情人眼里出西施，妈妈眼里出诗人_大学英语阅读

情人眼里出西施，妈妈眼里出诗人

Nina loved me.

No matter how different we were, Nina loved me and had found her poetic voice in telling me so. That led to an another revelation[20]: She could write! Nina and I were both writers!

But first, I had work to do. Surely her poetic talent had to be acknowledged[21], encouraged. Tension quickly set in.[22] After several desperate gulps of increasingly tepid coffee, I settled on the following:[23]

Nina is

Nina

the sweetest name

in the whole world.

Calling her back into the kitchen, I pushed the notepad toward her and smiled shyly.

“What is this, Mom?” She asked.

“What’s what, honey?”

“Uh, this?” she said, backhanding[24] the notepad at me. “Where’s the answer?”

Thoughts ricocheted inside my head as I clutched the paper back and studied the verse anew.[25] Eventually I found it. Or rather didn’t find it. The missing punctuation[26], that is.

Mentally adding a comma after “Mom,” and a question mark to the end, I paused. Despite the hard reality of the situation staring me in the face, I stubbornly clung to the idea of her words as a poem.[27] She may have been describing an apple, but I would always find a certain poetry in her verse.

Eating crow,[28] I tried to answer her question as lovingly as I could. “I don’t know, Nina. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. Do you think Golden Delicious are the softest apples in the world?”