随着女儿的长大，我们基本上是越来越不知道她在想什么了？其实这很正常，也不那么重要。可作为父母，还是想了解女儿在想些什么。
其实没什么好办法。
只是有一天，在她的房间里看到她买的一些书。突发灵感：何不从她看的书中看看她对什么感兴趣？
《The Five People You Meet In Heaven》就是其中一本。
第一个人
NO! EDDIE SHOOK his head violently. NO! The Blue Man seemed amused.
"No? It can't be heaven?" he said. "Why? Because this is where you grew up?"
Eddie mouthed the word Yes.
"Ah." The Blue Man nodded. "Well. People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners. And heaven itself has many steps. This, for me, is the second. And for you, the first."
He led Eddie through the park, passing cigar shops and sausage stands and the "flat joints," where suckers lost their nickels and dimes.
Heaven? Eddie thought. Ridiculous. He had spent most of his adult life trying to get away from Ruby Pier. It was an amusement park, that's all, a place to scream and get wet and trade your dollars for kewpie dolls. The thought that this was some kind of blessed resting place was beyond his imagination. (p. 34)
其实我还真没想过天堂到底是什么样子。应该是非常不一样吧。我向往吗？不知道。
看到后来才觉得这是一本宗教意味颇大的书。只是和传统的传教不同。
很多朋友都说，许多终生不信教(大多的老中)的人在临终时信了教，而且因此走的很安详。我还没找到这种感觉。但我觉得我可能是个很适于信教的人。
"I am leaving," the Blue Man whispered in his ear. "This step of heaven is over for me. But there are others for you to meet."
"Wait," Eddie said, pulling back. "Just tell me one thing. Did I save the little girl? At the pier. Did I save her?"
The Blue Man did not answer. Eddie slumped. "Then my death was a waste, just like my life."
"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone." (p. 50)
真是意味深长。
第二个人
"You've been waiting here all this time?" Eddie whispered.
"Time," the Captain said, "is not what you think." He sat down next to Eddie. "Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning."
Eddie looked lost.
"I figure it's like in the Bible, the Adam and Eve deal?" the Captain said. "Adam's first night on earth? When he lays down to sleep? He thinks it's all over, right? He doesn't know what sleep is. His eyes are closing and he thinks he's leaving this world, right?"
"Only he isn't. He wakes up the next morning and he has a fresh new world to work with, but he has something else, too. He has his yesterday."
The Captain grinned. "The way I see it, that's what we're getting here, soldier. That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays." (p.92)
我们不难承认生是一种开始，死亡也是一种开始吗？我还是有点困惑。
"Sacrifice," The Captain said. "You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost.
You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.”
…
"That’s the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else." (p. 93-94)
sacrifice大约可以翻译为牺牲；舍弃。我们老中好像近年越来越不用这样的词了。
第三个人
All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair. (p. 104)
......
All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence. And now, someplace beyond death, Eddie slumped against a stainless steel wall and dropped into a snowbank, stung again by the denial of a man whose love, almost inexplicably, he still coveted, a man ignoring him, even in heaven. His father. The damage done. (p. 110)
我看了"All parents damage their children. "之后很震动。
第一个立即的想法是，我父母damage我的童年了吗？直觉是一定有。然后就试图找出到底有哪些事，让我惊讶的是，我记不得到底有什么不愉快事能让我到今天还以一种近乎仇恨的心情记得(即便把时间延长到少年)！！！
第二个立即的想法是，我damage我女儿的童年了吗？有。起码有若干次，起码我觉得是伤害她了。我可能会有很多成立或不成立的理由做哪些可笑或者说可恨的事。想到这里，我突然想到，也许她不觉得是什么了不得的事呢？不会。起码现在不会。
随后的想法是，我伤害过我父母吗？有。大概很多次。我每次想到这些事，心里总是很不好受。有一次，和妈妈谈起一次我想了很久的事，我是觉得如果不说可能会后悔一辈子。结果却是妈妈好像记不得了。我有点沮丧，不过仍然有释放的感觉。
Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives. (p. 126)
"Because of loyalty," she said.
