2. 职称英语
  3. Through my mom’s loving words, I found a way back. When you wake up in j

Through my mom’s loving words, I found a way back. When you wake up in j

游客2023-08-30  25
问题     Through my mom’s loving words, I found a way back.
    When you wake up in jail —especially having been raised by God-fearing, hard-working, honest people like my mama and daddy —you know what alone means. You’ve betrayed who you are, the values you believe in, and the people Who gave you everything. At that moment, being a country singer wasn’t what mattered. All I could think about was what I was going to tell the Pentecostal (对灵降临节派的) preacher’s daughter who brought me up.
    I woke up on March 15, 2001, on a tiny cot in a jail cell in Nashville, wondering how it all came to this. At 37, I was looking at a sentence of 15 years for felony theft, and by all rights, I should have served it. I was addicted to crystal methamphetamine (冰毒), and I’d been stealing my friends’ musical instruments and pawning (典当) them to get money to feed my habit. I’d been caught red-handed (当场) with ＄25,000 worth of pilfered (偷窃) equipment stacked up in my living room. And I was high as a Georgia pine.
    Never in a million years did I think I’d end up behind bars. I’d had a rocky start in life, and the meth made me feel as if I was on top of the world. It beat back all the self-hatred I’d felt for a very long time.
    I was given away when I was three months old. I was born in Alabama, but Barbara and Ed Bates, who went on to have eight biological children, took me in —even though I had double pneumonia and cigarette burns on my diapers. They lived in Columbia, Miss., where Daddy was a sharecropper (佃农), and there wasn’t a lot of money to go around. Mama did the best she could, but her idea of a child going to school looking neat was double-knit pants and slicked-down hair. I wore glasses, and to top it off, I was fat. I felt like a geck, and was treated like one too.
    Then one day on the school bus, my cousin told me I was adopted. At the age of nine, I felt like an outsider in my own family. Mama tried to make it right. She said, "Out of all our kids, you’re special, because we got to pick you. God just gave us the rest of these knotheads."
    That was her way of letting me know I was really loved. But I always had a fear of abandonment, and wondered why my birth mother gave me away. When I was 30, I went looking and found her. She told me she wasn’t positive who my real daddy was, which only reinforced my notion that I wasn’t worth much.
    But it also made me want to prove myself wrong. I was 11 the first time I picked up a guitar and 15 when I wrote my first song. My dream was to make it as a country singer; and I spent years playing in bars throughout the South. In my mid-30s I moved to Nashville.
    After two years of hard work, I somehow managed to get a songwriting deal, and a record label was showing interest in me. Then my wife and I started having marital problems, and we moved to another state. The move was like driving the last nail in the coffin on my dream. It felt as if I’d given up on myself.
    One day during a trip I made to Nashville, a friend offered me a hit of methamphetamine from a little pipe. I didn’t know then that meth is our biggest drag problem in rural America —that it’s the easiest, cheapest drug to obtain, and also one of the most addictive. So I smoked it. And that was all that I thought about for the next year and a half. I ended up with a one — to two —gram-a-day habit, at a hundred dollars a gram.
    When the police arrested me, I looked like death, and didn’t care. My body was so beat up from doing drugs that my eyes were sunk back in my head, and my teeth and hair were failing nut from malnourishment ( [营养不良). The first seven days in jail, I just slept, going cold turkey(强制戒毒).
    When I woke up from the crash on the eighth day, I had never known such shame and guilt. I walked down the hall to the pay phone, dreading every step. My mama is the sweetest soul on the planet, and I knew this was going to break her heart. When I heard her voice I wasn’t sure I could go through with it, but I told her where I was. She said, "Son, don’t you know you can’t do anything to make me not love you?"
    Her words gave me the strength to turn to the God that I had denied. "I know I’ve messed up," I prayed. "And I’m not asking for anything, except tell me what I’m supposed to do." For the first time I realized that I couldn’t blame anybody else for my trouble. And I also realized this was my chance to turn things around. The next day, I called the people I’d taken things from and gave them the names of the pawn-shops where they could find their stuff. It was a small step toward making things right.
    Counting rehab (戒毒所), I was in jail for 94 days, but only because the judge took pity on me. He said that what I’d done seemed like a cry for help. The first thing I did when I got out was go to see Kenny Beard, my songwriting partner. He met me at the door holding the prized guitar he’d used to write so many hits, a guitar that I’d hocked six months earlier. He stuck it in my chest and told me to get my writing deal back. His faith in me gave me the courage to stay straight.
The executives at RCA, the record label that finally signed me, weren’t scared off by my history. They thought folks would relate to my songs. When people hear my words, I hope they’ll see that we’re all human. I don’t want them to make the same mistakes I have, but I do know that you can overcome almost anything, especially drug abuse. If sharing my story gives somebody a little courage to fight, then every bit of it was worth it.  [br] What is NOT the author’s attitude at the end of the story?
选项 A、Grateful.
B、Encouraged.
C、Hopeful.
D、Skeptical.
答案 D
解析 skeptical 意为“对事物持怀疑态度的”，文中并没有体现。
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