Finding something of the older generations, and learning something about the man who’d owned the item, translated…
As we moved many years ago, mom stacked some of the older books by the walls, was ready to get rid of them. The volume on the very top, a yellowed English textbook, it’d, caught my eyes.
I’d flipped through it gently, it was, filled with short stories. And, for me, who’d graduated from a foreign language department, it was more like children’s books. And still, every page I’d turned, had careful notes written on the pages. There were the pronunciation markings, and Chinese translations of words and phrases, and, there were even, idioms in sentences too.
not my photo…
After I’d inquired about it, I’d learned, that it was my father’s, from forty years ago, because of work, he’d taken the evenings and weekends to go to English cram school. And, before my father left for Taiwan at age seventeen, he’d only gone to privately owned small schools, so, he’d not even learned the phonetic spellings, let alone English.
This English textbook, I’d kept cherished to this day, because it’d told us, the children, an inspirational tale.
photo from online…
So, this child had learned from the father’s studious manners, and carried the values with him, and, he’s surely going to, find great use for the values he’d learned from his father’s studiousness that’s for certain. And the father was able to teach the son a lesson about life, despite how little schooling the father had when he was growing up.
Life, the Obstacle Course 