"People don't die because of loyalty."
"They don't?" She smiled. "Religion? Government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?"
Eddie shrugged.
"Better," she said, "to be loyal to one another." (p.138)
Ruby stood, and Eddie stood, too. He could not stop thinking about his father's death.
"I hated him," he mumbled.
The old woman nodded.
"He was hell on me as a kid. And he was worse when I got older."
Ruby stepped toward him. "Edward," she said softly. It was the first time she had called him by name. "Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
"Forgive, Edward. Forgive. Do you remember the lightness you felt when you fist arrived in heaven?"
Eddie did. Where is my pain?
"That's because no one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it."
She touched his hand.
"You need to forgive your father." (pp.141-142)
Ruby was gone. He was back atop the mountain, outside the diner, standing in the snow.
He stood there for a long time, alone in the silence, until he realized the old woman was not coming back. Then he turned to the door and slowly pulled it open. He heard clanking silverware and dishes being stacked. He smelled freshly cooked food-breads and meats and sauces. The spirits of those who had perished at the pier were all round, engaged with one another, eating and drinking and talking.
Eddie moved haltingly, knowing what he was there to do. He turned to his right, to the corner booth, to the ghost of his father, smoking a cigar. He felt a shiver. He thought about the old man hanging out that hospital window, dying alone in the middle of the night.
"Dad?" Eddie whispered.
His father could not hear him. Eddie drew closer. "Dad. I know what happened now."
He felt a choke in his chest. He dropped to his knees alongside the booth. His father was so close that Eddie could see the whiskers on his face and the frayed end of his cigar. He saw the baggy lines beneath his tired eyes, the bent nose, the bony knuckles and squared shoulders of a workingman. he looked at his own arms and realized, in his earthly body, he was now older than his father. He had outlived him in every way.
"I was angry with you, Dad. I hated you."
Eddie felt tears welling. He felt a shaking in his chest. Something was flushing out of him.
"You beat me. You shut me out. I didn't understand. I still don't understand. Why did you do it?" He drew in long painful breaths. "I didn't know, OK? I didn't know your life, what happened. I didn't know you. But you're my father. I'll let it go now, all right? All right? Can we let it go?"
His voice wobbled until it was high and wailing, not his own anymore. "OK? YOU HEAR ME?" he screamed. Then softer: "You hear me? Dad?"
He leaned in close. he saw his father's dirty hands. He spoke the last familiar words in a whisper.
"It's fixed."
Eddie pounded the table, then slumped to the floor. When he looked up, he saw Ruby standing across the way, young and beautiful. She dipped her head, opened the door, and lifted off the jade sky. (pp.143-144)
说起来，孩子和父母之间的关系有各种各样。这话题要说起来还是很有学问的。该书只是讲了某种情景，仍然催人泪下。特别是，当父母不在时，孩子们常常会有一种难以名状的失落或后悔。我特别不喜欢这样的感觉，也特希望我的孩子不要有这样的感觉。
最近在读龙应台的《大江大海1949》。摘一点吧。
我自己十九岁的时候，父母之于我，大概就像城市里的行道树一样吧？这些树，种在道路两旁，疾驶过去的车轮溅出的脏水喷在树干上，天空漂浮着的濛濛细灰，静悄悄地下来，蒙住每一片向上张开的叶。
行道树用脚，往下守着道路，却用脸，朝上接住整个城市的落尘。
如果这些树还长果子，他们的果子要不就被风刮落、在马路上被车轮辗过，要不就在扫街人的咒骂声中被拨进垃圾桶。谁，会停下脚步来问他们是什么树？
等到我惊醒过来，想去追问我的父母究竟是什么来历的时候，对不起，父亲，已经走了；母亲，眼睛看着你，似曾相识的眼神仿佛还带着你熟悉的温情，但是，你错了，她的记忆，像失事飞机的黑盒子沉入深海一样，纵入茫然--她连最亲爱的你，都不认得了。
行道树不会把一生的灰尘回倒在你身上，但是他们会以石头般的沉默和冷淡的失忆来对付你。
第四个人
People say they "find" love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, an it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love. And Eddie found a certain love with Marguerite, a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was irreplaceable. Once she'd gone, he'd let the days go stale. He put his heart to sleep. (p.155 - p.156)
LOVE, LIKE RAIN, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping it self alive. (p. 164)
......
