When she looked ahead，Florence Chadwick saw nothing but a solid wall of fog.Her body was numb (麻木的)．She had been swimming for nearly sixteen hours.

    Already she was the first woman to swim the English Channel in both directions.Now，at age 34，her goal was to become the first woman to swim from Catalina Island to the California coast.

    On the morning of July 4th，1952，the sea was like an ice bath and the fog was so thick that she could hardly see her support boats.The wind was strong and it was raining heavily.Against the cold water of the sea，she struggled on—hour after hour.Millions of people at home were watching her in front of the television.

    In one of the boats，her mother and her trainer tried their best to encourage her.They told her it wasn't much farther.But all she could see was fog.They urged her not to give up.She never had...until then.With only a half mile to go，she asked to be pulled out.

    After thawing her cold body several hours later，she told a reporter，“Look，I'm not excusing myself，but if I could have seen land I might have made it.” It was not tiredness or even the cold water that defeated her.It was the fog.She was unable to see her goal.

    Two months later，she tried again.This time，despite the same thick fog，she swam with all her strength and her goal clearly pictured in her mind.She knew that somewhere behind that fog was land and this time she made it! Florence Chadwick became the first woman to swim the Catalina Channel!  

    When my brother and I were young, my mom would take us on Transportation Days.

    It goes like this: You can't take any means of transportation more than once. We would start from home, walking two blocks to the rail station. We'd take the train into the city center, then a bus, switching to the tram, then maybe a taxi. We always considered taking a horse carriage in the historic district, but we didn't like the way the horses were treated, so we never did. At the end of the day, we took the subway to our closest station, where Mom's friend was waiting to give us a ride home—our first car ride of the day.

    The good thing about Transportation Days is not only that Mom taught us how to get around. She was born to be multimodal (多方式的). She understood that depending on cars only was a failure of imagination and, above all, a failure of confidence—the product of a childhood not spent exploring subway tunnels.

    Once you learn the route map and step with certainty over the gap between the train and the platform, nothing is frightening anymore. New cities are just light-rail lines to be explored. And your personal car, if you have one, becomes just one more tool in the toolbox—and often an inadequate one, limiting both your mobility and your wallet.

    On Transportation Days, we might stop for lunch on Chestnut Street or buy a new book or toy, but the transportation was the point. First, it was exciting enough to watch the world speed by from the train window. As I got older, my mom helped me unlock the mysteries that would otherwise have paralyzed my first attempts to do it myself: How do I know where to get off? How do I know how much it costs? How do I know when I need tickets, and where to get them? What track, what line, which direction, where's the stop, and will I get wet when we go under the river?

    I'm writing this right now on an airplane, a means we didn't try on our Transportation Days and, we now know, the dirtiest and most polluting of them all. My flight routed me through Philadelphia. My multimodal mom met me for dinner in the airport. She took a train to meet me.

    Jack was born without eyes. He's very lucky with his timing. He grew up having other kittens to play and socialize with, and was used to people from the moment he was born since there are always kids hanging around the barn. He was a favorite amongst the students at the barn. However, when it came time to find the kittens homes, no one knew where Jack would end up. That's when I got an e-mail from my friend. All she asked was “Do you still want one of the kittens? There's one here with no eyes and no one can take him.” Without thinking I told her that I did want the kitten.

    When we first brought him home Jack stayed mostly in my room. He walked cautiously around, sniffing everything. After about a day he had no issues running around, jumping onto my bed and climbing on everything. He went through a time where he could climb the stairs, but couldn't get down. He would sit at the top and cry until someone came and got him. Every now and then when he gets disoriented he'll stop and cry. But we just call his name and talk to him and it isn't long before he finds his way back to us.

    Also, a few weeks after getting Jack, we got a new barn cat named Bear. I always take Jack outside at that time for some fresh air and exercise. He loves to run (at top speed!) around the back yard and gardens. Bear and Jack have become best friends. It doesn't matter that he can't see, Jack always knows when Bear is around. He'll run across the yard straight to Bear and wrap his front legs around his neck in a big hug. They chase each other around and wrestle, and when they're tired they'll lie down in the grass together.

