19. Keep smiling.

A . Drive On, My Friend

A policeman was about to write up a ticket charging a motorist with speeding, when a woman in the back seat who could restrain herself no longer, began saying:

“There! Didn’t I tell you to watch out? But you kept right on speeding all morning, getting out of line, not blowing your horn, passing stop streets and everything else. Didn’t I tell you’d get caught? Didn’t I? Didn’t I?

“Who is this woman?” asked the officer.

“My wife,” said the motorist grimly.

“Drive on, my friend!” exclaimed the officer pityingly, as he began to tear up the ticket. “Drive on – and may the Lord have mercy on you!”

B. No use trying.

Uncle James: Well, Bobby, have you gained any prizes at the race?

Bobby: No, sir, the other fellows have got them all.

Uncle James: But you’ll keep on trying, my boy, won’t you?

Bobby: What’s the use of trying when the other fellows keep on doing the same!

20. Test Yourself VI (Psychological Aspect). Read the fragment of the novel “Very Far Away from Anywhere Else” by an American writer Ursula K. Le Guin. Do you like to make friends? Imagine you have a girl-friend/a boy-friend. Would they like you to ride to school/university in a car or give you a lift to school/university?

So there I was on Tuesday riding the bus and feeling guilty. I wasn’t even walking, after all my explanations of how I liked to walk and doctors say the exercise of walking is the best of all for the human body. I was riding the bus. For twenty-five cents. And three thousand dollars’ worth of car was sitting on its white sidewall steel-belted radials in front of our house, right where I’d get off the bus.

I looked out of the window of the bus to make sure it really was raining hard enough to be an excuse for not walking. It was coming down so hard that the bus windows looked like pebble glass; but mere facts don’t seem to help guilt much. I wondered how my father would say, “Didn’t you take the car to school? Why not tonight?” The thought made me twitch, and while twitching I noticed that the person in the window seat was somebody from school. I said, “Oh, hi,” and she said, “Hi,” and I wished it was somebody I didn’t know so I could ignore her.

The Fields had lived in a house two blocks up our street a couple of years, and Natalie had been in some classes with me in sophomore and junior years. She had long dark hair and was quiet and you never saw her around and she did something with music, and that was one hundred percent of what I knew about Natalie Field. She was good-looking, so I am no judge. People wouldn’t call her beautiful, because she was stocky and had a severe expression, but I think she was good-looking, only you didn’t notice it, because she wasn’t noticing you. However, this time I did notice it, because she was noticing me. She had to. My knapsack flap had gotten wet through and was dripping onto her knee. I moved it so it would soak into my thigh instead and said, "Sorry. It’s only a severed artery, it’ll stop soon.”

Now that is really strange, that I said that. Normally I would have said “Sorry” in a mumble and moved the knapsack and left it at that. I think that I was so sick of myself, of being guilty about the car, and being angry, and being lonely, and wondering what good it was being seventeen when it was just as bad as or a little worse than being sixteen, and all the rest of it, that I drove myself out of myself. Anything to escape! Even being funny with some girl I didn’t know. Or maybe when you meet the people you are supposed to meet you know it, without knowing it. I don’t know.

She gave a laugh, a real laugh, surprised and tickled. So I went on…