Because he had not slept in heaven, it was Eddie's perception that he had not spent more than a few hours with any of the people he's met. Then again, without night or day, without sleeping or waking, without sunsets or high tides and meals or schedules, how did he know? (p. 168)
......
Eddie realized that was precisely what he'd been feeling for years.
"I should have worked somewhere else," he told her. "I'm sorry I never got us out of there. My dad. My leg. I always felt like such a bum after the war."
He saw a sadness pass over her face.
"What happened?" she asked. "During that war?"
He had never quite told her. It was all understood. Soldiers, in his day, did what they had to do and didn't speak of it once they came home. He thought about the men he'd killed. He thought about the guards. He thought about the blood on his hands. He wondered if he's ever be forgiven.
"I lost myself," he said.
"No," his wife said.
"Yes," he whispered, and she said nothing else.
At times there in heaven, the two of them would lie down together. But they did not sleep. On earth, Marguerite said, when you fell asleep, you sometimes dreamed your heaven and those dreams helped to form it. But there was no reason for such dreams now.
Instead, Eddie held her shoulders and nuzzled in her hair and took long, deep breaths. At one point, he asked his wife if God knew he was here. She smiled and said, "Of course," even when Eddie admitted that some of his life he'd spent hiding from God, and the rest of the time he thought he went unnoticed. (pp.170-171)
Finally, after many talks, Marguerite walked Eddie through another door. They were back inside the small, round room. She sat on the stool and placed her fingers together. She turned to the mirror, and Eddie noticed her reflection. Hers, but not his.
"The bride waits here," she said, running her hands along her hair, taking in her image but seeming to drift away. "This is the moment you think about what you're doing. Who you're choosing. Who you will love. If it's right, Eddie, this can be such a wonderful moment."
She turned to him.
"You had to live without love for many years, didn't you?"
Eddie said nothing.
"You felt that it was snatched away, that I felt you too soon."
He lowered himself slowly. He lavender dress was spread before him.
"You did leave too soon, " he said.
"You were angry with me."
"No."
Her eyes flashed.
"OK. Yes."
"There was a reason to it all," she said.
"What reason?" he said. "How could there be a reason? You died. You were forty-seven. You were the best person any of us knew, and you died and you lost everything. And I lost everything. I lost the only woman I ever loved."
She took his hands. "No, you didn't. I was right here. And you loved anyway.
"Lost love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.
"Life has to end," she said. "Love doesn't."
Eddie thought about the years after he buried his wife. It was like looking over a fence. He was aware of another kind of life out there, even as he knew he would never be a part of it.
"I never wanted anyone else," he said quietly.
"I know," she said.
"I was still in love with you."
"I know." She nodded. "I felt it."
"Here?" he asked.
"Even here," she said, smiling. "That's how strong lost love can be."
She stood and opened a door, and Eddie blinked as he entered behind her. It was a dimly lit room, with foldable chairs, and an accordion player sitting in the corner.
"I was saving this one," she said.
She held out her arms. And for the first time in heaven, he initiated his contact, he came to her, ignoring the leg, ignoring all the ugly associations he had made about dance and music and weddings, realizing now that they were really about loneliness.
"All that's missing," Marguerite whispered, taking his shoulder, "is the bingo cards."
He grinned and put a hand behind her waist.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Yes."
"How come you look the way you looked the day I married you?"
"I thought you'd like it that way."
He thought for a moment. "Can you change it?"
"Change it?" She looked amused. "To what?"
"To the end."
She lowered her arms. "I wasn't so pretty at the end."
Eddie shook his head, as if to say not true.
"Could you?"
