1 . My First Marathon（马拉松）

A month before my first marathon, one of my ankles was injured and this meant not running for two weeks, leaving me only two weeks to train. Yet, I was determined to go ahead.

I remember back to my 7th year in school. In my first P.E. class, the teacher required us to run laps and then hit a softball. I didn’t do either well. He later informed me that I was ＂not athletic＂.

The idea that I was ＂not athletic＂ stuck with me for years. When I started running in my 30s, I realized running was a battle against myself, not about competition or whether or not I was athletic. It was all about the battle against my own body and mind. A test of wills!

The night before my marathon, I dreamt that I couldn’t even find the finish line. I woke up sweating and nervous, but ready to prove something to myself.

Shortly after crossing the start line, my shoe laces(鞋带) became untied. So I stopped to readjust. Not the start I wanted!

At mile 3, I passed a sign: ＂GO FOR IT, RUNNERS!＂

By mile 17, I became out of breath and the once injured ankle hurt badly. Despite the pain, I stayed the course walking a bit and then running again.

By mile 21, I was starving!

As I approached mile 23, I could see my wife waving a sign. She is my biggest fan. She never minded the alarm clock sounding at 4 a.m. or questioned my expenses on running.

I was one of the final runners to finish. But I finished! And I got a medal. In fact, I got the same medal as the one that the guy who came in first place had.

Determined to be myself, move forward, free of shame and worldly labels(世俗标签), I can now call myself a ＂marathon winner＂.

2 . Alice Moore is a teenager entrepreneur(创业者), who in May 2015 set up her business AilieCandy. By the time she was 13, her company was worth millions of dollars with the invention of a super-sweet treat that could save kids’ teeth, instead of destroying them.

It all began when Moore visited a bank with her dad. On the outing, she was offered a candy bar. However, her dad reminded her that sugary treats were bad for her teeth. But Moore was sick of missing out on candies. So she desired to get round the warning, “Why can’t I make a healthy candy that’s good for my teeth so that my parents can’t say no to it?” With that in mind, Moore asked her dad if she could start her own candy company. He recommended that she do some research and talk to dentists about what a healthier candy would contain.

With her dad’s permission, she spent the next two years researching online and conducting trials to get a recipe that was both tasty and tooth-friendly. She also approached dentists to learn more about teeth cleaning. Consequently, she succeeded in making a kind of candy only using natural sweeteners, which can reduce oral bacteria.

Moore then used her savings to get her business off the ground. Afterwards, she and her father secured their first business meeting with a supermarket owner, who finally agreed to sell Moore’s product—CanCandy.

As CanCandy’s success grows, so does Moore’s credibility as a young entrepreneur. Moore is enthusiastic about the candy she created, and she’s also positive about what the future might bring. She hopes that every kid can have a clean mouth and a broad smile.

Meanwhile, with her parents’ help, Moore is generally able to live a normal teenage life. Although she founded her company early on in life, she wasn’t driven primarily by profit. Moore wants to use her unique talent to help others find their smiles. She donates 10% of AilicCandy’s profits to Big Smiles. With her talent and determination, it appears that the sky could be the limit for Alice Moore.

3 . The end of the school year was in sight and spirits were high. I was back teaching after an absence of 15 years, dealing with the various kinds of "forbidden fruit" that come out of book bags. Now was the spring of the water pistol.

I decided to think up a method of dealing with forbidden fruit.

"Please bring that pistol to me," I said. "I'm going to put it in my Grandma's Box."

"What's that?" they asked.

"It's a large wooden chest full of toys for my grandchildren," I replied,

"You don't have grandchildren," someone said.

"I don't now." I replied. "But someday I will. When I do, my box will be full of wonderful things for them."

My imaginary Grandma's Box worked like magic that spring, and later. Sometimes. students would ask me to describe all the things I had in it. Then I would try to remember the different possessions I supposedly had taken away—since I seldom actually kept them. Usually the offender would appear at the end of the day, and I would return the belonging.

The-years went by, and my first grandchild Gordon was born. I shared my joy with that year's class. Then someone said, "Now you can use your Grandma's Box." From then on instead of coming to ask their possessions back, the students would say, "That's okay. Put it in your Grandma's Box for Gordon."

I loved talking about the imaginary box, not only with my students but also with my own children. They enjoyed hearing about all the forbidden fruit I had collected. Then one Christmas I received a surprise gift—a large, beautifully made wooden chest. My son Bruce had made my Grandma's Box a reality.

