My Father

My FatherA story told by the daughter of a famous actorby Amy MitfordPara 1I don't really know my father. He isn't easy to get on with. He's quite self-centred, and a little bit vain, I think, and in some ways quite unapproachable. The public must think he's very easy-going, but at home he keeps himself to himself.Para 2He can't have been at home much when I was a child, because I don't remember much about him. He's always been slightly out of touch with family life. His work always came first, and he was always off somewhere acting or rehearsing. He loves being asked for his autograph, he loves to be recognised. He has won several awards, and he's very proud of that. He was made a Member of the British Empire, and we had to go to Buckingham Palace to get the medal. It was incredibly boring. There were hundreds of other people getting the same awards, and you had to sit there for hours. He shows off his awards to whoever comes to the house.Para 3I went to public school, and because of my total lack of interest and non-attendance I was asked to leave. I didn't want to go there in the first place. I was taken away from all my friends. He must have been very pleased to get me into the school, but in the end it was a complete waste of money.I let him down quite badly, I suppose. I tried several jobs but I couldn't settle down in them. Then I realised that what I really wanted to do was live in the country and look after animals, so that's what I now do.Para 4As a family, we're not that close, either emotionally or geographically. We don't see much of each other these days. My father and I are totally different, like chalk and cheese. My interests have always been the country, but he's into books, music and above all, opera, which I hate. If they do come to see us, they're in completely the wrong clothes for the country—mink coats, nice little leather shoes, not exactly ideal for long walks across the fields.Para 5He was totally opposed to me getting married. He was hoping we would break up. Gerald's too humble, I suppose. He must have wanted me to marry someone famous, but I didn't, and that's all there is to it. We don't want children, but my father keeps on and on talking about wanting grandchildren. You can't make someone have children just because you want grandchildren.Para 6I never watch him on television. I'm not that interested, and anyway he usually forgets to tell me when he's on.Why My Great-uncle Gave Up the Ministryby Marcia Barnard ChandlerPara 1The following sad but true tale concerns my great-uncle, a wonderful, jolly, beloved man who was over six feet four and probably weighed close to three hundred pounds. He was also well-educated and in the early 1900s became a full-time Baptist minister. A kindly, gentle man despite his size, Uncle Alden Bentley's only real fault seemed to be that he was terribly clumsy. As a young minister, he was paying a pastoral call one day on a woman in Dillon, South Carolina, when he inadvertently sat on her Chihuahua, Twinkie, and killed it. As the lady searched for and called for her dog throughout the house, Uncle Alden felt underneath his hip and, realising what he had done, panicked and slipped the dead dog into his coat pocket. Although he was devastated, he could not bring himself to tell the woman what had happened.Para 2Five years later, he returned to the same home for an overnight visit and resolved to unburden himself by finally telling the woman exactly what had happened to Twinkie. She had just had the guest room prepared and had hung brand-new curtains. To make Uncle feel welcome, she had placed on the bedside table a large pitcher of ice water and a glass, as well as a pen and a bottle of ink, so he could work on his sermon before retiring.Para 3Uncle liked to sleep with the window open and got up in the night to open it. As he did, he knocked over what he assumed to be a full glass of water. Then, groping along the walls in an unsuccessful search for the light switch, he retraced his steps several times before raising the window and settling back on the bed for the night. When he opened his eyes the next morning, he was horrified. The fresh wallpaper on two walls was covered with great black blobs. The crisp white curtains were thoroughly smudged with the prints of Uncle's huge paws. It had not been the water glass he'd overturned during the night — it had been the ink bottle.Para 4In a shaken state of mind and knowing he must face his hostess, Uncle dressed hurriedly and started down the stairs outside the guest room. As he approached the landing, his foot slipped. Reaching wildly for support, he grabbed the nearest object, which happened to be a beautiful electric brass candelabra mounted on the stairwell wall. The fixture was hissing and smoking as he ripped it from the wall and toppled down to the landing below, still clutching it in his hand.Para 5"Are you hurt?" His hostess cried as she rushed to Uncle's side."No," said Uncle as he rose to his feet, "But I have demolished your home." With that he quickly walked out the front door and, at the end of the walk, turned and said to his hostess with deep reverence, "Twinkie had a Christian burial."Para 6He then retired from the ministry and became a teacher of philosophy for many years at a private preparatory school in