She took a moment, then came again into his arms. The accordion man played the familiar notes. She hummed in his ear and they began to move together, slowly, in a remembered rhythm that a husband shares only with his wife.
You made me love you I didn't want to do it I didn't want to do it You made me love you and all the time you knew it and all the time you knew it....
When he moved his head back, she 47 again, the web of lines beside her eyes, the thinner hair, the looser skin beneath her chin. She smiled and he smiled, and she was, to him, as beautiful as ever, and he closed his eyes and said for the first time what he'd been feeling from the moment he saw her again: "I don't want to go on. I want to stay here."
When he opened his eyes, his arms still held her shape, but she was gone, and so was everything else.
(p.172-p.175)
这一段我是看的热泪盈眶。
有些东西可能是一生都在追寻和思考的。
大多的时候，我们都是觉得自己是对的。可惜的是，常常在若干年后，发现自己错了或者不那么正确。
我常常羡慕(有时是完全不相信)有人信誓旦旦的说下辈子还要这样过。虽然我似乎还没到回首往事的时候，但我确实常常觉得的生活应该不是这样的。由此我下辈子为什么还要这样过呢？为什么不要有个完全不同的生活？
第五个人
A warm breeze blew. A tear rolled down Eddie's face. Tala studied it the way a child studies a bug in the grass. Then she spoke to the space between them.
"Why sad?" she said.
"Why am I sad?" he whispered. "Here?"
She pointed down. "There."
Eddie sobbed, a final vacant sob, as if his chest were empty. He had surrendered all barriers; there was no grown-up-to-child talk anymore. He said what he always said, to Marguerite, to Ruby, to the Captain, to the Blue man, and, more than anyone, to himself.
"I was sad because I didn't do anything with my life. I was nothing. I accomplished nothing. I was lost. I felt like I wasn't supposed o be there."
Tala plucked the the pipe-cleaner dog from the water.
"Supposed to be there," she said.
"Where? At Ruby Pier?"
She nodded.
"Fixing rides? That was my existence?" He blew a deep breath. "Why?"
She titled her head, as if it were obvious.
"Children," she said. "You keep them safe. You make good for me."
She wiggled the dog against his shirt.
"Is where you were supposed to be," she said, and then she touched his shirt patch with a small laugh and added two words, "Eddie Main-ten-ance." (pp. 190-191)
With that, the river rose quickly, engulfing Eddie's waist and chest and shoulders. Before he could take another breath, the nose of the children disappeared above him, and he was submerged in a strong but silent current. His grip was still entwined with Tala's, but he felt his body being washed from his soul, meat from the bone, and with it went all the pain and weariness he ever held inside him, every scar, every wound, every bad memory.
He was nothing now, a leaf in the water, and she pulled him gently, through shadow and light, through shades of blue and ivory and lemon and black, and he realized all these colors, all along, were the emotions of his life. She drew him up through the breaking waves of a great gray ocean and he emerged in brilliant light above an almost unimaginable scene:
There was a pier filled with thousands of people, men and women, fathers and mothers and children--so many children--children from the past and the present, children who had not yet been born, side by side, hand in hand, in caps, in short pants, filling the boardwalk and the rides and the wooden platforms, sitting on each other's shoulders, sitting in each other's laps. They were there, or would be there, because of the simple, mundane things Eddie had done in his life, the accidents he had prevented, the rides he had kept safe, the unnoticed turns he had affected every day. And while their lips did not move, Eddie heard their voices, more voices than he could have imagined, and a peace came upon him that he had never known before. He was free of Tala's grasp now, and he floated up above the sand and above the boardwalk, above the tent tops and spires of the midway, toward the peak of the big, white Ferris wheel, where a cart, gently swaying, held a woman in a yellow dress--his wife, Marguerite, waiting with her arms extended. He reached for her and he saw her smile and the voices melded into a single word from God:
Home. (pp. 192-194)
真是一本不错的书。
回到我最开始的动机。觉得女儿能挑这样的书读，我实在是没有什么可担心的了。
我还会找她的书读的，因为她可能会比我发现更多的好书。
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_People_You_Meet_in_Heaven
10/16/09 - 11/6/09
其实没什么好办法。
只是有一天，在她的房间里看到她买的一些书。突发灵感：何不从她看的书中看看她对什么感兴趣？
《The Five People You Meet In Heaven》就是其中一本。
第一个人
NO! EDDIE SHOOK his head violently. NO! The Blue Man seemed amused.
