评论
打印
In My Day
在我那个年代
Russell Baker
拉赛尔·贝克
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 ease beyond the gift of physical science.
母亲80岁时狠狠地摔了一跤，这是她最后一次摔得这么严重。此后她的大脑便开始在时间长河中自在地神游。有时候她认为自己是去参加婚礼或葬礼，而这些婚礼或葬礼其实是半个世纪前举行的。有时候她又会沉浸于在星期天下午为孩子们做晚餐的情景中，而这些孩子们现在已到了两鬓斑白的年纪。尽管她卧病在床，她的思绪却能穿越时空，飞快自如地在已逝去的岁月里穿梭，这些依靠自然科学可办不到。
Where's Russell? she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing home.
“拉赛尔在哪儿？”有一天我去养老院探望时她问道。
I'm Russell, I said.
“我就是拉赛尔。”我说。
She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future and promptly dismissed it.
她凝视着人高马大的我，难以想象她的儿子会长这么大，于是立即否认了我的话。
Russell'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 blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a stranger old enough to be her father.
“拉赛尔只有这么大。”她说着，将手抬起约离地两英尺，掌心向下比划了一下。那时的她是那个站在后院的年轻村妇，从后院可以看到苹果园后面暮霭蒙蒙的弗吉尼亚群山我对她来说是一个年纪大得足以做她父亲的陌生人。
Early one morning she phoned me in New York. "Are you coming to my funeral today?" she asked.
一天清晨，她给在纽约的我打电话，“你今天来参加我的葬礼吗？”她问道。
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.
这个怪异的问题使我睡意全无：“看在上帝的份上！您在说什么？”这是我所能给出的最好回答。
I'm being buried today, she declared briskly, as though announcing an important social event.
“今天'我就要下葬了。”她轻快地说，就像在宣布一项重大的社会事件。
