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“What do I do with it?” I wanted to know.
“You write down things that happened to you that day.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because maybe they’re interesting and you want to remember them.”
“What would I write?”
“Well, you’d write something like ‘Today I saw a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street.’ ”
“我要它做什么？”我想知道。
“你可以写下你每天经历的。”
“为什么我要这么做？”
“也许他们都很有趣，而以后你会想要记得这些。”
“我该怎么写？”
“你可以这样写‘今天我看见一个紫色头发的女人穿过了蒙塔古街。’”
I still remember the way she said that sentence: Today I saw a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street. It is one of those memories that I carry around, and always will, like the shard of a shell that falls out of a bag you took to the beach for a long summer.
我一直记得她说的那句话的形式：今天我看见一个一个紫色头发的女人穿过了蒙塔古街。这是我时刻并将一直携带，就像是挂在我的包上那一枚在某个漫长的夏天到海滩上拾到的贝壳。
I hadn’t seen a woman with purple hair crossing Montague Street, of course. But in that sentence was my mother’s sense that one might want to capture the extraordinary, her grasp of children’s love of the absurd, her striking physical presence—in my memory, she was leaning toward me, backlit, her black hair falling forward—and her intuition that my seriousness needed to be leavened with playfulness.
当然，我没有真正看到过穿过蒙塔古街的紫发女人。那句话是我母亲编出来引起我不同寻常注意的，她明白孩子们的好奇心一定不会忽视紫发女人这样惹人注目的存在——在我的记忆中，她站在我的斜前方，背着光，黑色的头发披在前面——她直觉我的当真需要由嬉闹中慢慢来发酵养成。
