Unit 1: Selection Vocabulary 5

Then I whistled and she tipped her head.

My mother sent up a silver thread
for me to slide down on.

Food fell into three distinct categories: Mexican food, which he could eat every day and die a happy man; American food—meals like hamburgers, hot dogs, and fried chicken—which we ate occasionally; and other people’s food, which included all the food he refused to eat.

As I understood it, this was my father’s unstated philosophy: We have our food—fajitas, tamales, tacos, enchiladas. It took our people many years to develop these foods. We even have two kinds of tortillas, flour and corn. So tell me why you want to eat other people’s food? Leave their food alone.

When we finished playing, he asked me if I wanted a souvenir. I said yes, thinking he was going to buy me a T-shirt at the front booth.

“Would you like to see a menu or do you want the buffet?” the waitress asked.

Then I spotted the elusive straits that Magellan had discovered more than four hundred years earlier.

And the land became only more distant and remote the farther we traveled into Tierra del Fuego.

The plane shook desperately against the Antarctic wind, and I thought to myself then that this was where wind was invented and here was the origin of the warm breeze we felt so far away in Brownsville.

He looked as if he were fourteen or fifteen, frail and willow-wild, in tennis shoes and blue jeans.

“But you put yourself in contact with me,” said the woman. “If you think that that contact is not going to last awhile, you got another thought coming..."

When she got to her door, she dragged the boy inside, down a hall, and into a large kitchenette furnished room at the rear of the house.

You might run that comb through your hair so you will look presentable.

He did not trust the woman not to trust him. And he did not want to be mistrusted now.