Happiness Is an Attitude

The 92-year-old confident and proud lady, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o’clock, with her hair fashionably combed and makeup perfectly applied, moved to a【小题1】(nurse) home today.

Her husband of 70 years recently passed away, 【小题2】 (make) the move necessary.

After many hours of waiting patiently in the hall of the nursing home, she 【小题3】 (smile) sweetly when told her room was ready. As she got into the elevator 【小题4】 her wheelchair, I provided a description of her tiny room.

“I love it,” she started with the enthusiasm of 【小题5】 eight-year-old child having just been presented with a new dog.

“Mrs. Jones, you haven’t seen the room….just wait.”

“That has 【小题6】 to do with it,” she replied. “Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. 【小题7】 I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged…it’s 【小题8】 I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it. It’s a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice; I can spend the day in bed 【小题9】 (recount) the difficulty I have with the parts of my body 【小题10】 no longer work or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones working. Each day is a gift, and as long as my eyes open, I’ll focus on the new day and all the happy memories I’ve stored away… just for this time in my life.”

Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave in the movement that fought to end slavery in the United States. He became a【小题1】 voice in the year before the Civil War.

A few weeks ago, the National Park Service (NPS) 【小题2】Douglass’s birth and Black History Month with reopening of his home at Cedar Hill, a【小题3】 site in Washington. D.C. The two-story house, which contains many of Douglass’s personal possessions, had undergone a three-year 【小题4】. (Thanks to the NTS website, however, you don’t have to live in the nation’s capital to visit it. Take a tour online.)

He was born in Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to a slave mother and a white father who never knew Douglass grew uo to become the first black 【小题5】 to hold a government office--- as US minister and consul general （总领事）to Haiti.

As a youth, he never went to school. Educating slaves was illegal in the South, so he 【小题6】 taught himself to read and write. At 21 years old, he escaped from his slave owner to Massachusetts and changed his last name to Douglass, to hide his identity.

In the 1850s, Douglass was involved with the Underground Railroad, the system 【小题7】 up by antislavery groups to bring runaway slaves to the North and Canada. His home in Rochester, N.Y. was near the Canadian border. It became an important station on the 【小题8】, housing as many as 11 runaway slaves at a time.

He died in 1895. In his lifetime, Douglass 【小题9】 the end of slavery in 1865 and the adoption of the 15^th Amendment to the US Constitution （美国宪法修正案）, which 【小题10】 African-Americans the right to vote.