大學英語綜合教程第三冊 14
[00:00.00] campus take on institution myth
[00:05.43]校園 呈現(xiàn) 機構 神話
[00:10.87]mobile cash in on handy advertise
[00:13.92]流動的 利用 手巧的 做廣告
[00:16.98]come down to trivial push around settle into
[00:21.80]可歸結為 瑣碎的 欺負 開始適應
[00:26.62]management once in a while put through criticize
[00:32.44]管理 偶爾 使經受考驗 批評
[00:38.27]blunt issue fantastic for once
[00:51.04]When children take up ways of making a living that differ greatly from their parents, differences in outlook can easily arise.
[01:00.79]This is what Alfred Lubrano found. Brought up in the family of a building worker,
[01:08.00]education led him to develop different interests and ambitions from his father.
[01:14.66]Here he writes about how this affected their relationship.
[01:20.25]BRICKLAYER’S BOY By Alfred Lubrano
[01:25.58]My father and I were both at the same college back in the mid 1970s. While I was in class at Columbia,
[01:34.22]he was laying bricks not far up the street, working on a campus building.
[01:40.49]2 Sometimes we’d hook up on the subway going home, he with his tools, I with my books.
[01:48.36]We didn’t chat much about what went on during the day. My father wasn’t interested in Dante,
[01:57.05]I wasn’t up on arches. We’d share a New York Post and talk about the Mets.
[02:04.32]3 My dad has built lots of places in New York City he can’t get into: colleges, apartments, office towers.
[02:14.40]He makes his living on the outside. Once the walls are up, a place takes on a different feel for him,
[02:22.94]as if he’s not welcome anymore. It doesn’t bother him, though. For my father
[02:30.47]earning the cash that paid for my entry into a fancy, bricked-in institution was satisfaction enough.
[02:38.77](1)We didn’t know it then, but those days were the start of a branching off,
[02:44.62]a redefining of what it means to be a workingman in our family. Related by blood, we’re separated by class, my father and I.
[02:55.70]Being the white-collar son of a blue-collar man means being the hinge on the door between two ways of life.
[03:03.98]4 It’s not so smooth jumping from Italian old-world style to U.S. yuppie in a single generation.
[03:12.94]Despite the myth of mobility in America, the true rule, experts say, is rags to rags, riches to riches.
[03:23.23]Maybe 10 percent climb from the working to the professional class. My father has had a tough time
[03:32.30]accepting my decision to become a mere newspaper reporter, a field that pays just a little more than construction does.
[03:42.72]He wonders why I haven’t cashed in on that multi-brick education and taken on some lawyer-lucrative job.
[03:52.23]After bricklaying for thirty years, my father promised himself I’d never lay bricks for a living.
[04:00.09]He figured an education would somehow rocket me into the upwardly mobile, and load some serious money into my pockets.
[04:09.97](2)What he didn’t count on was his eldest son breaking blue-collar rule No.1: Make as much money as you can,
[04:20.44]to pay for as good a life as you can get.
[04:24.57]5 He’d tell me about it when I was nineteen, my collar already fading to white. I was the college boy
[04:33.76]who handed him the wrong wrench on help-around-the-house Saturdays. “You better make a lot of money,”
[04:42.10]my blue-collar handy dad warned. “You’re gonna need to hire someone to hammer a nail into a wall for you.”
[04:50.64]6 In 1980, after college and graduate school, I was offered my first job, on a daily paper in Columbus, Ohio.
[05:00.56]I broke the news in the kitchen, where all the family business is discussed. My mother wept as if it were Vietnam.
[05:09.71]My father had a few questions: “Ohio? Where the bell is Ohio?”
[05:16.76]7 I said it’s somewhere west of New York City, that it was like Pennsylvania, only more so.
[05:24.73]I told him I wanted to write, and these were the only people who’d take me.
[05:30.76]8 “Why can’t you get a good job that pays something, like in advertising in the city, and write on the side?”
[05:38.78]9 “Advertising is lying,” I said. “I wanna tell the truth.”
[05:44.92]10 “The truth?” the old man exploded, his face reddening as it does when he’s up twenty stories in high wind.
[05:54.14]“What’s truth?” I said it’s real life, and writhing about it would make me happy. “You’re happy with your family,”
[06:03.47]my father said, spilling blue-collar rule No.2. “That’s what makes you happy. After that,
[06:12.30]it all comes down to dollars and cents. What gives you comfort besides your family? Money, only money.”