Massachusetts.Saved by His MistakesPara 1Jerry Cram set out to go coon hunting that gloomy afternoon. With him were his old shepherd dog and two beagle hound pups. At least he said they were beagles, but his older brother Bob had roared with laughter a month earlier, when Jerry had told him they had cost five dollars. "It's another of your mistakes, Jerry!" He said. And that's what Bob called the pups "Mistake No. 1"and "Mistake No. 2"Para 2Even Jerry had to admit that the pups weren't much help, for he hunted for several hours without any luck, till at last he ran out of shells. Then, toward evening, he spotted a racoon high in a beech tree. It was a forty-foot tree, an ancient one that had died years ago. The top of its trunk had been carried away in some storm, and the trunk itself had been gutted by rot and insects.Para 3Still, Jerry went up after the coon, intending to capture him by hand. But he never reached the animal. Just as he got level with the top of the broken trunk, the limb on which he was standing cracked ominously under his feet. Instantly he jumped to the rim of the tree trunk, and at once the edge crumbled. Down he plunged, too suddenly to make a sound, into the deep hollow of the dead tree.Para 4Halfway down Jerry's fall was broken for a moment by a jutting piece of wood that caught his clothing. Then he tumbled the rest of the way. Shaken, dazed, but miraculously unhurt, he picked himself up.Para 5It was dark inside the tree. Above him there was only a pale disc of sky. At his feet a pear-shaped hole framed a small patch of grey light. He could hear the pups sniffing and yelping to him, and Shep backed off and barked in alarm.Para 6Jerry was scared. Some time passed before he calmed down and began to look for a way to get out. There were no handholds on the inside of the trunk; the snag that had slowed him up on his way down was out of reach. And, though he tried desperately, he couldn't enlarge the hole at his feet by kicking. It would do no good to call, either; he was much too far from home for that. At last the idea came to him of sending the dogs for help. "Go home, Shep! Go home!" He shouted. The dog gave one sharp bark. "Go home!" He shouted again. And, at that, Shep turned and streaked across the field, but the two pups remained, yelping encouragement to their master.Para 7Night came. A storm broke. Lightning writhed above his head, and rain poured into the hollow cylinder of the tree. There was just room for Jerry to stand, and he was drenched by the rain. For a minute he wondered if he would drown there, but the water ran out of the hole at the bottom as fast as it came in at the top. Outside, Jerry could hear the pups whimpering. They were frightened by the storm, but they didn't go away. Instead, they moved closer to the tree to comfort him, and stuck their muzzles through the hole to lick his feet.Para 8Meanwhile Shep had run across the fields to the Cram home. Barking furiously, he got Bob to follow him back. But when they reached the fences the old dog, who had leaped over them frantically as he came, was too tired to jump them again, and, in the end, it was only the barking of the sad-eyed little pups that guided Bob to the right tree.Para 9Even then it took a rescue party, ropes, and fifteen hours to get Jerry out of his sodden prison —wet, hungry, and exhausted.Para 10"Oh, gosh," he said over and over after they had finally pulled him up, "I kept thinking, this is Jerry's last mistake: I'm going to die down here. But the pups didn't give up hope! Shep went for help, and the pups stayed with me all the time! Mistake No. 1 and Mistake No. 2 — they saved me!"GluePara 1I see in the newspaper that the Air Force is experimenting with a new glue they hope will hold some of their airplanes together. They think they may be able to replace the rivets in the fuselage with glue and save weight and money in the process. I hope the Air Force has more luck with the glue than I've ever had.Para 2The trouble most of us have with glue can't be blamed on the glue-makers. It isn't their fault. We just ask too much of glue and, of course, they encourage us to overestimate what it will do by showing us pictures of a drop of it lifting an elephant. I can't get a dish to hold together, and they're lifting elephants with it. Ed White, the football player, can't pull apart two blocks stuck with it.Para 3It's interesting how often sticking things together and making them stay that way comes up in our lives. In my lifetime, I've had a lot to do with glue and the experiences have almost always been disappointing . I was disillusioned by glue early in life. One of the other kids in first grade told me his mother said you could make things stick together with a paste made of flour and water. Mixing flour and water never worked for me as a kid.Para 4Maybe I just have no knack for glue. It's hard to remember a time in my life when the local hardware store wasn't pushing some new miracle bond, but none of them has ever proved to be miraculous for me.Para 5This Air Force story says they glue two surfaces together and then put them in "An oven-like pressure vessel at 250 degrees for an hour" Well, I just don't happen to have an oven-like pressure vessel I can heat. Maybe that's why half the stuff I glue together comes apart.Para 6Around the office