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“The Mother’s Day My Little Boy Disappeared”描写的虽然是短短几十分钟的故事，却充满了浓浓的生活气息，体现了母子情深，令人感动。
下面我们来看这篇原文“The Mother’s Day My Little Boy Disappeared”，看命题人是如何改编的。文中阴影部分为续写题目中没有出现的内容，方框框起来的部分是被命题人删掉的、需要学生续写的部分，小括号内词汇为命题人添加的内容，斜体是续写段首句。
The night before Mother’s Day there were broad hints passed across the table from the two older children that tomorrow morning I would be happily surprised by what they had gotten me as presents. The youngest was silent. Then they went to bed.
The next morning, around six, my daughter came into my room and said, “Justin’s not in his bed.” I sprang from my own, assuming he had gone downstairs to watch television. He hadn’t. I called out through the house. No answer. Was he hiding? I looked everywhere—under beds, in closets (衣橱) and finally, outside.
Since it was a Sunday, nobody was awake. The usual busy streets of Washington, D. C. were quiet, his bicycle was on the porch (门廊), and my thoughts were jumbled (纷乱). The empty bed, the flung covers (掀开的被子), the shoes he did not stop to put on—any other time of day I could find reasons for his being gone. But at 6 a.m. on a Sunday, Mother’s Day, I could find none. How macabre (How terrible)!
After rousing the household (whole family) and sending everyone up and down the streets and alleys for 20 minutes of calling, I went to the telephone, dialed the police and lived out my worst fear—I put in a missing-child report.
The police were solicitous. “Somebody,” an officer said, “will be right over.” I put down the telephone and tried to think where else he might have gone, or why. There was, I dimly hoped, one more possibility, the garden (where I worked), four blocks away in a neighborhood cooperative . I could think of no reason why he would go there. He had never gone by himself. But it was the only place I hadn’t tried, and after getting in the car, I drove slowly toward it. First block nothing—second and third empty too.
But at the end of the fourth block, I saw him walking toward me with his head down. He was in his pajama bottoms, with bare feet. I slammed on my brakes, flung open the car door, and felt every valve in my heart open with relief.
“Why?” I asked as he got into the car. He began to cry. “Where had you gone?”
“To your garden,” he answered, now breaking into a full weep against the dashboard. I took him into my arms and felt his small boned warm completeness against my ribs.
“Why did you want to go there?” I asked.
“Because,” he sobbed, “I woke up and remembered it was Mother’s Day and I didn’t have a present. And I thought maybe I could find some flowers to pick. But when I got to Oregon Avenue I remembered I wasn’t allowed to cross it by myself.”
The thought that he was actually afraid of his mother on Mother’s Day appalled me. I tried to tell him—remembering how when he was born I thought he was the most perfect, translucent creature I had ever beheld—that I did not want any flowers. Holding him tightly, I assured him that nothing in any flower garden could ever mean as much to me as he did. And he was more than smart, I added, to remember about not crossing Oregon Avenue.
(Then I told him) we had better go home and tell the policemen that everything was all rig ht.
“The policemen?” he exclaimed, looking up, his eyes wide.
“Yes,” I answered. “When I couldn’t find you, I called the police.”
His face took on an intensely interested expression. The trauma of Mother’s Day had been supplanted by a more interesting thought line, which kept him bolt upright on the seat as we drove home.
All of us retain mental snapshots of certain memorable events in our lives. And I am certain, from the flush of emotion I felt when I looked at Justin’s face, that this snapshot will always be passionately colored in my memory.