"Parenthood necessarily transforms people, and when I became a mother I was able to create, slowly, a room around my daughter. It began with her crib, which looked entirely out of place in the room that adjoined our bedroom, a room that we had supposed might be a library or study. When our daughter was born, the walls were decorated with skulls I'd collected from desert road trips through the Southwest -- deer, ram, and cow -- the shelves filled with grown-up books. In the middle of the large, shabby Oriental rug, the crib, festooned with mobiles and stuffed with pastel toys, appeared as an unexpected mirage of babyhood. Even I could see that it looked alien, adrift. Long before she could talk, our daughter expressed her clear dislike for the skulls, and I took them upstairs and replaced them with framed illustrations of Babar.
From "Outside In" by Kathryn Harrison,
in A Place Called Home:
Twenty Writing Women Remember
Edited by Mickey Pearlman
St. Martin's, $21.95, ISBN 031212796
From "Wasp, Where Is Thy Sting?"
"How do we respond to our children's accusing us of inconsistency? We can respond as Adam did in the Garden of Eden, claiming perfection, denying our mistakes, looking for someone else to blame, or not recognizing the right of anyone to judge us. Or we can drop the fig leaf of perfection and reveal ourselves as human beings doing our best, getting some things right and others wrong as we continue to grow and struggle."
From How Good Do We Have to Be?
But she must have seen something she liked because we became a regular item over the next six months. We got engaged and I told her it was my intention to get married before the end of the year -- for a tax deduction. Six hundred dollars seemed like a lot of money.
'No, no, no,' she said, 'things are moving too fast.'
From Mean Business:
From Po Bronson, in Mind Grenades:
"My favorite daydream is a classic American fantasy: I sign everything over to Pam, take a few thousand dollars out of the bank to tide me over until I connect somewhere, fill our old station wagon with as much personal gear as it will hold, get behind the wheel, and just . . . go. Westward, of course. Just follow the highway to God knows where and start over from scratch and find out what a new life can bring."
From Executive Blues:
"We did not always know what was on the bottom of the ocean; nor did we know what the bottom of the ocean was made of. In most areas, we did not know where the bottom of the ocean actually was. One of the first men to try to find out was Constantine Phipps of the Royal Navy, who dropped a weighted line from HMS Racehorse in 1883. It went down for 4,098 feet before it touched the bottom of the North Atlantic between Norway and Iceland. When the French naturalist Franois Peron returned from around-the-world journey in 1804, he reported -- without any evidence to support such a conclusion -- that the deeper the water got, the colder it became, and that the floor of the ocean was covered with eternal ice."
From Deep Atlantic:
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
"The best way to know Mrs. Jones-borough is through her grocery list, where she stands revealed in the glare of her High Wasp priorities.
9-Lives
Harper's
tomato juice
Worcestershire
Tabasco
vodka
food
in The Florence King Reader
By Florence King
St. Martin's Griffin, $13.95, ISBN 0312143370
By Harold S. Kushner
Little Brown, $21.95, ISBN 0316507415
"When I saw her for the first time, she struck me immediately as a beautiful, intelligent woman who initially didn't seem that affected by me. Indeed, Judy's first impressions of me were not inspiring. She thought I was handsome, but also aggressive and brash. I came on like a locomotive -- not like the restrained Midwest fellas to whom she was accustomed.
How I Save Bad Companies
and Make Good Companies Great
By Albert J. Dunlap with Bob Andelman
Times Business, $25, ISBN 0812928377
"Two styles of people: guys and gals. Females, what? They caretake. They nurture. Men, what? They squirt and move on. So, business start-upssame thing. The entrepreneurs who run businesses? They're like women. Caretakers. Venture capitalists, though? Gigolos. Roosters. Seed capital. Get it?"
Manifestos from the Future
Design and editorial direction by John Plunkett and Louis Rossetto
Hardwired, $32.95, ISBN 1888869003
Down and Out in Corporate America
By G. J. Meyer
Dell Trade Paperback, $12.95, ISBN 0440507650
Life, Death, and Exploration in the Abyss
By Richard Ellis
Alfred A. Knopf, $35, ISBN 0679433244
www@bookpage.com