"No? It can't be heaven?" he said. "Why? Because this is where you grew up?"
Eddie mouthed the word Yes.
"Ah." The Blue Man nodded. "Well. People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners. And heaven itself has many steps. This, for me, is the second. And for you, the first."
He led Eddie through the park, passing cigar shops and sausage stands and the "flat joints," where suckers lost their nickels and dimes.
Heaven? Eddie thought. Ridiculous. He had spent most of his adult life trying to get away from Ruby Pier. It was an amusement park, that's all, a place to scream and get wet and trade your dollars for kewpie dolls. The thought that this was some kind of blessed resting place was beyond his imagination. (p. 34)
其实我还真没想过天堂到底是什么样子。应该是非常不一样吧。我向往吗？不知道。
看到后来才觉得这是一本宗教意味颇大的书。只是和传统的传教不同。
很多朋友都说，许多终生不信教(大多的老中)的人在临终时信了教，而且因此走的很安详。我还没找到这种感觉。但我觉得我可能是个很适于信教的人。
"I am leaving," the Blue Man whispered in his ear. "This step of heaven is over for me. But there are others for you to meet."
"Wait," Eddie said, pulling back. "Just tell me one thing. Did I save the little girl? At the pier. Did I save her?"
The Blue Man did not answer. Eddie slumped. "Then my death was a waste, just like my life."
"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone." (p. 50)
真是意味深长。
第二个人
"You've been waiting here all this time?" Eddie whispered.
"Time," the Captain said, "is not what you think." He sat down next to Eddie. "Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning."
Eddie looked lost.
"I figure it's like in the Bible, the Adam and Eve deal?" the Captain said. "Adam's first night on earth? When he lays down to sleep? He thinks it's all over, right? He doesn't know what sleep is. His eyes are closing and he thinks he's leaving this world, right?"
"Only he isn't. He wakes up the next morning and he has a fresh new world to work with, but he has something else, too. He has his yesterday."
The Captain grinned. "The way I see it, that's what we're getting here, soldier. That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays." (p.92)
我们不难承认生是一种开始，死亡也是一种开始吗？我还是有点困惑。
"Sacrifice," The Captain said. "You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost.
You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.”
…
"That’s the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else." (p. 93-94)
sacrifice大约可以翻译为牺牲；舍弃。我们老中好像近年越来越不用这样的词了。
第三个人
All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair. (p. 104)
......
All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence. And now, someplace beyond death, Eddie slumped against a stainless steel wall and dropped into a snowbank, stung again by the denial of a man whose love, almost inexplicably, he still coveted, a man ignoring him, even in heaven. His father. The damage done. (p. 110)
我看了"All parents damage their children. "之后很震动。
第一个立即的想法是，我父母damage我的童年了吗？直觉是一定有。然后就试图找出到底有哪些事，让我惊讶的是，我记不得到底有什么不愉快事能让我到今天还以一种近乎仇恨的心情记得(即便把时间延长到少年)！！！
第二个立即的想法是，我damage我女儿的童年了吗？有。起码有若干次，起码我觉得是伤害她了。我可能会有很多成立或不成立的理由做哪些可笑或者说可恨的事。想到这里，我突然想到，也许她不觉得是什么了不得的事呢？不会。起码现在不会。
随后的想法是，我伤害过我父母吗？有。大概很多次。我每次想到这些事，心里总是很不好受。有一次，和妈妈谈起一次我想了很久的事，我是觉得如果不说可能会后悔一辈子。结果却是妈妈好像记不得了。我有点沮丧，不过仍然有释放的感觉。
Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives. (p. 126)
"Because of loyalty," she said.
