In My Day

更新时间:2023-06-08 22:22:13 阅读：评论：0

In My Day (Rusll Baker)

At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ea fight的过去式beyond the gift of physical science.

"Where's Rusll" she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing home.

"I'm Rusll," I said.

mobike

She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future and promptly dismisd it.

(迅速地)

"Rusll's only this big," she said, holding her hand, palm down, two feet from the floor. That day she was a young country wife in the backyard with a view of hazy（朦胧的） blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard(果园), and I was a stranger old enough to be her father.

Early one morning she phoned me in New York. "Are you coming to my funeral today?" she asked.

It was an awkward question with which to be awakened. "What are you talking about, for God's sake?" was the best reply I could manage.

"I'm being buried today," she declared briskly(轻快地), as though announcing an important social event.

"I'll phone you back," I said and hung up, and when I did phone back she was all right, although she wasn't all right, of cour, and we all knew she wasn't.

She had always been a small woman — short, light-boned, delicately structured — but now, under the white hospital sheet, she was becoming 短裤英语tiny(微小的). I thought of a doll with huge, fierce eyes. There had always been a fierceness in her. It showed in that angry challenging thrust of the chin when she issued an opinion, and a great one she had always been for issuing opinions.

"I tell people exactly what's on my mind," she had been fond of boasting（吹嘘）, "whether they like it or not."

"It's not always good policy to tell people exactly what's on your mind," I ud to caution(警告) her.

"If they don't like it, that's too bad," was her customary（习惯的） reply, "becau that's the way I am."

And so she was, a formidableamenity（强大而可怕的） woman, determined to speak her mind, determined to have her way, determined to bend(make…give in; to change mind) tho who oppod her. She had hurled herlf at life with an energy that made her em always on the run. throw把自己扔向一种…生活

在奔波

She ran after chickens, an axe(斧头) in her hand, determined on a beheading(斩首) that would put dinner in the pot. She ran when she made the beds, ran when she t the table. One Thanksgiving she burned herlf badly when, running up from the cellar(地窖) even with the ceremonial turkey, she tripped on (在…失误)the stairs and tumbled down(滚下), ending at the bottom in the debris碎片 of giblets内脏, hot gravy(肉汁), and battered(破碎的) turkey. Life was combat(战斗), and victory was not to the lazy, the timid(胆小的), the drugstore cowboy(游手好闲的人), the mush-mouth(口齿不清者) afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind. She ran.中文日文翻译

But now the running was over. For a time I could not accept the inevitable. As I sat by her bed, my impul冲动 was to argue her back to reality. On my first visit to the hospital in Baltimore, she asked who I was.

"Rusll," I said.

"Rusll's way out west," she advid me.

"No, I'm right here."

"Guess where I came from today?" was her respon.

"Where?"

"All the way(一路上，始终) from New Jery."

"No. You've been in the hospital for three days," I insisted.

So it went until a doctor came by(从旁走过) to give one of tho oral quizzes that medical men外科医生 apply in such cas. She failed completely, giving wrong answers or none at all. Then a surpri.

"When is your birthday?" he asked.

"November 5, 1897," she said. Correct. Absolutely correct.

"How do you remember that?" the doctor asked.

"Becau I was born on Guy Fawkes Day."

"Guy Fawkes?" asked the doctor, "Who is Guy Fawkes?"

She replied with a rhyme韵律 I had heard her recite叙述 time and again(屡次，常常) over the years(多年以来):

"Plea to remember the Fifth of November,

Gunpowder treason and plot.

I e no reason why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot." ignorant

Then she glared at this young doctor so ill informed about Guy Fawkes' failed scheme诡计 to blow King James off his throne with barrels of gunpowder火药桶 in 1605. "You may know a lot about medicine, but you obviously don't know any history," she said. Having told him exactly what was on her mind, she left us again.

Then doctors diagnod诊断 a hopeless nility衰老 or hardening of the arterie本二s动脉. I thought it was more complicated than that. For ten years or more the 金山词霸英语翻译ferocity凶猛，厉害 with which she had once attacked life had been turning to a rage愤怒 against the weakness, the boredom, and the abnce of love that too much age had brought her. Now, after the last bad fall, she emed to have broken chains that imprisoned her in a life she had come to hate and to return to a time 占据inhabited by people who loved her, a time in which she was needed. Gradually I understood.

Three years earlier I had gone down下降 from New York to Baltimore, where she lived, for one of my infrequent罕见的 visits and, afterwards, had written her with some banal老套的 advice to look for the silver lining不幸中的一线希望, to count her blessings instead of burdening others with her miries灾难. I suppo what it really amounted to相当于 was a threat that if she was not more cheerful during my visits I would not come to e her very often. Sons are capable of such letters. This one was written out of a childish faith in the eternal永恒的 strength of parents, a naive belief that age and wear could be overcome by an effort of will, that all she needed was a good pep talk鼓舞士气的话 to recharge a flagging(declining,减弱的) spirit.

She wrote back in an unusually cheery vein (style) intended to demonstrate, I suppo, that she was mending her ways改过自新. Referring to关于 my visit, she wrote: "If I emed unhappy to you at times, I am, but there's really nothing anyone can do about it, becau I'm just so very tired and lonely that I'll just go to sleep and forget it." She was then venty-eight.

Now three years later, after the last bad fall, she had managed to forget the fatigue 疲劳and loneliness and to recapture happiness. I soon stopped trying to argue her back to what I considered the real world and tried to travel along with her on tho fantastic journeys into the past. One day when I arrived at her bedside she was radiant.容光焕发的

"Feeling good today," I said.

"Why shouldn't I feel good?" she asked. "Papa's going to take me up to沙文主义是什么意思 Baltimore on the boat today."

At that moment she was a young girl standing on a wharf码头, waiting for the Chesapeake Bay steamer轮船 with her father, who had been dead sixty-one years. William Howard Taft was in the White Hou, America was a young country, and the future stretched before it in beams光线 of crystal清澈透明的 sunlight. "The greatest country on God's green earth," her father might have said, if I had been able to step into my mother's time machine. It definitely went into our living

About her father, my grandfather, my mother's childhood and her people, I knew very little. A world had lived and died, and though it was part of my blood and bone I knew little more about it than I knew of the world of the pharaohs法老. It was uless now to ask for help from my mother. The orbits of her mind rarely touched prent interrogators for more than a moment. Track

help的用法

询问者

Sitting at her bedside, forever out of touch with her, I wondered about(对…感到疑惑) my own children and children in general, and about the disconnection between children and parents that prevents them from knowing each other. Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs进球英语激起 their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them. If a parent does lift the curtain a bit, it is often only to stun (impress) the young with some exemplary tale of how much harder life was in the old days.

I had been guilty of this when my children were small in the early 1960s and living the affl

uent富裕的 life. It irritated me that their childhoods should be, as I thought, so easy when my own had been, as I thought, so hard. I had developed the habit of lecturing them on the harshness of life in my day.

"In my day all we got for dinner was macaroni通心粉 and chee, and we were glad to get it."

"In my day we didn't have any television."

"In "

Clear the way of

At dinner one evening a son had offended me with an inadequate report card成绩单, and as I cleared my throat to lecture, he gazed at me with an expression of unutterable十足的，无法用语言表达的 resignation放弃 and said, "Tell me how it was in your day, Dad."

I was angry with him for that, but angrier with mylf for having become one of tho ancient bores who highly lective memories of the past become transparently dishonest even to small children. I tried to break the habit, but must have failed. Between us there was a dispute about争论 time. He looked upon the time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and being young, he was indifferent to不在乎 the past.

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