From a Town on the Hudson Read Online Free Page A

son feel positive about his life in Fort Lee. The older son, fourteen years old then, gradually became more confident in his studies. Though he couldn't speak English yet, he could participate in his class by doing homework and taking tests. When he received the highest score in his class on the science test for the first time, the science teacher, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, praised him generously, and that encouraged him more. He knew he had grasped the American way of learning when he passed the bilingual class and the E.S.L. class.
    For me, to help with our younger son's homework certainly was a joy because I liked English. But it kept me busy as well. From the kitchen, frying fish and mincing onions, I loudly answered his questions while he was doing his homework in the dining room next to the kitchen. After dinner, I sat beside him and helped him with his homework. I had majored in English but certainly had never mastered it. Most of the vocabulary in the textbooks was so new to me even though it was for elementary school children. I was a tutor who spent a lot of time consulting the dictionary and couldn't help crying out each time I found an expression I understood in his textbooks. I had never seen everyday words like "scrub" in the old English poems I had learned in my college days. I often wished I could go to school with our younger son and learn English from the very beginning level. A year later, the hours for doing homework became shorter. When one and a half years had passed, he got so that he could notice some mistakes his mother made. One day, about two years after our younger son had transferred to the American public school, he said, "I will do it by myself, Mother." The two years working with him had stimulated my desire to learn English for myself, and I started to write essays in the summer of 1987.

WHEN MY friend Kiyoko, the wife of my husband's colleague, found a traffic ticket under the windshield wiper of her car, she turned pale. One afternoon in September 1985, the first year of American life for both of us, she got a ticket at the public parking lot in Fort Lee because her time on the parking meter had expired. That day we had gone to a beauty salon near there while our children went to school. Since I hadn't gotten a drivers license yet, she picked me up and took me to the salon. I, too, was responsible for the ticket. The violation slip said that if she didn't pay by the due date she would have to appear in court as well. "Fine" and "court," which we had had nothing to do with until then, suddenly touched our lives. The scene of poor Kiyoko standing in a court of the United States even flashed into my mind. Later when we looked back on that day, we couldn't help laughing. However, we took it seriously at the time.
    Both Kiyoko's and my family had moved from Japan about a half-year earlier. Kiyoko and I were not used to the area yet and were not very fluent in English. Our children also struggled with English in their new schools. Our husbands, who were our last resort, were working hard at the New York branch of a Japanese bank. We all were very busy adapting to basic American life. Besides, knotty problems with my house came up frequently: The basement resident of the duplex let his dog walk in the front yard and never cleaned up after it. Water overflowed from one of our toilets sometimes. Squirrels went in and out of the ceiling through a broken place in the eaves. Moreover, I heard from my mother-in-law that my father-in-law had been injured in a traffic accident in Japan. Kiyoko, too, worried about her daughter's health after she had a high fever. There was a mass of things to make us anxious. Kiyoko's getting the parking ticket was one more mess we had gotten into and which we wanted to solve as soon as possible. With our hair freshly done, Kiyoko and I were at a loss beside her big Buick in the large public parking lot.
    I thought that we had better ask someone what we should do. In Japan, police