英语书籍：Listening Is An Act Of Love（二）

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Nonfiction: Listening Is An Act Of Love
A Celebration of American Life
from the StoryCorps Project
Author: Dave Isay, Editor
Publisher: The Penguin Press
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 9781594201400
LISTENING (Part 2 of 5)
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HOME and FAMILY

When StoryCorps launched, I wasn't sure whether the interviews would
resonate with anyone other than the participants and their families.
I also suspected that we'd start hearing the same stories repeated
over and over again.

From the day we opened, I was taken by the power and universality of
the recordings coming out of the booth. Most StoryCorps interviews
revolve around the three great themes of human existence--birth,
love, and death--but from these themes emerge an astonishing array
of stories.

One day, about a year into the project, the senior producer for
StoryCorps, Sarah Kramer, came up to me and said, "You know, the
longer the project runs, the better the stories seem to get." Her
words remain true to this day.


CYNTHIA RAHN, 48, interviewed by her friend ADRIENNE LEA, 47
RECORDED IN DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA

Cynthia Rahn: I lived very far out in the country, and I had just
started kindergarten with a lot of kids from town that I didn't
know. We had an assignment to bring in either a toy or a stuffed
animal or something you found in your barn so that we could create a
barnyard diorama. I was a little shy and insecure because I knew I
was from out in the country and probably looked poor to everybody
else, and certainly everybody else looked rich to me. So I felt a
little intimidated.

But Mrs. White was a wonderful lady. Very loving and considerate.
When she gave us the assignment, she made it very exciting. And I
don't think she had a clue that completing the assignment would be a
problem for anyone. She said, "Go home, find something that has to
do with a farm animal or a barn, and bring it in tomorrow, and we'll
all as a group create a farmyard scene here at kindergarten." We
were very excited about it when we left to go home. But once I got
home, I took off my school clothes and ran outside to play. I
completely forgot about the assignment, and played until dark.

When my mother got home from work, we came in and ate and got ready
to go to bed. And then I realized I had forgotten to do anything to
prepare for this assignment. And so, here was Momma, just got home
from work, tired, and I said, "Oh my gosh, I've got to get a cow or
a hoe or a stuffed animal," something that represents a farm. We
looked, and I did not have one single farmyard toy. I didn't have a
plastic horse. I didn't have a stuffed cow. We had nothing. So it
was dark, and it was time to go to bed. And I started to cry. I got
really upset. And I said, "I can't go to school tomorrow and not
have anything." And Momma said, "It's too late. There's no stores
open." In rural Appalachia there were no Wal-Marts; you couldn't
just ride out and get something. And so, in addition to getting
upset, I started to get a little angry because I felt my momma
wasn't helping me. She said, "Well, you should have thought about
this when you got home. You waited too late. You weren't
responsible. You have to go to bed now."

I went to bed upset and angry, and then next morning I got up and
the first thing I thought of, laying in my bed, was "I don't have
anything to take to school." Momma worked, so she had to leave
early. She left before we got up, and she would leave us breakfast.

I went downstairs, and sitting on the kitchen table was a barn made
out of notebook paper. She had just taken plain notebook paper and
folded it; and she folded the walls, she folded the roof, she folded
the doors that opened so horses could go in and out. She had
shutters on the windows. She had little steps that went up to the
loft. And it was just sitting there. It was like magic. I looked at
it--there wasn't a staple in it. There was no tape. She had just
folded a barn for me.

I was so happy and so excited when I saw that barn. I was like, "I
can't believe she did that!" My sister took me to kindergarten. And
when I came in, the other kids had bags of store-bought plastic farm
animals. And everybody was so amazed at my barn. I felt like the
most special kid in the class. My mother is not the origami type, so
I have no idea where she learned to do that. I have no idea how long
that would have taken her to do or how she figured out how to make
that barn.

It made me a very happy little girl, and I was very popular that day
in school. I just felt like a queen. And I knew, too, that she
cared.

April 13, 2006

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====ABOUT THE AUTHOR==================

Dave Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and its parent company, Sound
Portraits Productions. Over the past two decades his radio
documentary work has won nearly every award in broadcasting,
including five Peabody awards. Dave has also received a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a United States Artists
Fellowship. He is the author (or coauthor) of four books based on
Sound Portraits radio stories, including "Our America: Life and
Death on the South Side of Chicago" and "Flophouse." He and his
wife, Jennifer Gonnerman, live in Brooklyn.

所有跟帖： 

• what a great mom ! -billnet- ♂ (0 bytes) () 04/24/2009 postreply 22:17:52

• Yes, she sure is. -紫君- ♀ (0 bytes) () 04/25/2009 postreply 08:26:32