"People don't die because of loyalty."
"They don't?" She smiled. "Religion? Government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?"
Eddie shrugged.
"Better," she said, "to be loyal to one another." (p.138)
Ruby stood, and Eddie stood, too. He could not stop thinking about his father's death.
"I hated him," he mumbled.
The old woman nodded.
"He was hell on me as a kid. And he was worse when I got older."
Ruby stepped toward him. "Edward," she said softly. It was the first time she had called him by name. "Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
"Forgive, Edward. Forgive. Do you remember the lightness you felt when you fist arrived in heaven?"
Eddie did. Where is my pain?
"That's because no one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it."
She touched his hand.
"You need to forgive your father." (pp.141-142)
Ruby was gone. He was back atop the mountain, outside the diner, standing in the snow.
He stood there for a long time, alone in the silence, until he realized the old woman was not coming back. Then he turned to the door and slowly pulled it open. He heard clanking silverware and dishes being stacked. He smelled freshly cooked food-breads and meats and sauces. The spirits of those who had perished at the pier were all round, engaged with one another, eating and drinking and talking.
Eddie moved haltingly, knowing what he was there to do. He turned to his right, to the corner booth, to the ghost of his father, smoking a cigar. He felt a shiver. He thought about the old man hanging out that hospital window, dying alone in the middle of the night.
"Dad?" Eddie whispered.
His father could not hear him. Eddie drew closer. "Dad. I know what happened now."
He felt a choke in his chest. He dropped to his knees alongside the booth. His father was so close that Eddie could see the whiskers on his face and the frayed end of his cigar. He saw the baggy lines beneath his tired eyes, the bent nose, the bony knuckles and squared shoulders of a workingman. he looked at his own arms and realized, in his earthly body, he was now older than his father. He had outlived him in every way.
"I was angry with you, Dad. I hated you."
Eddie felt tears welling. He felt a shaking in his chest. Something was flushing out of him.
"You beat me. You shut me out. I didn't understand. I still don't understand. Why did you do it?" He drew in long painful breaths. "I didn't know, OK? I didn't know your life, what happened. I didn't know you. But you're my father. I'll let it go now, all right? All right? Can we let it go?"
His voice wobbled until it was high and wailing, not his own anymore. "OK? YOU HEAR ME?" he screamed. Then softer: "You hear me? Dad?"
He leaned in close. he saw his father's dirty hands. He spoke the last familiar words in a whisper.
"It's fixed."
Eddie pounded the table, then slumped to the floor. When he looked up, he saw Ruby standing across the way, young and beautiful. She dipped her head, opened the door, and lifted off the jade sky. (pp.143-144)
说起来，孩子和父母之间的关系有各种各样。这话题要说起来还是很有学问的。该书只是讲了某种情景，仍然催人泪下。特别是，当父母不在时，孩子们常常会有一种难以名状的失落或后悔。我特别不喜欢这样的感觉，也特希望我的孩子不要有这样的感觉。
最近在读龙应台的《大江大海1949》。摘一点吧。
我自己十九岁的时候，父母之于我，大概就像城市里的行道树一样吧？这些树，种在道路两旁，疾驶过去的车轮溅出的脏水喷在树干上，天空漂浮着的濛濛细灰，静悄悄地下来，蒙住每一片向上张开的叶。
行道树用脚，往下守着道路，却用脸，朝上接住整个城市的落尘。
如果这些树还长果子，他们的果子要不就被风刮落、在马路上被车轮辗过，要不就在扫街人的咒骂声中被拨进垃圾桶。谁，会停下脚步来问他们是什么树？
等到我惊醒过来，想去追问我的父母究竟是什么来历的时候，对不起，父亲，已经走了；母亲，眼睛看着你，似曾相识的眼神仿佛还带着你熟悉的温情，但是，你错了，她的记忆，像失事飞机的黑盒子沉入深海一样，纵入茫然--她连最亲爱的你，都不认得了。
行道树不会把一生的灰尘回倒在你身上，但是他们会以石头般的沉默和冷淡的失忆来对付你。
第四个人
People say they "find" love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, an it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love. And Eddie found a certain love with Marguerite, a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was irreplaceable. Once she'd gone, he'd let the days go stale. He put his heart to sleep. (p.155 - p.156)
LOVE, LIKE RAIN, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping it self alive. (p. 164)
......
