Goodbye Kiss

The Board Meeting had come to an end. Bob started to stand up and jostled（推挤，撞） the table, spilling his coffee over his notes. "How embarrassing. I am getting so clumsy in my old age."

Everyone had a good laugh, and soon we were all telling stories of our most embarrassing moments. It came around to Frank who sat quietly listening to the others. Someone said, "Come on, Frank. Tell us your most embarrassing moment."

Frank laughed and began to tell us of his childhood. "I grew up in San Pedro. My Dad was a fisherman, and he loved the sea. He had his own boat, but it was hard making a living on the sea. He worked hard and would stay out until he caught enough to feed the family. Not just enough for our family, but also for his Mom and Dad and the other kids that were still at home."

He looked at us and said, "I wish you could have met my Dad. He was a big man, and he was strong from pulling the nets and fighting the seas for his catch. When you got close to him, he smelled like the ocean. He would wear his old canvas（帆布） , foul-weather coat and his bibbed overalls（工装裤，工作裤） . His rain hat would be pulled down over his brow（眉毛） . No matter how much my Mother washed them, they would still smell of the sea and of fish."

Frank's voice dropped a bit. "When the weather was bad he would drive me to school. He had this old truck that he used in his fishing business. That truck was older than he was. It would wheeze（喘息） and rattle down the road. You could hear it coming for blocks. As he would drive toward the school,I would shrink down into the seat hoping to disappear. Half the time, he would slam to a stop and the old truck would belch（打嗝，喷出） a cloud of smoke. He would pull right up in front, and it seemed like everybody would be standing around and watching. Then he would lean over and give me a big kiss on the cheek and tell me to be a good boy. It was so embarrassing for me. Here, I was twelve years old, and my Dad would lean over and kiss me goodbye!"

He paused and then went on, "I remember the day I decided I was too old for a goodbye kiss. When we got to the school and came to a stop, he had his usual big smile. He started to lean toward me, but I put my hand up and said, 'No, Dad.'

It was the first time I had ever talked to him that way, and he had this surprised look on his face.

I said, 'Dad, I'm too old for a goodbye kiss. I'm too old for any kind of kiss.'

My Dad looked at me for the longest time, and his eyes started to tear up. I had never seen him cry. He turned and looked out the windshield（挡风玻璃） . 'You're right,' he said. 'You are a big boy....a man. I won't kiss you anymore.'"

Frank got a funny look on his face, and the tears began to well up in his eyes, as he spoke. "It wasn't long after that when my Dad went to sea and never came back. It was a day when most of the fleet stayed in, but not Dad. He had a big family to feed. They found his boat adrift with its nets half in and half out. He must have gotten into a gale（大风，狂风） and was trying to save the nets and the floats."

I looked at Frank and saw that tears were running down his cheeks. Frank spoke again. "Guys, you don't know what I would give to have my Dad give me just one more kiss on the cheek....to feel his rough old face....to smell the ocean on him....to feel his arm around my neck. I wish I had been a man then. If I had been a man, I would never have told my Dad I was too old for a goodbye kiss."

Just Two For Breakfast

When my husband and I celebrated our 38th wedding anniversary at our favorite restaurant, Lenny, the piano player, asked, "How did you do it?"

I knew there was no simple answer, but as the weekend approached, I wondered if one reason might be our ritual（仪式，惯例） of breakfast in bed every Saturday and Sunday.

It all started with the breakfast tray my mother gave us as a wedding gift. It had a glass top andslatted（用板条做的） wooden side pockets for the morning paper the kind you used to see in the movies. Mother loved her movies, and although she rarely had breakfast in bed, she held high hopes for her daughter. My adoring bridegroom took the message to heart.

Feeling guilty, I suggested we take turns. Despite grumblings（发牢骚） -- "hate crumbs（面包屑） in my bed" ---Sunday morning found my spouse eagerly awaiting his tray. Soon these weekend breakfasts became such a part of our lives that I never even thought about them. I only knew we treasured this separate, blissful time  read, relax, forget the things we should remember.

Sifting（过滤，筛选） through the years, I recalled how our weekends changed,but that we still preserved the ritual. We started our family (as new parents, we slept after breakfast more than we read), but we always found our way back to where we started, just two for breakfast, one on Saturday and one on Sunday.

When we had more time, my tray became more festive. First it was fruit slices placed in geometric（几何学的） pattern; then came flowers from our garden times just one blossom sprouting（发芽） from a grapefruit half. This arranger（曲作家） of mine had developed a flair for decorating, using everything fromamaryllis（喇叭花） to the buds of a maple tree. My husband said my cooking inspired him. Mother would have approved. Perhaps it was the Saturday when the big strawberry wore a daisy hat that I began to think, how can I top this? One dark winter night I woke with a vision of a snowman on a tray. That Sunday I scooped a handful of snow and in no time had my man made. With a flourish I put a miniaturepinecone（松果，松球） on his head.

