillow. I could have done better," I whispered.

"You did show her she was special because at a time in her life when she thought everyone had given up on her you went to all the effort of making this," my aunt said. "She told her therapist every week that she couldn't give up because someone believed in her enough to make the sun rise just for her." Lynne Smelser-Gackler CANTON ff J---'- -v. tfV.fi fc. WES BAUSMITHThe Detroit News I am a woman of 53 years who has received quite a few gifts in my day. But the greatest gift I ever received was the one during the Christmas season of 1954.

1 was 13 years old. That year had been very hard for my eight-member family. My father had been ill for some time with black lung illness and was unable to provide for all of us fi- nancially. To aid and ease the responsibility of my father having to buy for all of us kids, I decided I would write to my sister in Milwaukee for help. I enclosed my Christmas list.

It included clothes, money and games. Christmas was approaching fast, and there was no mail or Christmas box for me from my sister. I was feeling very sad and disappointed. It was disappointing that my sister might not be able to fill my Christmas wish. Christmas Eve came and passed into Christmas Day.

There was no mail or Christmas box. What happened? I wondered. Did she not get my letter in time? I surely sent it early enough. Maybe she was having a bad time herself. I thought, oh well, she should have written and said that she had gotten my letter but was unable to fill my Christmas list or something to that effect, right? Feeling kind of low a few days after Christmas, I decided I would write to my sister again.

The letter was written but never mailed. You see, the day before New Year's Eve, the mailman knocked on our door with a package. It was addressed to yours truly, Roberta Tarvin (my maiden name). I signed for the package, tore it open wildly. Enclosed was a letter from Mrs.

Chapman. My sister's married name was Chapman, but this was not from my sister. This was from a perfect stranger. The letter stated that she, Mrs. Chapman, had received my letter by mistake or fate of God, and opened it.

It seemed I had put the wrong address on the letter. Mrs. Chapman tried to locate my sister to explain and to give her the letter, but she couldn't find her. Discovering the Christmas list and my wishes, the Chapmans decided to fill it for me, since they couldn't find my sister. So you see, that is the greatest Christmas present I have ever received.

I am not only talking about the clothes, money and games, but the knowledge that there is always someone out there who cares and shows it by giving even to a stranger. Roberta Anderson DETROIT 44 i WANTED TO SHOW HER she was special, but it was only a pillow. I could have done better," I whispered. 1MORE ESSAYS PAGES 10, 12D a MOVIE REVIEWS 'Schindler's List" Rated (Splendid) "Heaven and Earth" Rated 0 (Worthwhile) Spielberg triumphs with his forceful epic of the Holocaust's unlikely hero Heaven' speaks rom the heart ibout war's folly By Susan Stark DETROIT NEWS FILM CRITIC nee in a very great while, a movie insinuates 4 itself so deeply into your consciousness that it Susan Stark TROIT NEWS FILM CRITIC offers not vicarious experience but instead, di epic melodrama of war and peace told, dis tinctively, from a woman's point of view, Heaven and Earth completes what Oliver rect experience. Steven Spielberg's heartfelt, monumental Schindler's List is such a movie.

An epic of the Holocaust, a three-hour drama crammed with emotionally telegraphic detail taken from life, this is the picture that marks Spielberg's coming of age as an artist. His film version of Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List takes as intimate and confrontational a look at the Nazi beast as any document in the vast literature of the Holocaust. Oskar Schindler, played mostly from the eyes by Liam Neeson, was a stylish but unsettled German businessman who came to Cracow just after Hitler's forces mowed down the Poles. Schindler saw that there was big money to be made from the war effort and promptly launched himself as a profiteer in pots and pans. He persuaded the few Jews in the city who still had money to finance his business.

The many Jews in the city thrown out of work, including dozens of highly educated professionals, became his die makers, machinists, metal polishers. A Jewish accountant, played as a model of controlled desperation by Ben Kingsley, ran the business and tracked the elaborate scheme of pay- me calls his Vietnam trilogy. First, Platoon. Second, rn on the Fourth of July. Now, the true story of Le Hayslip's tumultuous life.

The sixth child of rice farmers, she was born in rural itnam of the '50s, far removed from the distractions later, conflict of the waning French colonial era. war against the French finally reached her village, iugh, and then the war against the Americans. Le Ly suffered greatly during that conflict, at the ids of both the Saigon government and the Viet ng. At loose ends, she married a kind American ser-nt twice her age only to return with him to the Unit-States at war's end and soon find herself engaged in lolent marital war. Heaven and Earth tells her compelling story, deep-ng and enriching it with a plethora of background ails.

You come away from the film with a real sense Please see 4D As Schindler, Liam Neeson (right) plays a game of wits opposite Ralph Fiennes, the SS boss. offs and kickbacks that sustained it. And Schindler? He contributed what he himself defines in the film as in a happier time and place, he'd have been a PR guy in a shantung suit. What makes Schindler's story compelling and hauntingly ironic is that by trying to do well, he wound up doing good. Between 1939 and 1945, this bounder, this hedonist, Please see 'Schindler's 9D Le Ly Hayslip, played by Hiep Thi Le, is comforted by her mother, an almost unrecognizable Joan Chen, in "Heaven and Earth.".