Special Topics in Calamity Physics

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Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.

“Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond—James Bond — you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began — with a wheeze.”

Given such rigid parameters, I always assumed I wouldn’t have my Magnificent Reason until I was at least seventy, with liver spots, rheumatism, wit as quick as a carving knife, a squat stucco house in Avignon (where I could be found eating 365 different cheeses), a lover twenty years my junior who worked in the fields (I don’t know what kind of fields — any kind that were gold and frothy) and, with any luck, a small triumph of science or philosophy to my name. And yet the decision — no, the grave necessity — to take pen to paper and write about my childhood — most critically, the year it unstitched like a snagged sweater — came much sooner than I ever imagined.

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