Happiness Is an Attitude

The 92-year-old confident and proud lady, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o’clock, with her hair fashionably combed and makeup perfectly applied, moved to a    1    (nurse) home today.

Her husband of 70 years recently passed away,     2     (make) the move necessary.

After many hours of waiting patiently in the hall of the nursing home, she    3     (smile) sweetly when told her room was ready. As she got into the elevator     4     her wheelchair, I provided a description of her tiny room.

“I love it,” she started with the enthusiasm of     5    eight-year-old child having just been presented with a new dog.

“Mrs. Jones, you haven’t seen the room….just wait.”

“That has    6     to do with it,” she replied. “Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time.     7     I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged…it’s    8     I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it. It’s a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice; I can spend the day in bed     9     (recount) the difficulty I have with the parts of my body    10    no longer work or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones working. Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open, I’ll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I’ve stored away… just for this time in my life.”

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao,     1     is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.

It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail    2     (patch v. 缝补) with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from     3     (handle) heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Everything about him was old     4     his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

“Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. “I could go with you again. We’ve made some money.”

The old man had taught the boy     5     (fish) and the boy loved him.

“No,” the old man said. “You’re with a lucky boat. Stay with them.”

“But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big     6     every day for three weeks.”

“I remember,” the old man said. “I know you did not leave me because you doubted.”

“It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I    7     obey him.”

“I know,” the old man said. “It is quite normal.”

“He hasn’t much faith.”

“No,” the old man said. “    8     we have, Haven’t we?”

“Yes,” the boy said. “Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace and then we’ll take the stuff home.”

“Why not?” the old man said. “Between fishermen.”

When the wind was in the east a smell came across the harbour from the shark factory; but today there was only the faint edge of the odour because the wind had backed into the north and then dropped off and it was pleasant and sunny on the Terrace.

“Santiago,” the boy said.

“Yes,” the old man said. He     9     (hold) his glass and thinking of many years ago.

“Can I go out to get sardines for you for tomorrow?”

“No. Go and play baseball. I can still row and Rogelio will throw the net.”

“I would like to go. If I cannot fish with you, I would like to serve in some way.”

“You bought me a beer,” the old man said. “You are already a man.”

“How old was I when you first took me in a boat?”

“Five and you nearly were killed when I brought the fish in too green and he nearly     10     (tear) the boat to pieces. Can you remember?”

A woman was waiting at an airport one night. She hunted for a book, bought a bag of cookies and found a place to sit.

She was absorbed in her book but happened     1     (see) that the man sitting beside her grabbed a cookie or two from the bag in between them. She tried to ignore it. As the greedy cookie thief kept eating, she munched (大声咀嚼) some cookies and watched the clock.

She was getting     2     (angry) as time went by,     3     (think), “If I weren't so nice, I would blacken his eyes.” With each cookie she took, he took one, too; with only one     4     (leave), she wondered what he would do.

With a smile on his face, and a nervous laugh, he took the last cookie and broke it in half．He offered her a half, and ate the other. She grabbed it from him and thought, “Oh, this guy is so rude!     5     didn’t he even show any gratitude?”

When her flight was called, she gathered her belongings and headed for the gate, refusing to look back at the rude thief. She     6     (board) the plane, sank in her seat, and looked for her book.

As she reached in her baggage, she found her bag of cookies with surprise.“     7     mine is here, the others were his, and he tried to share! How rude I was! It was I     8     should have showed gratitude.”

After being diagnosed with a severe pain disease, Jake Smith from Colorado leaned on music to cope.

The problem first started for Smith when he was a freshman in high school. He suffered a concussion (脑震荡) while playing basketball. The symptoms didn’t seem to go away after several months.

Doctors discovered a small fracture (裂痕) in Smith’s skull     1     was causing the pressure and the headaches. The teenager had surgery to repair it, but when he woke up, the problem was much worse. For months, he was in near constant pain. “It was the first time in my life that I     2     (experience) a pain severe enough to actually understand why people would kill themselves because of the pain,” Smith said.

Doctors eventually diagnosed him with Trigeminal Neuralgia (三叉神经痛), a disorder that causes severe pain in the face. T.N.,     3     it’s also called, gets worse over time and is incurable. Doctors call it suicide disease because they think it’s     4     (painful) thing a human can experience. And they estimate that 25 percent of people who have this disease end up killing themselves.

    5     (Face)that awful reality, Smith turned to something he’d known since he was five years old — playing the piano.     6     he was in too much pain to sleep, he would be in the basement on his keyboard playing all night long.

The keys wouldn’t take the pain away, but the notes would make it more bearable. While dealing with the immense pain, the then- 18-year-old wrote his first album, Loreto. He published all 17 songs on his website, free for all,     7     (aim) to offer some comfort to people also going through pain.

That idea prompted Smith     8     (start) song dedications (为别人写歌). He would take requests within online groups for people suffering from T.N. or other pain disorders and write personalized melodies for them.     9     his own suffering, he composed songs like “Adina Defeats Despair,” “Maija’s Waterfall” and “Marsha’s Snowy Mountain,” sometimes based on a person’s requested peaceful place.

“A lot of people say that when I write them a song and they listen to it, their pain is a little lessened. So, I guess that’s     10     I keep doing it,” he said.

The 20-year-old has so far published over 100 songs on his website. His efforts to help people with T.N. have expanded to include other pain diseases, as well as cancer.

Rene Compean was no stranger to Angeles National Forest. He     1     (hike) the park numerous times. But when hiking along a new path, the 45-year-old was lost.

    2     the day faded into darkness, his concern turned to fear. With only a little water in his backpack and 10% battery     3    (remain) on his cellphone, Compean was unprepared for anything more than the two-hour trip he’d planned.

Compean climbed to a spot     4     he found one bar of signal. “SOS. My phone is going to die. I'm lost,”he texted a friend, attaching a photo showing where he was. The shot showed his legs hanging over a rock face. All Compean could do then was wait. The temperature was dropping fast.     5     (dress) only in shorts, and a sweatshirt, the hiker was chilled to the bone. He hugged himself into a tight ball. And after spotting two mountain lions, he spent the night     6     high alert.

Sixty miles away, Ben Kuo     7     (work) at home when he read a posting from the police, showing an image of a man’s legs. The search-and-rescue teams had spent the previous night unsuccessfully looking for Compean, so they released the photo, hoping someone     8     recognize the location.

“I've always loved looking for where photos are taken,” Kuo says. He frequently tries to identify     9     movie scenes or commercials were filmed. He’s often successful. The first thing he noticed in Compean’s photo was plenty of greenery. After comparing it to the satellite map, Kuo realized something: “He’s got to be on the south side because there’re not any green valleys on the north side.” That finding led him to an area that looked like the territory in the image. The final step was cross-referencing the original photo with 3-D images of the area. The locations matched!

After spending 27 hours in the wilderness, Compean was found. Compean’s story probably would have ended differently had it not been for the man with strong satellite skills and     10     sharp eye for detail.