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Daniel Hickey，高海奇 记者，作家，爱尔兰人， 现为诺里奇《东方日报》记者。 最近，妻子、儿子和我回到了爱尔兰过暑假。我们在首都都柏林度过了前四天，2017年儿子便出生在这里。随后，乘火车前往我的家乡巴利纳，一个位于西海岸，临近大西洋，人口刚刚超过10000人的小镇。 My wife, son and I recently travelled back to Ireland for the summer holidays. We spent the first four days in Dublin, the capital city of Ireland, where our son was born in 2017, before taking the train to my hometown, Ballina, a town of just over 10,000 people on the west coast, not far from the Atlantic Ocean. 这是爱尔兰不以阳光而闻名的一个地方。据我父母说，六月是一个可怕的月份。每天都在下雨，气温从未超过15摄氏度。土地暴露在从大海中粗暴地席卷而来的狂风中，沿岸的树木斜斜生长，与草成锐角，风很大，雨水平地落下。 It’s a part of the country not known for sunshine. June, according to my parents, had been a horrible month. It rained every day and the temperature never climbed above 15C. The land there is exposed to dramatic weather sweeping wildly in from the sea. Trees along the coast grow slantways, at an acute angle to the grass, it is so relentlessly windy. The rain falls horizontally. 然而，当我们在8月中旬抵达时，这个小镇正处于一股沸腾的、汗流浃背的热浪之中。人们把雨衣换成了T恤和短裤。所有的百货商店都卖光了泳装。当地报纸的头条写着：“西方吸收了阳光！” When we arrived, though, in the middle of August, the country was in the grip of a simmering, sweat-drenched heatwave. The people had swapped their raincoats for T-shirts and shorts. All the department stores had sold out of swimwear. The local newspaper’s headline declared: 'The west soaks up the sun!’ 当阳光普照爱尔兰西部时，人们放下了一切，前往海滩。之前的所有计划都被放弃了。 When the sun is shining in the west of Ireland, people drop everything and head to the beach. All previous plans are abandoned. 对我的儿子来说，这意味着五天的时间在沙子里挖沙堡，在海浪中划船，跳过浪花，和他的三个堂兄一起吃冰淇淋甜筒——他们都还住在我的家乡。 For my son, this meant five days of digging in the sand and building sandcastles, paddling in the surf, jumping over waves, and eating ice-cream cones with his three cousins – all of who still live in my hometown. 他喜欢它的每一分钟。我试图从他的角度来看待这段经历。当我和他一样大的时候，也经常在同一个海滩，跳过那些拍打在岸上的浪花。 He loved every minute of it. I tried to see the experience from his perspective. When I was his age, we used to visit the same beach. I used to splash in that surf and jump over those waves. 星期天，我们唯一没有去海滩的一天，我和妻子带着儿子去了城里，我们需要给他找一套新的游泳装备——但商店都卖光了。不过，也并不是毫无收获。因为当我们走回父母家的时候，在大街上看到一家空置商店的橱窗里，陈列着小镇的旧照片，包括1970年代和1980年代的一些学童。 On Sunday, the only day we didn’t go to the beach, my wife and I took our son to town; we needed to find him a new set of swimming clothes – but the shops were all sold out. The excursion wasn’t entirely in vain, though, because as we were walking back to my parents’ house, we stopped on the main street to look at the window of a vacant shop, where there was a display of old photos of the town, including some of schoolchildren in the 1970s and 1980s. “我想知道那里有没有你的照片。”我妻子说。 “I wonder if there’s a picture of you there,” my wife said. “我怀疑。”我说。 “I doubt it,” I said. 但是，当我看到小学第一位老师的脸时，便十分确信我也在上面。我站在修道院山小学高年级班的后排，1985年6月。 But then I saw the face of my first teacher when I was at primary school, and sure enough there I was, standing in the back row in a class of senior infants at Convent Hill Primary School in June, 1985. 我抱起儿子让他看得更清楚。 I picked up my son so he could get a better look. “你可以看到我吗？”我指着照片中的自己说。 “Can you see me?” I said, pointing myself out. 他花了几秒钟。“哦，是的，”他说。“你在这。” It took him a few seconds. “Oh yeah,” he said. “There you are.” There I was. 我在那里。 There I was. 是一种奇怪的感觉，看着这张自己对着镜头微笑的照片。照片中的我五岁，和儿子现在一样大。那时的我完全不知道，会在2022年8月的某一天，从家乡主干道的商店橱窗里望出去，望着42岁的自己和自己的儿子。 It was a strange feeling, studying this picture of myself smiling for the camera. I was five years old in that photo, the same age as my son is now. Little did I know, back then, that one day in August 2022 I would be looking out from a shop window on the main street of my hometown, at myself, now 42-years-old, and at my own son. 在我们离开爱尔兰返回英国的前一天，家乡当地报纸的那一周版出版了。巧合的是，头版的照片是我儿子和他的两个堂兄弟在海滩上享受阳光。 The day before we left Ireland, to return to England, that week’s edition of my hometown’s local newspaper was published. Coincidentally, the picture on the front page was of my son and two of his cousins on the beach, enjoying the sun. “小明星！”我哥哥说。 “Little celebrities!” my brother said. 我的儿子，就像橱窗里的我一样，在照片中已经五岁了。和我一样，他对着镜头微笑，眺望着一个尚未被创造出来的世界，一个他甚至无法想象的世界……我想起了几十年后的他，找到一份褪色的报纸并研究这张照片，就如同我在大街上看着五岁时自己的照片。我很好奇，彼时，他会是什么感受。 My son, like myself in the photo in the shop window, is five years old in the photo. And like me, he is smiling for the camera and looking out into a world that has not yet been made, a world he cannot yet even imagine… and I think of him decades into the future, finding a faded copy of that newspaper and studying the photo, the way I looked at the picture of my five-year-old self on the main street, and wondering what it was like to be himself. 审 | 周春伦 END  |
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