每天都該讀一遍的英語(yǔ)美文
每天都該讀一遍的英語(yǔ)美文
英語(yǔ)寫作是英語(yǔ)專業(yè)學(xué)生的一項(xiàng)重要技能,英語(yǔ)專業(yè)學(xué)生可以選取成立英語(yǔ)社團(tuán)、背誦美文、撰寫英文日記、積累高級(jí)詞匯和句式等課外提高英語(yǔ)寫作能力的有效途徑,提升英語(yǔ)寫作水平。下面是學(xué)習(xí)啦小編帶來的每天都該讀一遍的英語(yǔ)美文，歡迎閱讀!
每天都該讀一遍的英語(yǔ)美文篇一
All Mum's Letters
To this day I remember my mum's letters. It all started in December 1941. Every night she sat at the big table in the kitchen and wrote to my brother Johnny, who had been drafted that summer. We had not heard from him since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
I didn't understand why my mum kept writing Johnny when he never wrote back.
"Wait and see-we'll get a letter from him one day," she claimed. Mum said that there was a direct link from the brain to the written word that was just as strong as the light God has granted us. She trusted that this light would find Johnny.
I don't know if she said that to calm herself, dad or all of us down. But I do know that it helped us stick together, and one day a letter really did arrive. Johnny was alive on an island in the Pacific.
I had always been amused by the fact that mum signed her letters, "Cecilia Capuzzi", and I teased her about that. "Why don't you just write 'Mum'?" I said.
I hadn't been aware that she always thought of herself as Cecilia Capuzzi. Not as Mum. I began seeing her in a new light, this small delicate woman, who even in high-heeled shoes was barely one and a half meters tall.
She never wore make-up or jewelry except for a wedding ring of gold. Her hair was fine,sleek and black and always put up in a knot in the neck. She wouldn't hear of getting a haircut or a perm. Her small silver-rimmed pince-nez only left her nose when she went to bed.
Whenever mum had finished a letter, she gave it to dad for him to post it. Then she put the water on to boil, and we sat down at the table and talked about the good old days when our Italian-American family had been a family of ten: mum, dad and eight children. Five boys and three girls. It is hard to understand that they had all moved away from home to work,enroll in the army, or get married. All except me.
Around next spring mum had got two more sons to write to. Every evening she wrote three different letters which she gave to me and dad afterwards so we could add our greetings.
Little by little the rumour about mum's letters spread. One day a small woman knocked at our door. Her voice trembled as she asked: "Is it true you write letters?"
"I write to my sons."
"And you can read too?" whispered the woman.
"Sure."
The woman opened her bag and pulled out a pile of airmail letters. "Read… please read them aloud to me."
The letters were from the woman's son who was a soldier in Europe, a red-haired boy who mum remembered having seen sitting with his brothers on the stairs in front of our house.Mum read the letters one by one and translated them from English to Italian. The woman's eyes welled up with tears. "Now I have to write to him," she said. But how was she going to do it?
"Make some coffee, Octavia," mum yelled to me in the living room while she took the woman with her into the kitchen and seated her at the table. She took the fountain pen, ink and air mail notepaper and began to write. When she had finished, she read the letter aloud to the woman.
"How did you know that was exactly what I wanted to say?"
"I often sit and look at my boys' letters, just like you, without a clue about what to write."
A few days later the woman returned with a friend, then another one and yet another one--they all had sons who fought in the war, and they all needed letters. Mum had become the correspondent in our part of town. Sometimes she would write letters all day long.
Mum always insisted that people signed their own letters, and the small woman with the grey hair asked mum to teach her how to do it. "I so much want to be able to write my own name so that my son can see it." Then mum held the woman's hand in hers and moved her hand over the paper again and again until she was able to do it without her help.
After that day, when mum had written a letter for the woman, she signed it herself, and her face brightened up in a smile.
One day she came to us, and mum instantly knew what had happened. All hope had disappeared from her eyes. They stood hand in hand for a long time without saying a word. Then mum said: "We better go to church. There are certain things in life so great that we cannot comprehend them." When mum came back home, she couldn't get the red-haired boy out of her mind.
After the war was over, mum put away the pen and paper. "Finito," she said. But she was wrong. The women who had come to her for help in writing to their sons now came to her with letters from their relatives in Italy. They also came to ask her for her help in getting American citizenship.