[06:21.47]11 During the two weeks before I moved, he reminded me that newspaper journalism is a dying field,
[06:29.46]and I could do better. No longer was I the good son who studied hard. I was hacking people off.
[06:38.45]12 One night, though, my father brought home some heavy tape and that clear, plastic bubble stuff
[06:45.52]you pack your mother’s second-string dishes in.
[06:49.39]my father said to me before he sealed the boxes and helped me take them to UPS.
[06:56.05]“This is what he wants,” my father told my mother the day I left for Columbus.
[07:02.40]“What are you gonna do?” After I said my good-byes, my father took me aside
[07:09.98]and pressed five $100 bills into my hands. “It’s okay,” he said over my weak protests. “Don’t tell your mother.”
[07:20.14]13 When I broke the news about what the paper was paying me,
[07:24.89]my father suggested I get a part-time job to supplement my income. “Maybe you could drive a cab.”
[07:32.68]Once, after I was chewed out by the city editor for something trivial,
[07:38.50]I made the mistake of telling my father during a visit home. “They pay you nothin’,
[07:45.63]and they push you around too much in that business,” he told me, the rage building.
[07:51.46]“Next time, you gotta grab the guy by the throat and tell him he’s a big jerk.”
[07:58.01]14 My father isn’t crazy about his life. He wanted to be a singer and actor when he was young,
[08:05.83]but his Italian family expected money to be coming in.
[08:10.71](3) My dad learned a trade, as he was supposed to , and settled into a life of pre-scripted routine.
[08:18.29]15 Although I see my dad in frequently, my brother, who lives at home, is with the old man every day.
[08:26.41]Chris has a lot more blue-collar in him than I do, despite his management-level career.
[08:33.62]Once in a while he’ll bag a lunch and, in a nice wool suit, meet my father at a construction site and share sandwiches.
[08:43.55]16 It was Chris who helped my dad most when my father tried to change his life several months ago.
[08:50.08]My dad wanted a civil-service bricklayer foreman’s job that wouldn’t be so physically demanding.
[08:57.57]There was a written test that included essay questions about construction work.My father hadn’t done anything like it in forty years.
[09:07.66]Every morning before sunrise, Chris would be ironing a shirt and my father would sit at the kitchen table
[09:15.65]and read aloud his practice essays on how to wash down a wall, or how to build a tricky corner.
[09:24.14]Chris would suggest words and approaches.
[09:27.82]17 It was so hard for my dad. He had to take a prep course in a junior high school
[09:34.88]three nights a week after work for six weeks. At class time, the outside men would come in,
[09:42.95]twenty-five construction workers squeezing themselves into little desks. Tough blue-collar guys armed with No.2 pencils
[09:53.48]leaning over and scratching out their practice essays, cement in their hair, tar on their pants,
[10:01.55]their work boots too big and clumsy to fit under the desks.
[10:06.46]18 “Is this what finals felt like?” my father would ask me on the phone. “Were you always this nervous?”
[10:15.00]I told him yes. I told him writing’s always difficult. He thanked Chris and me for the coaching,
[10:23.39]for putting him through school this time. My father thinks he did okay, but he’s still awaiting the test results.
[10:31.93](4)In the meantime, he takes life the-collar way, one brick at a time.
[10:38.07]19 When we see each other these days, my father still asks how the money is. Sometimes he reads my stories,
[10:47.05]usually he likes them, although he recently criticized one piece as being a bit sentimental.
[10:54.39]20 During one of my visits to Brooklyn not long ago, he and I were in the car,
[11:00.22]on your way to buy toiletries, one of my father’s weekly routines. “You know, you’re not as successful as you could be,”
[11:09.65]he began, blue-collar blunt as usual. “You paid your dues in school. You deserve better restaurants, better clothes.”
[11:19.42]Here we go, I thought, the same old stuff. I’m sure every family has five or six similar big issues
[11:28.04]that are replayed like well-worn videotapes. I wanted to fast-forward this thing when we stopped at a red light.
[11:36.74]21 Just then my father turned to me, solemn and intense. “I envy you,” he said quietly.
[11:46.22]“For a man to do something he likes and get paid for it—that’s fantastic.”
[11:52.41]He smiled at me before the light changed, and we drove on. To thank him for the understanding,
[12:00.35]I sprang for the deodorant and shampoo. For once, my father let me pay.
[12:03.97]直言不諱的 問題 極好的 就此一次