As I delivered the tray, complete with a nicely frozen snowman, I waited for a reaction. There was none but as I headed down the stairs I heard a whoop of laughter and then, "You've won! Yes, sir, you've won the prize!"

The Magical Coat

My l4-year-old son, John, and I spotted the coat simultaneously（同时地） . It was hanging on a rack（齿条，行李架） at a secondhand clothing store in Northampton Mass, crammed in with shoddy（假冒的，劣质的） trench coats and an assortment（分类，混合物） of sad, woolen overcoats -- a rose among thorns.

While the other coats drooped（下垂，消沉） , this one looked as if it were holding itself up. The thick, black wool of the double-breasted chesterfield（长大衣） was soft and unworn, as though it had been preserved in mothballs（卫生球） for years in dead old Uncle Henry's steamer trunk. The coat had a black velvet collar, beautiful tailoring, a Fifth Avenue label and an unbelievable price of $28. We looked at each other, saying nothing, but John's eyes gleamed. Dark, woolen topcoats were popular just then with teenage boys, but could cost several hundred dollars new. This coat was even better, bearing that touch of classic elegance from a bygone（过去的） era.

John slid his arms down into the heavy satin（缎子） lining of the sleeves and buttoned the coat. He turned from side to side, eyeing himself in the mirror with a serious, studied expression that soon changed into a smile. The fit was perfect.

John wore the coat to school the next day and came home wearing a big grin（露齿笑） . "Ho. did the kids like your coat?" I asked. "They loved it," he said, carefully folding it over the back of a chair and smoothing it flat. I started calling him "Lord Chesterfield" and "The Great Gatsby."

Over the next few weeks, a change came over John. Agreement replaced contrariness（反对，矛盾） , quiet, reasoned discussion replaced argument. He became more judicious, more mannerly, more thoughtful, eager to please. “Good dinner, Mom," he would say every evening.

He would generously loan his younger brother his tapes and lecture him on the niceties（精密，美好） of behaviour; without a word of objection, he would carry in wood for the stove. One day when I suggested that he might start on homework before dinner, John -- a veteran procrastinator（拖拉者） – said, “You’re right. I guess I will.”

When I mentioned this incident to one of his teachers and remarked that I didn't know what caused the changes, she said laughing. "It must be his coat!" Another teacher told him she was giving him a good mark not only because he had earned it but because she liked his coat. At the library, we ran into a friend who had not seen our children in a long time, “Could this be John?" he asked, looking up to John's new height, assessing the cut of his coat and extending his hand, one gentleman to another.

John and I both know we should never mistake a person's clothes for the real person within them. But there is something to be said for wearing a standard of excellence for the world to see, for practising standards of excellence in though, speech, and behaviour, and for matching what is on the inside to what is on the outside.

Sometimes, watching John leave for（动身去） school, I've remembered with a keen sting what it felt like to be in the eighth grade -- a time when it was as easy to try on different approaches to life as it was to try on a coat. The whole world, the whole future is stretched out ahead, a vast panorama（全景，全貌）where all the doors are open. And if I were there right now, I would picture myself walking through those doors wearing my wonderful, magical coat.

The Life I Pursued

That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the pattern of life it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a placid（平静的，温和的） rivulet（小溪，小河） , meandering（漫步） smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vastly sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a vague（模糊的） uneasiness（不安，担忧） .

Perhaps it is only by a kink（扭结，奇想） in my nature, strong in me even in those days, that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great majority, something amiss（有毛病的，有缺陷的） . I recognized its social value. I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course.

There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In my heart was desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged（锯齿状的） rocks and treacherous（奸诈的，叛逆的） ,shoals（浅滩，沙洲） it I could only have change-change and the excitement of unforeseen.

Enjoy Loneliness

I find it wholesome（健全的，有益健康的） to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome（疲倦的，厌倦的） and dissipating（消散） . I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude（孤独，隐居） . We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent（勤勉的，用功的） student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish（托钵僧） in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing（锄地，挖掘） or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can see the folks and recreate, and, as he thinks,remunerate（酬劳，赔偿） himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and the blues; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette（礼仪，礼节）and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside（非正式的） every night; we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a factory---never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than theloon（懒人，笨蛋） in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray?

And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure（蔚蓝的） tint of its waters. The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. god is alone---but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel（栗色） , or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Millbrook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.