【推荐2】When I was about 12, I had an enemy, a girl who liked to point out my shortcomings. Week by week her list ______: I was very thin; I wasn’t a ______ student; I talked too much; I was too _____, always feeling superior to（胜过）others, and so on. I tried to hear all this as long as I could. _____, I became very angry. I ran to my father with _____ in my eyes.

He listened to me ______, and then he asked. “Are the things she says true or not? Janet, didn’t you ever wonder _____ you’re really like? Well, you now have that girl’s ______. Go and ____ a list of everything she said and mark the points that are ______. Pay no attention to the other things she said.”

I did ______ he told me. To my great _____, I discovered that about half the things were true. Some of them I couldn’t ______ (like being very thin), but a good number I could – and suddenly I wanted to change. For the first time I went to a fairly ______ picture of myself.

I brought the list back to Daddy. He ______ to take it. “That’s just for you,” he said. “You know _____ than anyone else the truth about yourself. But you have to learn to ______, not just close your ears in anger, feeling _____ when something said about you is true, you’ll find it of help to you. Our world is full of people who think they know your affairs. Don’t shut your ______. Listen to them all, but hear the truth and do what you know is the right thing to do.”

Daddy’s advice has always ______ to me at many important moments. In my life, I’ve never had a better piece of advice.

【推荐3】Without warning, my father would knock on the door in the middle of night, drunken and begging my mother to open it. Later on, they lived their ________ lives and my mother was ________ my family independently.

My father was always claiming he had been planning to do something for us, but he had no________. The man who was ________ to love us, in fact, lacked the ________ of what it truly meant to love a child.

Maybe it was his complicated relationship to his father that made him ________   Maybe it was the pain ________ with a life of misfortune. Who knows? Whatever it was, it stole him from us, and ________ from me. Not understanding me, he simply ________   me—not just emotionally, but ________ as well. Never once did he hug me.

My best memories of him were from his ________ at participation. Once every month or two, he would ________ and drive us to Trucker’s Paradise. To me, the games were fun but easily forgotten. It was the ________ of my father that was most treasured.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I would find evidence of my father's love.

When my favorite personal computer came onto the market, I convinced myself that I had to have it even though its price was far ________ my mother's reach. 1 mowed (割草) every yard I could find that summer, ________ it still wasn't enough. Then my dad agreed to help me ________ the rest of the money by selling watermelons. This was the first time that I had ever spent time alone with him. He laughed and repeatedly ________ me as “my boy”, a phrase he relayed with a sense of ________.

It just goes to show that however distant the father and however broken the ________, there is still a need for even the smallest bit of ________ of a father's love. Although he had never told me that he loved me, I would regard that day as the greatest evidence of that fact.