As a child, I was a loner. I was an only child, and my mother was a single parent_________her son in the 1980s. I grew up pretty isolated(孤零零的),_________from other children. All I had were comic books and a bunch of dolls.

These feelings of isolation and loneliness_________until my teen years. I gradually became a lonely, angry and socially_________teenager. This was all bound to_________, however. As luck, or fate would have it, a kid in my class brought a book to our_________one day and began to show it around to the rest of our classmates._________struck, and I absolutely had to have a look.

The kid brought his brother’ s copy of Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook and was offering to teach the others_________to play. Looking at the beautiful cover, I was so_________that I asked if I could come over and__________.

The rest as they say is history, and since that day I’ve been gaming on and off and it also changed me a lot.

The__________not only helped me__________the isolation I felt, it also__________me to open up to others, making friends along the way. But that’s not the only thing I__________from playing Dungeons and Dragons. I also picked up a few life__________along the way.

Growing up, I understood one thing about my dad: He knew everything. This was our _________ I asked him questions and he told me the answers.

In my teen years, he taught me things I’d need to know to _________ in the real world. When I moved out on my own, I _________ him at least once a week, usually when something broke in my apartment and I needed to know how to _________ it. But then, eventually, I needed him _________ . I got married, and my husband had most of the _________ I lacked. For everything else, we had Google.

I don’t know when it happened, but our _________ when I called changed into six words. “Hi, Dad, sweets. Here’s Mom.” (Because I still needed her. ) I loved my dad, of course, but I _________ at times if maybe he had already shared _________ I needed to know. Maybe, after knowing a man for 40 years, there’s nothing left to say.

Then, this summer, my family and I __________ in with my parents for three weeks while our house was being renovated (翻新). One day, Dad asked me to help him __________ the board at their dock. As we put the new board together piece by piece, my dad knowing __________ what went where, I looked at him. “How do you know how to build it?” The heavy hammer he was __________ paused in midair. “I spent a summer in college building them on the Jersey Shore.” I thought I knew everything about my dad — his __________ jobs. But I never knew this. I __________ that maybe it’s not that there’s nothing left to say.

A few __________ later, after my family moved back into our house, I called my parents. Dad __________. “Hi, sweets,” he said. “Here’s Mom.” “Wait, Dad,” I said. “How are you?” We __________talking about what he was working on. To anyone else, it would sound like a __________ conversation between a dad and his daughter. But to me, it was__________ , a new beginning. I spent the first part of my life needing to talk to my dad. Now I talk to him because I want to.

The teacher who changed my life was Marjorie Hurd. She actually set the ______ of my life in the new land I entered as a young war refugee (难民).

Shortly after I met Marjorie Hurd, I was ______. She introduced me to the ______ wealth of Greece — giving me a new ______ on my war-ravaged (受战争蹂躏的) homeland. I began to be proud of my ______.

One day, after ______ how writers should write about what they know, she ______ us to compose an essay from our own experience. Then looking at me, she ______, “Nick, I want you to write about what happened to your family back in Greece.” I had been trying to put those ______   memories behind me and left the assignment until the last moment. Then I ______ the essay, hoping never to see it again, but Miss Hurd ______ the essay to a contest sponsored by the Worcester paper and it won a medal.

For the first time I began to understand the ______ of the written word. I followed the literary path that Miss Hurd had once set me on. After graduation, I became the ______ of the Worcester paper. When the paper ______ a picture of me standing next to President Kennedy, my father cut out the photograph and ______ it in his breast pocket for the rest of his life to show everyone he met.