Bassim
VIP Member
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2008
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Bosnian
- Home Country
- Bosnia Herzegovina
- Current Location
- Sweden
Would you please correct the mistakes in the first part of my short story?
When my friend Martin McNeil died, I was asked to deliver a eulogy for him, which I accepted with the heavy heart. This is what I said.
Dear friends, bereaved family members, and celebrants. We have gathered today to bid farewell to our Martin, one of the greatest men I met in my life. It had been my privilege to have him as my best friend. He was not only a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a proud man, but also a pillar of our community. The emptiness we all feel today is enormous and impossible to fill again. His twenty-five children and numerous women who had a good fortune to become his family and friends must be inconsolable.
I have known Martin since childhood, and my memories are flooding back now as I stand in front of his coffin. To illustrate what kind of child he was, I’d like to mention a couple of episodes from that time. When he was four, his uncle gave him a cowboy on a horse figurine as a birthday present. Martin took it, glared at it with contempt, and threw it at the ground, shouting, “I don’t want any toys! Give me cash!” These two sentences are probably the wisest a child had uttered in the history of our civilization. So profound and prescient. I will remember them for the rest of my life and I have used them as a guiding idea in my life just as scientists use Einstein’s Theory of Relativity when they think about the universe.
When I was five, Martin asked me how children were made. I told him it was a stork that brought them. He tumbled to the ground, slapped his knees, and hooted with laughter. “You fool! Do you still believe in fairy tales?” he asked. Then we sat on the grass, and he explained to me that there was something people call sex, after which a woman usually got pregnant, and nine months later a child was born. His description of that act involving a man and a woman seemed awful to me, and I asked him if sex was painful. “Oh no,” he replied. “On the contrary, they enjoy it very much and they never tire of it.”
Martin and I were classmates. One day our mathematics teacher we dubbed “Fat Pig” called Martin to the blackboard and ordered him to solve a mathematical problem. We didn’t like the teacher because he was haughty, fat and chewed nuts all the time, which he fished from his trouser pocket. As he walked among the aisles, he used to hold a ruler in his hairy hand, which he slapped in his sweaty palm. I would wince whenever he stood above me, although I had never seen him hitting anyone. Martin didn’t respect him, especially since he spied on him in a local video shop, where the teacher rented porn films. “Fat Pig” used to hang his jacket on the chair, and this time was no different. As he turned his back to Martin and started pacing down the aisle, Martin pulled the wallet out of the jacket inner pocket and slipped it inside his trousers, and then turned to the blackboard, pretending to be solving the problem. The act happened so fast that the majority of the students didn’t even see it, and those who saw it were poker-faced. About half an hour later, the whole school was on their knees searching for the wallet, never to find it again. The same afternoon before going home, we went to a patisserie and gorged ourselves on all kinds of cakes. What we couldn’t eat, Martin packed in a bag, and when we walked through the park, he gave the treats to birds. He was the most generous person you could imagine and always shared with others what he had.
On another occasion, as we strolled through the town one cold afternoon, we saw a flock of doves huddling under an old oak. They were miserable and looked as if they would freeze to death. Martin took pity on them and bid me to stay outside while he went into a supermarket. He came back after a few minutes and took a wedge of Gruyère Réserve out of his pocket. He went to the birds, crumbled the cheese, and then we watched them picking the bits and coming back to life. Martin’s eyes sparkled with happiness. “Blessed are those who feed the hungry,” he said like a prophet.
TO BE CONTINUED
When my friend Martin McNeil died, I was asked to deliver a eulogy for him, which I accepted with the heavy heart. This is what I said.
Dear friends, bereaved family members, and celebrants. We have gathered today to bid farewell to our Martin, one of the greatest men I met in my life. It had been my privilege to have him as my best friend. He was not only a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a proud man, but also a pillar of our community. The emptiness we all feel today is enormous and impossible to fill again. His twenty-five children and numerous women who had a good fortune to become his family and friends must be inconsolable.
I have known Martin since childhood, and my memories are flooding back now as I stand in front of his coffin. To illustrate what kind of child he was, I’d like to mention a couple of episodes from that time. When he was four, his uncle gave him a cowboy on a horse figurine as a birthday present. Martin took it, glared at it with contempt, and threw it at the ground, shouting, “I don’t want any toys! Give me cash!” These two sentences are probably the wisest a child had uttered in the history of our civilization. So profound and prescient. I will remember them for the rest of my life and I have used them as a guiding idea in my life just as scientists use Einstein’s Theory of Relativity when they think about the universe.
When I was five, Martin asked me how children were made. I told him it was a stork that brought them. He tumbled to the ground, slapped his knees, and hooted with laughter. “You fool! Do you still believe in fairy tales?” he asked. Then we sat on the grass, and he explained to me that there was something people call sex, after which a woman usually got pregnant, and nine months later a child was born. His description of that act involving a man and a woman seemed awful to me, and I asked him if sex was painful. “Oh no,” he replied. “On the contrary, they enjoy it very much and they never tire of it.”
Martin and I were classmates. One day our mathematics teacher we dubbed “Fat Pig” called Martin to the blackboard and ordered him to solve a mathematical problem. We didn’t like the teacher because he was haughty, fat and chewed nuts all the time, which he fished from his trouser pocket. As he walked among the aisles, he used to hold a ruler in his hairy hand, which he slapped in his sweaty palm. I would wince whenever he stood above me, although I had never seen him hitting anyone. Martin didn’t respect him, especially since he spied on him in a local video shop, where the teacher rented porn films. “Fat Pig” used to hang his jacket on the chair, and this time was no different. As he turned his back to Martin and started pacing down the aisle, Martin pulled the wallet out of the jacket inner pocket and slipped it inside his trousers, and then turned to the blackboard, pretending to be solving the problem. The act happened so fast that the majority of the students didn’t even see it, and those who saw it were poker-faced. About half an hour later, the whole school was on their knees searching for the wallet, never to find it again. The same afternoon before going home, we went to a patisserie and gorged ourselves on all kinds of cakes. What we couldn’t eat, Martin packed in a bag, and when we walked through the park, he gave the treats to birds. He was the most generous person you could imagine and always shared with others what he had.
On another occasion, as we strolled through the town one cold afternoon, we saw a flock of doves huddling under an old oak. They were miserable and looked as if they would freeze to death. Martin took pity on them and bid me to stay outside while he went into a supermarket. He came back after a few minutes and took a wedge of Gruyère Réserve out of his pocket. He went to the birds, crumbled the cheese, and then we watched them picking the bits and coming back to life. Martin’s eyes sparkled with happiness. “Blessed are those who feed the hungry,” he said like a prophet.
TO BE CONTINUED