Because he had not slept in heaven, it was Eddie's perception that he had not spent more than a few hours with any of the people he's met. Then again, without night or day, without sleeping or waking, without sunsets or high tides and meals or schedules, how did he know? (p. 168)
......
Eddie realized that was precisely what he'd been feeling for years.
"I should have worked somewhere else," he told her. "I'm sorry I never got us out of there. My dad. My leg. I always felt like such a bum after the war."
He saw a sadness pass over her face.
"What happened?" she asked. "During that war?"
He had never quite told her. It was all understood. Soldiers, in his day, did what they had to do and didn't speak of it once they came home. He thought about the men he'd killed. He thought about the guards. He thought about the blood on his hands. He wondered if he's ever be forgiven.
"I lost myself," he said.
"No," his wife said.
"Yes," he whispered, and she said nothing else.
At times there in heaven, the two of them would lie down together. But they did not sleep. On earth, Marguerite said, when you fell asleep, you sometimes dreamed your heaven and those dreams helped to form it. But there was no reason for such dreams now.
Instead, Eddie held her shoulders and nuzzled in her hair and took long, deep breaths. At one point, he asked his wife if God knew he was here. She smiled and said, "Of course," even when Eddie admitted that some of his life he'd spent hiding from God, and the rest of the time he thought he went unnoticed. (pp.170-171)
Finally, after many talks, Marguerite walked Eddie through another door. They were back inside the small, round room. She sat on the stool and placed her fingers together. She turned to the mirror, and Eddie noticed her reflection. Hers, but not his.
"The bride waits here," she said, running her hands along her hair, taking in her image but seeming to drift away. "This is the moment you think about what you're doing. Who you're choosing. Who you will love. If it's right, Eddie, this can be such a wonderful moment."
She turned to him.
"You had to live without love for many years, didn't you?"
Eddie said nothing.
"You felt that it was snatched away, that I felt you too soon."
He lowered himself slowly. He lavender dress was spread before him.
"You did leave too soon, " he said.
"You were angry with me."
"No."
Her eyes flashed.
"OK. Yes."
"There was a reason to it all," she said.
"What reason?" he said. "How could there be a reason? You died. You were forty-seven. You were the best person any of us knew, and you died and you lost everything. And I lost everything. I lost the only woman I ever loved."
She took his hands. "No, you didn't. I was right here. And you loved anyway.
"Lost love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.
"Life has to end," she said. "Love doesn't."
Eddie thought about the years after he buried his wife. It was like looking over a fence. He was aware of another kind of life out there, even as he knew he would never be a part of it.
"I never wanted anyone else," he said quietly.
"I know," she said.
"I was still in love with you."
"I know." She nodded. "I felt it."
"Here?" he asked.
"Even here," she said, smiling. "That's how strong lost love can be."
She stood and opened a door, and Eddie blinked as he entered behind her. It was a dimly lit room, with foldable chairs, and an accordion player sitting in the corner.
"I was saving this one," she said.
She held out her arms. And for the first time in heaven, he initiated his contact, he came to her, ignoring the leg, ignoring all the ugly associations he had made about dance and music and weddings, realizing now that they were really about loneliness.
"All that's missing," Marguerite whispered, taking his shoulder, "is the bingo cards."
He grinned and put a hand behind her waist.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Yes."
"How come you look the way you looked the day I married you?"
"I thought you'd like it that way."
He thought for a moment. "Can you change it?"
"Change it?" She looked amused. "To what?"
"To the end."
She lowered her arms. "I wasn't so pretty at the end."
Eddie shook his head, as if to say not true.
"Could you?"
She took a moment, then came again into his arms. The accordion man played the familiar notes. She hummed in his ear and they began to move together, slowly, in a remembered rhythm that a husband shares only with his wife.
