父亲节英语演讲稿：My Father’s Hands
摘录:My father was forced to let the bank take possession of most of the acreage6) of his farmlandone year when a crop failure meant he couldn’t make the mortgage7) payment. He was ableto keep one acre of the farmland where the small farm house was located.
My Father’s Hands
His hands were rough and exceedingly1) strong. He could gently prune2) a fruit tree orfirmly ease a stubborn horse into a harness. What I remember most is the special warmthfrom those hands as he would take me by the shoulder and point out the glittering swoop of ablue hawk, or a rabbit asleep in its lair. They were good hands that served him well and failedhim in only one thing. They never learned to write.
My father was illiterate. The number of illiterates3) in our country has steadily declined, butif there were only one I would be saddened4), remembering my father and the pain heendured because his hands never learned to write. He started school in the first grade, wherethe remedy for a wrong answer was ten rule r strokes across a stretched palm.
For some reason, shapes, figures and letters just did not fall into the rig ht pattern inside hissix-year-old mind. His father took him out of school after several months and set him to a man’sjob on the farm.
Years later, his wife, with her fourth-grade education, would try to teach him to read. And stilllater I would grasp his big fist between my small hands and awkwardly help him to trace theletters of his name. He submitted5) to the ordeal for a short time, but soon grew restless andwould declare that he had had enough.
