Home > Work > Now Go Out There: (and Get Curious)
1 " Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious and compassionate will save your ass. Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder. "
― Mary Karr , Now Go Out There: (and Get Curious)
2 " Bad things are gonna' happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won't stave the really bad things off. Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people's blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human. "
3 " Far as I can tell, a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. "
4 " A BLESSING FROM MY SIXTEEN YEARS’ SONI have this son who assembled inside meduring Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled.Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras.Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.Look at the muscled obelisk of him nowpawing through the icebox for more grapes.Sixteen years and not a bone broken,not a single stitch. By his age,I was marked more ways, and small.He’s a slouching six foot two,with implausible blue eyes, which settleon the pages of Emerson’s “Self Reliance”with profound belligerence.A girl with a navel ringcould make his cell phone buzz,or an Afro’d boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell—creatures strange as dragons or eels.Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counselarcane as any oracle’s. Dante claims school isharshing my mellow. Rodney longs to datea tattooed girl, because he wants a womanwilling to do stuff she’ll regret.They’ve come to lead my soninto his broadening spiral.Someday soon, the tetherwill snap. I birthed my own mominto oblivion. The night my son smashedthe car fender, then rode homein the rain-streaked cop cruiser, he asked, Did youand Dad screw up so much?He’d let me tuck him in,my grandmother’s wedding quiltfrom 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’tblame us, I said. You’re your ownidiot now. At which he grinned.The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevytook it hard. He’d found my sonawkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,where he’d draped his own coatover her shaking shoulders. My fault,he’d confessed right off.Nice kid, said the cop. "