Day 6 回顾

Day 7                                            Bryce  男生视角

Buddy, Beware! 当心点，哥们儿！

Seventh grade brought changes, all right, but the biggest one didn’t happen at school – it happened at home. Granddad Duncan came to live with us.

初一时情况有了变化，没错，但最大的改变并不是发生在学校——它发生在家里。邓肯爷爷来和我们住在一起的。

At first it was kind of weird because none of us really knew him. Except for Mom, of course. And even though she’s spent the past year and a half trying to convince us he’s a great guy, from what I can tell, the thing he likes to do best is stare out the front-room window. There’s not much to see out there except the Bakers’ front yard, but you can find him there day or night, sitting in the big easy chair they moved in with him, staring out the window.

一开始有点奇怪，因为我们谁都不真正了解他。当然，除了妈妈。尽管她花了一年半的时间试图说服我们他是一个很棒的老人，但据我所知，他最喜欢做的事情就是盯着前厅的窗户看。除了Baker家的前院，外面没什么可看的，但你会发现他白天黑夜，一直坐在他们搬进来的大安乐椅上，盯着窗外。

Okay, so he also reads Tom Clancy novels and the newspapers and does crossword puzzles and tracks his stocks, but those things are all distractions. Given no one to justify it to, the man would stare out the window until he fell asleep. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It just seems so… boring.

好吧，他也读汤姆·克兰西的小说和报纸，做填字游戏，查看他的股票行情，但这些只能算作他的分心之事。没有人来解释为啥这么做，他会一直盯着窗外，直到睡着为止。这本来也没什么，只是看起来太…无聊了。

Mom says he stares like that because he misses Grandma, but that’s not something Granddad had ever discussed with me. As a matter of fact, he never discussed much of anything with me until a few months ago when he read about Juli in the newspaper.

妈妈说他那样看着外边是因为他想念奶奶，但爷爷从来没有和我谈论过。事实上，他从来没有和我讨论过任何事情，直到几个月前他在报纸上读到关于朱莉的消息。

Now, Juli Baker did not wind up on the front page of the Mayfield Times for being an eighth-grade Einstein, like you might suspect. No, my friend, she got front-page coverage because she refused to climb out of a sycamore tree.

现在，朱莉·贝克并没有像你想的那样，因为是初二的未来的爱因斯坦而登上《梅菲尔德时报》的头版。不，朋友啊，她登上头条，因为她拒绝从梧桐树上爬下来。

Not that I could tell a sycamore from a maple or a birch for that matter, but Juli, of course, knew what kind of tree it was and passed that knowledge along to every creature in her wake.

我根本无法辨别什么美国梧桐树、枫树或白桦树，但朱莉当然知道那是什么树，并把这一常识告知她身边的每一个人。

So this tree, this sycamore tree, was up the hill on a vacant lot on Collier Street, and it was massive. Massive and ugly. It was twisted and gnarled and bent, and I kept expecting the thing to blow over in the wind.

这棵树，这棵梧桐树，是在科利尔街的一块空地上，它超级大。又大又丑。它树干扭曲着，长满节疤，弯弯曲曲，我总觉得它会被一阵风吹跑。

One day last year I’d finally had enough of her yakking about that stupid tree. I came right out and told her that it was not a magnificent sycamore, it was, in reality, the ugliest tree known to man. And you know what she said? She said I was visually challenged. Visually challenged! This from the girl who lives in a house that’s the scourge of the neighborhood. They’ve got bushes growing over windows, weeds sticking out all over the place, and a barnyard’s worth of animals running wild. I’m talking dogs, cats, chickens, even snakes. I swear to God, her brothers have a boa constrictor in their room. They dragged me in there when I was about ten and made me watch it eat a rat. A live, beady-eyed rat. They held that rodent up by its tail and gulp (狼吞虎咽), the boa swallowed it whole. That snake gave me nightmares for a month.