I use paper cement. It's fun to play with and it works if it's the right consistency. The problem is, I only use it once a month or so, and it keeps getting too thick in the jar. We have a one-gallon can of paper cement thinner, and over the period of a year I use more thinner than I use cement.Para 7In my cellar I glue a lot of wood together. I've tried the catalyst powder glue that you mix with water. I've tried the two-part epoxies, white casein-based glue, contact cement, hydro glue and the new super-glues. Glue and I were simply not meant for each other. If I clamp four mortised legs into a tenoned frame and let the glue set, I find one leg is an inch shorter than the other three because the clamps were too tight in one direction. The glue has dripped down the legs and, all in all, I've made a mess of my project. Our Defence Department would be in sorry shape if I was gluing together planes for the Air Force in my basement.Para 8When it comes to fixing things that are broken, I've had even less success with glue. If the rung of a chair is loose, you have to take the chair apart, put glue in all the rung holes and then try to find a way to clamp uneven surfaces together.Para 9Whenever some china treasure is broken in our kitchen and assigned to me to repair in the cellar, I align the parts and apply the glue. There is no way to apply clamps to a plate, so I hold the pieces together for as long as I can. When I relieve the pressure, it always turns out that the two pieces I've glued together are no longer aligned.Para 10The only thing I can do is to give the Air Force my best advice. My advice is for them to consider some other way. Elastic bands, for example, are infinitely better than glue. I've seldom asked an elastic band to do something I couldn't handle. String or rope is a possible alternative to glue. If the Air Force wants to lift a one-ton elephant with a drop of something, I suppose they use glue, but if they want to hold something together, I'd recommend almost anything else.Learning a LanguagePara 1When we talk about learning a language like English, Japanese or Spanish, we speak and think as though the language in question were a fixed unchanging thing. We expect to learn it as we learned geometry or how to ride a bicycle —systematically, and with clear ultimate success. Many people subsequently give up when they discover just what a misconception this is. They have in fact embarked on an activity that could last the rest of their lives. The experience makes them realise that they are not only going to have to work very hard indeed if they want to succeed, but also that they are —in many cases —barely masters of the language they call their own "mother tongue".Para 2Studying any language is, in fact, an endless voyage. Each of the thousands of languages currently used in the world is a complex affair. Many languages do have a standard form-particularly on paper-and this is what we learn, but they probably also have a variety of regional dialects and social styles, and many are the products of the historical mingling of other languages. The English language is just such a hybrid. It began its career just under two thousand years ago as a form of ancient German, collided with a special kind of old French, was subjected to several waves of Latin and a flood of Greek, and since then has acquired bits and pieces of every other language that its users have ever been in contact with.Para 3A second common misconception about language is that words have fixed and clear meanings. This is —fortunately or unfortunately —far from true. Take even the apparently simple and specific English word man. It seems clear enough; it refers to "an adult male human being". Of course it does, but just consider for a moment the following sentences:1) There are several men missing in that chess set.2) The boat was manned entirely by women and children.Para 4You might argue that these sentences are somewhat unnatural; certainly, they do not represent theeveryday core meaning of the word man. They are, however, legitimate extensions of that core meaning, the second being especially interesting because it is a verb and not a noun, and suggests that we expect adult male human beings to serve as the crews of ships, not women and certainly not children. Part of the pleasure and genius of language may well arise out of this slight "misuse" of words. After all, if you call a person a cat or a cabbage, no literal identification is intended, but a great deal of meaning is nevertheless conveyed.Para 5A third misconception about language claims that every language is — or should be — equally used and understood by all its practitioners everywhere. Certainly, users of the standard forms of English in the United Kingdom generally understand their equivalents in the United States; the degree of similarity between these two major forms of English is great. Dialect-users in these countries, however, have serious problems understanding each other, to the extent that they may wonder if they are actually using the same language. Someone from Brooklyn, New York, will have trouble with a Cockney from London; an old-style British Army colonel won't do well in discussions with a Californian flower-boy. Yet they all belong within the vast community of 20th century World English.。