故事节选:结束了的故事

“You write down things that happened to you that day.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because maybe they’re interesting and you want to remember them.”

“What would I write?”

“Well, you’d write something like ‘Today I saw a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street.’ ”
 
“我要它做什么？”我想知道。
“你可以写下你每天经历的。”
“为什么我要这么做？”
“也许他们都很有趣，而以后你会想要记得这些。”
“我该怎么写？”
“你可以这样写‘今天我看见一个紫色头发的女人穿过了蒙塔古街。’”

I still remember the way she said that sentence: Today I saw a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street. It is one of those memories that I carry around, and always will, like the shard of a shell that falls out of a bag you took to the beach for a long summer.

我一直记得她说的那句话的形式：今天我看见一个一个紫色头发的女人穿过了蒙塔古街。这是我时刻并将一直携带，就像是挂在我的包上那一枚在某个漫长的夏天到海滩上拾到的贝壳。

I hadn’t seen a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street, of course. But in that sentence was my mother’s sense that one might want to capture the extraordinary, her grasp of children’s love of the absurd, her striking physical presence—in my memory, she was leaning toward me, backlit, her black hair falling forward—and her intuition that my seriousness needed to be leavened with playfulness.

 当然，我没有真正看到过穿过蒙塔古街的紫发女人。那句话是我母亲编出来引起我不同寻常注意的，她明白孩子们的好奇心一定不会忽视紫发女人这样惹人注目的存在——在我的记忆中，她站在我的斜前方，背着光，黑色的头发披在前面——她直觉我的当真需要由嬉闹中慢慢来发酵养成。

My brothers and I spent an inordinate amount of time with our mother when we were children, not only because we went to school where she worked, as the head of the middle school, but because she loved being with kids. She was a bit of a child herself. She had married when she was seventeen, and in some ways never lost the teen-ager inside her. Over the summer, she would study the names of Northeastern birds in her Audubon books and, with utter focus, write a list of the ones she’d seen. She had a vivid sense of what makes children feel safe, and she believed in a child’s experience of the world. Students trusted her, even when they’d been sent to her office and she was asking them why in the world they had done whatever it was they had done.

 我和哥哥孩童时期时有无数呆在母亲身边的日子，不仅仅是因为我们在母亲当校长的学校里上学，更因为她喜欢和我们这些孩子们呆在一起。她自己也有一点孩子气。从她17岁结婚后，在某些方面来说她一直保留着她内心的童真。夏天结束的时候，她就研究她的奥特朋书籍里东北鸟类的名称并且全神贯注，还会列出她看到过的种类。她具有明显的使孩子们感到安全的气质，相信孩子眼中看到的世界。学生都信任她，即使他们因为做了一些被她认为不当做的事被送去她的办公室，接受她的疑问。

She spent hours with my brothers and me, making gingerbread houses or sledding or cutting out paper snowflakes. She taught us all to make apple pie, and read “The Black Stallion” out loud to us at night—though she also had a habit of promising to read a book out loud and then giving up partway through. The boxes of memorabilia she kept for each of us were always disorganized. One of the things I found there after she died was a card I had made for her birthday when I was about six. It began: