=== Pinch Hitter ===
This passage is from the short story “Pinch Hitter” by Rochelle Spencer. In the first paragraph, the narrator is reflecting on a story her boyfriend once told her about his father’s prize baseball card. And when he spoke like this, even if I couldn’t find the words, I thought I knew exactly what he meant. Whenever he spoke like this, I was convinced that stories were powerful, that they let us reinvent ourselves, that they allowed us to become something stronger and greater than what we are. But now that I am older, I realize this isn’t always the case—stories don’t always heal. Today, I make my living as a reporter, and after nearly a decade of interviewing people about their discarded dreams, I recognize that not everyone gains strength from telling their stories. Certainly, this was true of even my own mother and her story of how she’d met Jackie Robinson. She’d told this story hundreds of times over the years for no other reason than she simply enjoyed telling it. She liked to exaggerate all the events leading up to the great occasion except for one: the moment she actually saw Jackie Robinson—that part never changed, never altered, not once. The summer my mother moved to New York was the same summer Sugar Ray Robinson regained the middleweight title and the Dodgers won the World Series. It was 1955, and to my mother, the entire world seemed accessible. That summer, she arrived from Trinidad accompanied by a hot breeze sprinkled, she claims, with the scent of oranges. And because my mother is one of those people who has been beautiful all of her life, she assumed that sweet breeze was made just for her, to tickle her bronze skin and high cheekbones. That summer, all of Brooklyn left their windows open. Bed-Stuy was moving from a mostly Jewish-Italian neighborhood to a mostly black one, and the sounds of Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Dodgers announcer Ray Barber drifted from kitchen to street. There were places—libraries, the corners of basements—where you could be cool and alone, but people really talked to you here, and that’s how my mother first developed this story. Now on the rare times when my mother and I were actually getting along, when we were out working in the garden and the sweat and the dirt and the sunshine made us feel a little more free with each other, she’d retell this story. She’d embellish, of course, but still I loved to hear her speak, loved to hear her voice skip and swing like a game of Double-Dutch. And when she was done, she’d sigh, shake her head, run her fingertips across her beautiful, sculpted face. “There’s a difference,” she’d murmur with a somberness that always surprised me, “between celebrities and heroes.” And then I, unused to my mother demonstrating any genuine feeling, would try to think of something sarcastic to say, and would only be able to nod my head.
=== Passage A: From Southwest Art ===
Artist. Like earlier painters of city scenes, such as Edward Hopper or artists of the Ashcan School, she is possessed of an eye that finds interest in places that would be written off as ordinary or ugly by those attuned to more conventionally compelling or beautiful scenes.
=== Passage B: From American Artist ===
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=== Passage IV: From Seven Elements That Changed the World ===
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