Part 1

    "我的母亲已经离开了这个世界，却仍盘桓在我心中，有时在黎明前把我唤醒：'假如有一件事让我无法忍受，那就是干事半途而废者。'"

  MY MOTHER, dead now to this world but still roaming free in my mind, wakes me some mornings before daybreak. "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a quitter[半途而废的人]."

  I have heard her say that all my life. Now, lying in bed, coming awake in the dark, I feel the fury of her energy fighting the good-for-nothing idler within me who wants to go back to sleep instead of tackling[抓住] the brave new day.

  Silently I protest - I am not a child anymore I have made something of myself. I am entitled to sleep late.

  "Russell, you've got no more initiative than a bump on a log. "

  She has hounded me with these battle cries since I was a boy in short pants.

  "Make something of yourself!"

  "Don't be a quitter!"

  "Have a little ambition."

  The civilized man of the world within me scoffs at materialism and strivers after success: He has read the philosophers and social critics. He thinks it is vulgar[粗俗的] and unworthy to spend one's life pursuing money, power, fame, and - " Sometimes you act like you're not worth the powder and shot it would take to blow you up with. "

  LIFE HAD BEEN HARD for my mother ever since her father died, leaving nothing but debts. The family house was lost, the children scattered.My mother's mother, fatally ill with "tubercular infection[结核病], fell into a suicidal[自杀的] depression and was institutionalized [被送进疗养院]. My mother, who had just started college, had to quit and look for work.

  Then, after five years of marriage and three babies, her husband died in 1930, leaving my mother so poor that she had to give up her baby Audrey for adoption. Maybe the bravest thing she did was give up Audrey, only ten months old, to my Uncle Tom and Aunt Goldie. Uncle Tom, one of my father's brothers, had a good job with the railroad and could give Audrey a comfortable life.

  My mother *headed off[中止、放弃] with my other sister and me to take shelter with her brother Allen, poor realtives dependent on his goodness. She eventually found work patching grocers' smocksog at ten dollars a week in a laundry.

    -------------------TO BE CONTINUED---------------------