On one occasion mum admitted that she had always had a secret dream of writing a novel. "Why didn't you?" I asked. "All people in this world are here with one particular purpose," she said. "Apparently, mine is to write letters." She tried to explain why it absorbed her so.
"A letter unites people like nothing else. It can make them cry, it can make them laugh.There is no caress more lovely and warm than a love letter, because it makes the world seem very small, and both sender and receiver become like kings in their own kingdoms. My dear, a letter is life itself!"
Today all mum's letters are lost. But those who got them still talk about her and cherish the memory of her letters in their hearts.
每天都該讀一遍的英語(yǔ)美文篇二
The Red Mahogany Piano
Many years ago, when I was a young man in my twenties, I worked as a salesman for a St.Louis piano company.
We sold our pianos all over the state by advertising in small town newspapers and then,when we had received sufficient replies, we would load our little trucks, drive into the area and sell the pianos to those who had replied.
Every time we advertised in the cotton country of Southeast Missouri, we would receive a reply on a postcard, which said, in effect, “ Please bring me a new piano for my little granddaughter. It must be red mahogany. I can pay a month with my egg money.” The old lady scrawled2 on and on and on that postcard until she filled it up then turned it over and even wrote on the front around and around the edges until there was barely room for the address.
Of course, we could not sell a new piano for a month. No finance company would carry a contract with payments that small, so we ignored her postcards.
One day, however, I happened to be in that area calling on other replies, and out of curiosity I decided to look the old lady up. I found pretty much what I expected: The old lady lived in a one-room sharecroppers3 cabin in the middle of a cotton field.
The cabin had a dirt floor and there were chickens in the house. Obviously, the old lady could not have qualified to purchase anything on credit no car, no phone, no real job,nothing but a roof over her head and not a very good one at that. I could see daylight through it in several places. Her little granddaughter was about 10, barefoot and wearing a feed sack dress.
I explained to the old lady that we could not sell a new piano for a month and that she should stop writing to us every time she saw our ad. I drove away heartsick, but my advice had no effect she still sent us the same postcard every six weeks. Always wanting a new piano, red mahogany, please, and swearing she would never miss a payment. It was sad.
A couple of years later, I owned my own piano company, and when I advertised in that area,the postcards started coming to me. For months, I ignored them what else could I do?
But then, one day when I was in the area something came over me. I had a red mahogany piano on my little truck. Despite knowing that I was about to make a terrible business decision, I delivered the piano to her and told her I would carry the contract myself at a month with no interest, and that would mean 52 payments. I took the new piano in the house and placed it where I thought the roof would be least likely to rain on it. I admonished4 her and the little girl to try to keep the chickens off it, and I left sure I had just thrown away a new piano.
But the payments came in, all 52 of them as agreed sometimes with coins taped to a 3x5 inch card in the envelope. It was incredible!
So, I put the incident out of my mind for 20 years.
Then one day I was in Memphis on other business, and after dinner at the Holiday Inn on the Levee, I went into the lounge. As I was sitting at the bar having an after dinner drink, I heard the most beautiful piano music behind me. I looked around, and there was a lovely young woman playing a very nice grand piano.
Being a pianist of some ability myself, I was stunned by her virtuosity5, and I picked up my drink and moved to a table beside her where I could listen and watch. She smiled at me,asked for requests, and when she took a break she sat down at my table.
“Aren't you the man who sold my grandma a piano a long time ago?”
It didn't ring a bell6, so I asked her to explain.
She started to tell me, and I suddenly remembered. My Lord, it was her! It was the little barefoot girl in the feed sack dress!
She told me her name was Elise and since her grandmother couldn't afford to pay for lessons, she had learned to play by listening to the radio. She said she had started to play in church where she and her grandmother had to walk over two miles, and that she had then played in school, had won many awards and a music scholarship. She had married an attorney in Memphis and he had bought her a grand piano.
Something else entered my mind. “Look, Elise,” I asked, “ May I ask you what kind of wood is your first piano made of, the one your grandmother bought you?”
“It's red mahogany,” she said, “Why?”
I couldn't speak.
Did she understand the significance of the red mahogany? The unbelievable audacity7 of her grandmother insisting on a red mahogany piano when no one in his right mind would have sold her a piano of any kind? I think not.
And then did the old lady understand the marvelous accomplishment of that beautiful, terribly underprivileged8 child in the feed sack dress? No, I'm sure she didn't understand that either.
But I did, and my throat tightened.