    Jack is truly an inspiration. I've owned a lot of kittens in my life, but Jack is the happiest, most playful of them all. He doesn't feel sorry for himself. Heck, for all he knows, all cats are just like him. People who know Jack don't feel sorry for him. They cherish him for the treasure that he is. I have talked to a few people who haven't met him personally who tend to pity him, but they just don't understand. Jack doesn't need pity. I think Jean (who has Gumbo the eyeless ginger) said it best when she told me that cats don't have disabilities, they have adaptabilities.

    Are you so sure your mistakes are just mistakes? Or could they be building blocks to a success beyond any you imagined?

    When my friend Dorothy goes home to visit her family each Thanksgiving, her mother serves the traditional “mistake salad”. The dish was born many years ago. Dorothy explains, when mother was using a cookbook to make a salad. In the process, mother accidentally included half the salad ingredients(原料)from a recipe(食谱)on the left side of the open cookbook, and half the ingredients from a different salad recipe on the opposite page. Everyone enjoyed the salad so much that she continue to serve it every year. So it was really not a mistake at all.

    Then there was the fellow named Alfred, who invented dynamite(炸药). When Alfred's brother died, the city newspaper confused the two and printed an abituary(讣告)saying that the dead's most notable act was the creation of bombs. Surprised to consider that his name would forever be connected with destruction, Alfred sought to leave a more positive fame to humanity. So he set a prize for people who contributed to world peace. Now the Nobel Prize, established by Alfred Nobel, is the most respected award in the world.

    Everything is part of something bigger, and mistakes are no exception. In his brilliant book Illusions, Richard Bach explains that every problem comes to you with a gift. If you focus only on what went wrong, you miss the gift. If you are willing to look deeper and ask for the bright, the problem will disappear. You are left only with the learning, and you go forward on your path.

    As soon as a person dies, decomposition(分解) begins. And the first visitors arrive. “Within 5 to 15 minutes of death, flies or other insects begin to colonize the body.” says Rabi Musah, an organic chemist at the University at Albany.

    She says different species turn up at different stages of decomposition. “So because of that, depending upon what entomological(昆虫学的) evidence you find, you can learn something about when the person died in terms of the timing of the death.”

    Flies don't tend to stick around when disturbed by detectives. But they do leave behind eggs. The eggs are hard to tell apart by appearance alone, so specialists raise them until they hatch, a few weeks later—and they get a species ID and, with a little guesswork, a person's time of death.   But Musah has come up with a more time-saving approach: chemical analysis of the eggs. She and her team investigated that method by first harvesting flies with pig-liver traps hidden throughout New York City. They collected the trapped flies and then chemically analyzed their eggs. And it turns out each species of fly egg has a unique chemical fingerprint—enough to tell the eggs apart without raising the eggs to maturity. The study is in the journal Analytical Chemistry.

    Musah and her colleague Jennifer Rosati are now testing the method on a real case. “And once we do that we will be publishing some case studies to illustrate(阐明) that this is a method that can be used, and hopefully eventually it's something that will stand up in court, and something that could speed up detective work—or help deal with a cold case.”

    It is quite reasonable to blame traffic jams, the cost of gas and the great speed of modern life, but manners on the road are becoming horrible. Everybody knows that the nicest men would become fierce tigers behind the wheel. It is all right to have a tiger in a cage, but to have one in the driver's seat is another matter altogether.

    Road politeness is not only good manners, but good sense too. It takes the most cool-headed drivers great patience to give up the desire to beat back when forced to face rude driving. On the other hand, a little politeness goes a long way towards reducing the possibility of quarrelling and fighting. A friendly nod or a wave of thanks in answer to an act of politeness helps to create an atmosphere of good will and calm so necessary in modern traffic condition. But such behaviors of politeness are by no means enough. Many drivers nowadays don't even seem able to recognize politeness when they see it.

    However, misplaced politeness can also be dangerous. Typical examples are the driver who waves a child crossing the street at a wrong place into the path of oncoming cars that may be not able to stop in time. The same goes for encouraging old ladies to cross the road wherever and whenever they want to. It always amazes me that the highways are not covered with the dead bodies of these grannies (奶奶).

    An experienced driver, whose manners are faultless, told me it would help if drivers learnt to correctly join in traffic stream without causing total blockages that give rise to unpleasant feelings. Unfortunately, modern drivers can't even learn to drive. Years ago, experts warned us that the fast increase of the car ownership would demand more give-and-take from all road users. It is high time for all of us to take this message to heart.