You made me love you I didn't want to do it I didn't want to do it You made me love you and all the time you knew it and all the time you knew it....
When he moved his head back, she 47 again, the web of lines beside her eyes, the thinner hair, the looser skin beneath her chin. She smiled and he smiled, and she was, to him, as beautiful as ever, and he closed his eyes and said for the first time what he'd been feeling from the moment he saw her again: "I don't want to go on. I want to stay here."
When he opened his eyes, his arms still held her shape, but she was gone, and so was everything else.
(p.172-p.175)
这一段我是看的热泪盈眶。
有些东西可能是一生都在追寻和思考的。
大多的时候，我们都是觉得自己是对的。可惜的是，常常在若干年后，发现自己错了或者不那么正确。
我常常羡慕(有时是完全不相信)有人信誓旦旦的说下辈子还要这样过。虽然我似乎还没到回首往事的时候，但我确实常常觉得的生活应该不是这样的。由此我下辈子为什么还要这样过呢？为什么不要有个完全不同的生活？
第五个人
A warm breeze blew. A tear rolled down Eddie's face. Tala studied it the way a child studies a bug in the grass. Then she spoke to the space between them.
"Why sad?" she said.
"Why am I sad?" he whispered. "Here?"
She pointed down. "There."
Eddie sobbed, a final vacant sob, as if his chest were empty. He had surrendered all barriers; there was no grown-up-to-child talk anymore. He said what he always said, to Marguerite, to Ruby, to the Captain, to the Blue man, and, more than anyone, to himself.
"I was sad because I didn't do anything with my life. I was nothing. I accomplished nothing. I was lost. I felt like I wasn't supposed o be there."
Tala plucked the the pipe-cleaner dog from the water.
"Supposed to be there," she said.
"Where? At Ruby Pier?"
She nodded.
"Fixing rides? That was my existence?" He blew a deep breath. "Why?"
She titled her head, as if it were obvious.
"Children," she said. "You keep them safe. You make good for me."
She wiggled the dog against his shirt.
"Is where you were supposed to be," she said, and then she touched his shirt patch with a small laugh and added two words, "Eddie Main-ten-ance." (pp. 190-191)
With that, the river rose quickly, engulfing Eddie's waist and chest and shoulders. Before he could take another breath, the nose of the children disappeared above him, and he was submerged in a strong but silent current. His grip was still entwined with Tala's, but he felt his body being washed from his soul, meat from the bone, and with it went all the pain and weariness he ever held inside him, every scar, every wound, every bad memory.
He was nothing now, a leaf in the water, and she pulled him gently, through shadow and light, through shades of blue and ivory and lemon and black, and he realized all these colors, all along, were the emotions of his life. She drew him up through the breaking waves of a great gray ocean and he emerged in brilliant light above an almost unimaginable scene:
There was a pier filled with thousands of people, men and women, fathers and mothers and children--so many children--children from the past and the present, children who had not yet been born, side by side, hand in hand, in caps, in short pants, filling the boardwalk and the rides and the wooden platforms, sitting on each other's shoulders, sitting in each other's laps. They were there, or would be there, because of the simple, mundane things Eddie had done in his life, the accidents he had prevented, the rides he had kept safe, the unnoticed turns he had affected every day. And while their lips did not move, Eddie heard their voices, more voices than he could have imagined, and a peace came upon him that he had never known before. He was free of Tala's grasp now, and he floated up above the sand and above the boardwalk, above the tent tops and spires of the midway, toward the peak of the big, white Ferris wheel, where a cart, gently swaying, held a woman in a yellow dress--his wife, Marguerite, waiting with her arms extended. He reached for her and he saw her smile and the voices melded into a single word from God:
Home. (pp. 192-194)
真是一本不错的书。
回到我最开始的动机。觉得女儿能挑这样的书读，我实在是没有什么可担心的了。
我还会找她的书读的，因为她可能会比我发现更多的好书。
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_People_You_Meet_in_Heaven
10/16/09 - 11/6/09