Finally, I found my voice. “I just wondered,” I said. “I'm proud of you, but I have to go to my room.”
And I did have to go to my room, because men don't like to be seen crying in public.
每天都該讀一遍的英語(yǔ)美文篇三
A Sailor's Christmas Gift
William J. Lederer
Last year at Christmas time my wife, our three boys and I were in France on our way from Paris to Nice. For five wretched days everything had gone wrong. Our hotels were "tourist traps," our rented car broke down; we were all restless and irritable in the crowded car. On Christmas Eve, when we checked into a dingy hotel in Nice, there was no Christmas spirit in our hearts.
It was raining and cold when we went out to eat. We found a drab little joint shoddily decorated for the holidays. It smelled greasy. Only five tables in the restaurant were occupied. There were two German couples, two French families and an American sailor, by himself. In the corner, a piano player listlessly played Christmas music. I was too stubborn and too tired and miserable to leave. I looked around the noticed that the other customers were eating in stony silence. The only person who seemed happy was the American sailor. While eating he was writing a letter, and a half-smile covered his face.
My wife ordered our meal in French. The waiter brought us the wrong thing, so I scolded my wife for being stupid. She began to cry. The boys defended her, and I felt even worse. Then at the table with the French family, on our left, the father slapped one of the children for some minor infraction, and the boy began to cry. On our right, the fat, blond German woman began berating her husband.
All of us were interrupted by an unpleasant blast of cold air. Through the front door came an old French flower woman. She wore a dripping, tattered overcoat and shuffled in on wet,rundown shoes. Carrying her basket of flowers, she went from one table to the other."Flowers, monsieur? Only one franc." No one bought any. Wearily she sat down at a table between the sailor and us. To the waiter she said, "A bowl of soup. I haven't sold a flower all afternoon." To the piano player she said hoarsely, "Can you imagine, Joseph, soup on Christmas Eve?" He pointed to his empty tipping plate.
The young sailor finished his meal and got up to leave. Putting on his coat, he walked over to the flower woman's table. "Happy Christmas!" he said, smiling, and picking out two corsages, asked, "How much are they?"
"Two francs, monsieur." Pressing one of the small corsages flat, he put it into the letter he had written, then handed the woman a 20-franc note.
"I don't have change, monsieur," she said, "I'll get some from the waiter."
"No, ma'am," he said, leaning over and kissing the ancient cheek. "This is my Christmas present to you." Straightening up, he came to our table holding the other corsage in front of him. "Sir," he said to me, "may I have permission to present these flowers to your beautiful wife?" In one quick motion, he gave my wife the corsage, wished us a Merry Christmas, and departed.
Everyone had stopped eating. Everyone was watching the sailor. Everyone was silent. A few seconds later, Christmas exploded throughout the restaurant like a bomb.
The old flower woman jumped up, waving the 20-franc note. Hobbling to the middle of the floor, she did a merry jig and shouted to the piano player, "Joseph, my Christmas present, and you shall have half so you can have a feast too." The piano player began to beat out "Good King Wenceslaus," hitting the keys with magic hands, nodding his head in rhythm.
My wife waved her corsage in time with the rhythm. She was radiant and appeared 20 years younger. The tears had left her eyes and the corners of her mouth turned up in laughter. She began to sing, and our three sons joined her, bellowing the song with uninhibited enthusiasm.
"Gut, gut," shouted the Germans. They jumped on their chairs and began singing in German.The waiter embraced the flower woman. Waving their arms, they sang in French. The Frenchman who had slapped the boy beat rhythm with a fork against a bottle. The lad climbed on his lap, singing in a youthful soprano.
The Germans ordered wine for everyone. They delivered it themselves, hugging the other customers, bawling Christmas greetings. One of the French families ordered champagne and made the rounds, kissing each one of us on each cheek. The owner of the restaurant started singing "The First Noel," and we all joined in, half of us crying.
People crowded in from the street until many customers were standing. The walls shook as hands and feet kept time to the yuletide carols. A few hours earlier, a few people had been spending a miserable evening in a shoddy restaurant. It ended up being the happiest, the very best Christmas Eve they had ever spent.
This, Admiral McDonald, is what I am writing you about. As the top man in the Navy, you should know about the very special gift that the U.S. Navy gave to my family - to me and to the other people in that restaurant. Because your young sailor had the Christmas spirit in his soul, he released the love and joy that had been smothered within us by anger and disappointment. He gave us Christmas.
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