My wife and I used to feel that it was impossible to be a true friend to someone whose name we didn’t know. How wrong we were! Years of Sunday morning bus trips through the city with the same group of “nameless” people have changed our thinking.
Before the bus takes off, we all join in a conversation: where’s the silent woman who sits up front and never replies to our greetings? Here she comes. Her worn clothing suggests she doesn’t have much money to spare, but she always takes an extra cup of coffee for the driver.
We get smiles from a Mexican couple as they get on the bus hand in hand. When they get off, they’re still holding hands. The woman was pregnant late last year, and one day her change of shape showed that she’d borne the child. We even felt a little pride at the thought of our extended family.
For many months, our only sadness lay in our inability to establish the same friendship with the silent woman at the front of the bus. Then, one evening, we went to a fish restaurant. We were shown to a table alongside someone sitting alone. It was the woman from the bus.
We greeted her in the friendly and familiar way we’d shown all year, but this time her face softened, then a shy smile. When she spoke, the words escaped awkwardly (笨拙地) from her lips. All at once we realized why she hadn’t spoken to us before. Talking was hard for her.
Over dinner, we learned the story of a single mother with a disabled son who was receiving special care away from home. She missed him badly, she explained.
“I love him…and he loves me, even though lie doesn’t express it very well,” she murmured. “Lots of us have that problem, don’t we? We don’t say what we want to say, what we should be saying. And that’s not good enough.”
The candles lit on out tables. Our fish had never tasted better. The atmosphere grew pleasant, and when we parted as friends—we share names.
【小题1】The underlined word “establish” in the fourth paragraph probably means____________.| A．set up | B．keep | C．discover | D．take part |
| A．She was worried about her disabled son. |
| B．She was only interested in the bus driver. |
| C．She had some difficulty in expressing herself. |
| D．She was sad to see the happy Mexican couple as a single mother. |
| A．The silent woman with her son both brought interest to the passengers. |
| B．The silent woman and her son both had some difficulty in expressing. |
| C．My wife and I didn’t become friends with the silent woman. |
| D．The Mexican couple were going to give birth to a baby. |
| A．The Silent Woman on the Bus | B．Different Kinds of Friendship |
| C．Going to Work by Bus | D．Friends of the Road |