去年的一天，我终于受够了她对那棵蠢树的唠叨。我径直走过去，告诉她那不是一棵壮丽的美国梧桐树，事实上，它是世上最丑陋的树。你知道她说了些什么？她说我眼睛有毛病！眼睛有毛病？！作为邻里受到她住的房子连累不提了，她竟然说出这种话。她家窗户外灌木攀爬，杂草丛生，谷仓成了野生动物园。我说的是狗、猫、鸡，甚至是蛇。我向上帝发誓，她的兄弟们的房间里有一条大王蟒蛇。我十岁的时候，他们把我拖进去，强行让我看蟒蛇活吞整个老鼠。一只活生生的，眼睛骨碌碌转的老鼠。他们抓住这个啮齿动物的尾巴，蟒蛇一口把它吞了下去。那条蛇让我做了整整一个月的噩梦。

Anyway, normally I wouldn’t care about someone’s yard, but the Bakers’ mess bugged my dad big-time, and he channeled his frustration into our yard. He said it was our neighborly duty to show them what a yard’s supposed to look like. So while Mike and Matt are busy plumping up their boa, I’m having to mow and edge our yard, then sweep the walkways and gutter, which is going a little overboard, if you ask me.

不管怎样，通常我不会在意别人的院子，但是她家杂乱不堪的院子严重干扰了我爸爸，他把他的恼怒情绪带进了我们家的院子。他说，我们作为邻居有责任让她们知道一个院子本该是什么模样。所以当迈克和马特忙着喂肥他们的蟒蛇时，我却不得不修剪草坪，慢慢穿过我们的院子，然后清扫人行道和排水沟。依我看，这有点过头了。

And you’d think Juli’s dad—who’s a big, strong, bricklaying dude – would fix the place up, but no. According to my mom, he spends all his free time painting. His landscapes don’t seem like anything special to me, but judging by his price tags, he thinks quite a lot of them. We see them every year at the Mayfield County Fair, and my parents always say the same thing: “The world would have more beauty in it if he’d fix up the yard instead.”

你可能会认为朱莉的爸爸—一个身材高大、强壮、砌砖的家伙——会修缮院子，但并没有。据我妈妈说，他所有的空闲时间都在画画。他的风景画对我来说并没有什么特别之处，但从他的价格标签评判，他认为他的画物超所值。我们每年都会在梅菲尔德县集市上看到这些画，我的父母总是说同样的话：“如果他把院子修好，世界将会更美丽。”

Mom and Juli’s mom do talk some. I think my mom feels sorry for Mrs. Baker – she says she married a dreamer, and because of that, one of the two of them will always be unhappy.

妈妈和朱莉的妈妈有时聊聊天。我想我妈妈会为她的太太感到难过。贝克-她说她嫁给了一个梦想家，正因如此，他们两人中的一个将永远不开心。

Whatever. Maybe Juli’s aesthetic sensibilities have been permanently screwed up（弄糟，破坏） by her father and none of this is her fault, but Juli has always thought that that sycamore tree was God’s gift to our little corner of the universe.

无所谓了，也许朱莉的审美情感被她的父亲永久带偏了，这不是她的错，但朱莉一直认为那棵梧桐树是上帝给我们宇宙一角的馈赠。

Backin the third and fourth grades she used to clown around with her brothers in the branches or peel big chunks of bark off so they could slide down the crook in its trunk. It seemed like they were playing in it whenever my mom took us somewhere in the car. Juli’d be swinging from the branches, ready to fall and break every bone in her body, while we were waiting at the stoplight, and my mom would shake her head and say, “Don’t you ever climb that tree like that, do you hear me, Bryce? I never want to see you doing that! You either, Lynetta. That is much too dangerous.”

在三年级和四年级的时候，她经常和哥哥们在树枝上嬉戏，或者剥下大块的树皮，这样他们就可以从杈弯里滑下来。每当我妈妈驾车带我们外出时，似乎他们一直都在那里玩耍。我们在等红绿灯时，朱莉在枝丫上晃荡，随时可能摔下来，跌断她身上的每一根骨头。我妈妈会摇头说：“你千万不要爬上那棵树，听见了吗，布莱斯？我永远不想看到你这个样子！你也一样，莉妮塔。太危险了。”

My sister would roll her eyes and say, “As if,” while I’d slump beneath the window and pray for the light to change before Juli squealed my name for the world to hear. 

我妹妹会翻着白眼说，“怎么可能！”而我躲在车窗下，祷告趁朱莉直着嗓门喊我的名字之前，交通灯变绿。

读后小记

为什么我特别喜欢这一章节？

作为土生土长的农村孩子，小时候抓鱼捞虾，捉虫逮鸡，爬树样样能。虽然性格没有Juli那么热情大胆，骨子里也是喜欢大自然，乐于尝试新事物。不过提起那条蛇，还是算了，虽不至于闻而丧胆，至少也是敬而远之！

尤其那棵梧桐树深得我心，多希望爬上去，拥有更远的视野，领略不一样的风景！