After their three children grew up and left home, Margaret Thompson and her husband, Kenneth, stretched their legs together on walking holidays in Switzerland. In Interlaken, year after year, they would head up the mountain and watch the paragliders (空中滑翔) launch themselves into the sky. Back in town, in a large park, they watched them return to earth. “Some day I’d love to do that,” Thompson told Kenneth.
But there was always so much to do in Interlaken. So she continued to watch the gliders take flight and land. Kenneth died in 2005. Eleven years later, and three decades after those walking holidays, Thompson finally took to the skies herself, in a paraglider with an instructor. Thompson was 80.
Recently, Thompson heard from an instructor that grown men, when airborne, sometimes cry and beg to be brought down. But what she remembers is “feeling free. You feel weightless. It’s quite windy. It blows you around. You sail along and look around you, and see all the toy houses down below. You feel like you are up in heaven somewhere there, watching everyone down below.”
Thirty years seems a long time to hold on to a dream. “It was,” she says. Why did it take so long? “I wanted to do it, but I felt somebody should benefit from it.” She did not think of just enjoying the experience? “I don’t think so. There had to be a cause at the end of it all,” she says. With her first paraglide, she raised ￡1,500 for Moorfields eye hospital in London, most of it with the aid of social clubs run by the Presbyterian church she regularly attends.
Is she scared of getting older? “Fear? No. People say: ‘Isn’t getting old awful?’ I say: ‘No. You are free to do more things that you want to do.”
Thompson felt no fear paragliding. “I mean, you sort of say to yourself: Well, if anything happens to me now, I’m OK. People might worry about falling, it being the end of them. But that didn’t bother me at all. When it’s your time, it’s your time. No matter where you are.”
【小题1】Why didn’t Thompson take up paragliding after her children left home?| A．She was engaged. | B．She preferred walking. |
| C．She was afraid of heights. | D．She had to tend her husband. |
| A．She lost his direction. | B．She was scared to death. |
| C．She regretted paragliding. | D．She had a sense of freedom. |
| A．She got support from social clubs. | B．She wanted to make it meaningful. |
| C．She hoped to contribute to the church. | D．She had a good cause to experience fun. |
| A．Terrified. | B．Helpless. | C．Calm. | D．Doubtful. |