4 . In May 1987 the Golden Gate Bridge had a 50th birthday party. The bridge was closed to motor traffic so people could enjoy a walk across it. Organizers expected perhaps 50,000 people to show up. Instead, as many as 800, 000 crowded the roads to the bridge. By the time 250,000 were on the bridge, engineers noticed something terrible：the roadway was flattening under what turned out to be the heaviest load it had ever been asked to carry. Worse, it was beginning to sway（晃动）. The authorities closed access to the bridge and tens of thousands of people made their way back to land. A disaster was avoided.

The story is one of scores in To Forgive Design：Understanding Failure, a book that is at once a love letter to engineering and a paean（赞歌）to its breakdowns. Its author, Dr. Henry Petroski, has long been writing about disasters. In this book, he includes the loss of the space shuttles（航天飞机）Challenger and Columbia, and the sinking of the Titanic.

Though he acknowledges that engineering works can fail because the person who thought them up or engineered them simply got things wrong, in this book Dr. Petroski widens his view to consider the larger context in which such failures occur. Sometimes devices fail because a good design is constructed with low quality materials incompetently applied. Or perhaps a design works so well it is adopted elsewhere again and again, with seemingly harmless improvements, until, suddenly, it does not work at all anymore.

Readers will encounter not only stories they have heard before, but some new stories and a moving discussion of the responsibility of the engineer to the public and the ways young engineers can be helped to grasp them.

"Success is success but that is all that it is," Dr. Petroski writes. It is failure that brings improvement.

6 . When my teenaged son became seriously ill, terrible times for my family began. Our once-happy home became tense and depressed. My husband and I were exhausted under the great stress of caring for my son. It was as if we forgot how to communicate-we couldn’t have a simple conversation without a fighting. Our marriage was on the point of breaking up.

One evening, my son and I were talking about gifts. I recalled my first Valentine’s present from my husband, a kazoo. I was awkward when I received it because I couldn’t get it to make a sound although I am a professional saxophone player. However hard I tried, it just never worked. The kazoo eventually got packed away and forgotten. But my son was interested and insisted on seeing it. After some trouble, I found it.

“You couldn’t get a sound? What’s so hard about it?” my husband asked, amazed. He took the kazoo and blew. Nothing happened. Surprised, he tried again. Still there was no sound. Frustrated, he tried again, only to produce a funny sound like an angry bumblebee trapped in the mouth of a bear. We burst into laughter. My son took a turn to play the kazoo. He did no better than us, causing more laughing.

Seeing his face light up, we felt as if the darkness had lifted and a ray of sunshine was let in. It was the best ten minutes of the past couple of years. The mood stayed light for the rest of the evening. It didn’t solve anything. But this experience with the kazoo brought some change in our hearts that always reminds us that there are still things to laugh at and enjoy, and that we can still connect as a family.

10 . I was at a new school in a new state and needed something solid to stand on: a place to feel grounded. I also needed to do laundry, so I walked to a nearby self-service laundry and stuffed a machine with my clothes. As I struggled to close the washer door, the woman working behind the counter told me to give it a good hit with my hand. The washer did its job, yet even after an hour, the dryer seemed to have barely warmed my clothes. I left, having decided to air-dry them on my car in the August heat.

A month later, I learned her name was Sandy, which she told me after I’d helped her stop a washing machine from moving across the floor. I was grading poems at a table when one of the washers broke loose and skipped an inch into the air. I jumped to the machine and held on while she unplugged it. The next week, Sandy told me dryer No. 8 was the fastest.

It went on like this. I’d do laundry once a week, usually Thursday or Friday. Sandy worked Tuesday through Saturday and we’d talk small while I folded clothes. She told me about her son and his grades, as well as the new dog they’d just adopted. She was fascinated that I was studying poetry. She teased (开玩笑) that it was harder making a living as a poet than as a laundry attendant. Even then I knew she was probably right.

I began to recognize others there: workers taking breaks by the door, a mother and her baby, and even some delivery drivers. But Sandy was the center of my community. For nearly three years and almost every week, I’d do laundry and talk with her. We checked on each other, expecting the other to be there. We asked where the other had gone when we missed a week. There was a note of concern for the other’s absence, a note of joy at their return.

I’d found a place to stand on solid ground.