有哪些小事可以徹底改變生活？

他給我一塊玻璃。

My husband was killed on 9/11; he worked in 1 WTC, well above the impact floors. On his birthday in March, 2002, I went to the site that used to be the WTC. It wasn’t cleaned up yet, in fact it was ugly a shell and smelled about the same, and access was still pretty chaotic. I got to the Century 21 department store across the street, and stood against the wall - and just crumbled. Broke down.

我丈夫死于911事件，他在世貿(mào)中心一號樓工作，就在被撞擊樓層上面。2002年3月他生日時，我去了世貿(mào)中心舊址，那里還沒有被清理干凈，看起來聞起來就像地獄一般，通往那兒的道路也一片混亂，我去了馬路對面的21世紀百貨商店，靠墻站著，心都要碎了，我要崩潰了。

A guy who was working across the street at the site - which was still a full-on disaster area - saw me and came across. “Who did you lose?” he asked. “My husband,” I said, through ugly tears, and I told the guy what firm my husband had worked for, and that it was his birthday.

馬路對面當時完全就是災(zāi)難現(xiàn)場，一個工作人員看見我了就走過來問我：“你失去什么親人了?”我說：“我丈夫”，我哭得很難看，跟他說我丈夫之前在哪個公司工作，那天是他的生日。

Guy turned out to be a firefighter. Reached into his front pocket. “This is actually really rare. Not a lot of glass survived; it just vaporized.” And he pressed it into my hand.

那個人是消防員，他把手伸進衣服前面口袋里，把一塊玻璃放進我手里說：“這塊真的很少見，大部分玻璃都沒了，熔化掉了。”

I still have it. It’s not that the guy was giving up a valuable souvenir. It was that he was acknowledging my connection to that little piece of glass, and putting it where he thought it belonged - that, and he needed to give me something that in some small way I could hold onto and focus on, instead of the hurt. This was how he could do that in that one moment.

我現(xiàn)在仍然留著它，不是因為那個男人放棄了一個有價值的紀念品，而是因為他明白我和這一小塊玻璃之間的聯(lián)系，把它放到一個他認為這塊玻璃該去的地方。他需要把這個東西給我，讓我能握在手里或多或少把注意力轉(zhuǎn)移到這上面，而不是整日悲傷。這就是當時他所能做的。

I was so bound up in my own head I never even asked his name; he didn’t ask mine either. If he’s out there now, I want to tell him that the little piece of glass made me start to think that maybe everything wasn’t transient, ephemeral - that maybe there were things, little things, short moments, small pieces, that last no matter what.

我當時思想都集中在這個東西上，甚至都沒問他的名字，他也沒問我的名字。如果他現(xiàn)在還在那兒，我想告訴他這一小塊玻璃使我開始思考，可能不是所有東西都是轉(zhuǎn)瞬即逝的，可能還有一些東西雖小雖短暫，但不管在什么情況下都能延續(xù)下去。

I want to say to him: thanks for that.

我想對他說：謝謝他的贈品。