Hillbilly Elegy - Jan 24

He was ________(放弃我的抚养权给别人), they said.

I knew that he loved Kentucky, its beautiful mountains, and its ________(起伏的绿色) horse country.

“He’s a toothless fucking retard,” she’d tell Mom, I suspect for reasons of class and culture: Mamaw had done everything in her power to be better than ________(比起她的出生).

Though she was hardly rich, she wanted her kids to get an education, obtain white-collar work, and marry ________(梳洗整洁的) middle-class folks—people, in other words, who were nothing like Mamaw and Papaw.

Bob, however, was ________(典型的南方乡下人).

Half of his teeth had ________(烂没了), and the other half were black, brown, and ________(歪歪扭扭), the consequence of a lifetime of ________(饮用山露酒) and presumably some missed dental checkups.

He was a ________(高中辍学生) who drove a truck for a living.

This seemed ________(有点夸张) even when I was six.

Our new life with Bob ________(有种浮于表面、家庭情景剧的感觉).

Mom had recently acquired her nursing license, and Bob ________(薪水优渥), so we had plenty of money.

My life assumed a predictable cadence: I’d go to school and come home and eat dinner.

Mom and I ________(在...方面建立亲密关系) other things, especially our favorite sport: football.

Mom checked out books on football strategy from the public library, and we built little models of the field with ________(彩色美术纸) and loose change—pennies for the defense, nickels and dimes for the offense.

We practiced on our construction-paper football field, ________(检查各种突发事件): What happened if a particular ________(前锋) (a shiny nickel) missed his block?

But she did return to a local community college and earn ________(副学士) in nursing.

The night before everything was due, the project looked precisely how it deserved to look: like the work of a third-grader who had ________(有点懈怠) a bit.

During my third-grade ________(科学竞赛) project, Mom helped at every stage—from planning the project to assisting with lab notes to assembling the presentation.

It looked like a scientist and a professional artist had ________(协力做某事) to create it.

I didn’t ________(没有进入最终一轮) of the competition.

What that incident taught me—besides the fact that I needed to do my own work—was that Mom cared deeply about ________(需要动脑子的事情[猜测]).

He ________(年长我5岁，比我重出35磅), but I ________(冲上去打他) twice as he pushed me down easily.

She never laid a hand on me punitively—she was anti-spanking in a way must have come from her own bad experiences—but when I asked her what it felt like to be punched in the head, she showed me.

Despite her admonition not to start fights, our unspoken ________(荣誉准则) made it easy to convince someone else to start a fight for you. If you really wanted to get into it with someone, all you needed to do was insult his mom. No amount of self-control could withstand ________(有技术含量的辱骂妈妈).

To ________(逃避) avenging a string of insults was to lose your honor, your dignity, or even your friends.

Mamaw, lurking nearby, intervened in what was certain to be another schoolyard ________(笼中比赛 [其实就是打架]).

The next year, I noticed that ________(班里的恶霸) had taken a particular interest in a specific victim, an odd kid I rarely spoke to.