; special topics in calamity physics
"Evereyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story," Dad said, scratiching his jaw thoughtfully, arranging the limp collar of his chambray shirt. "Even if you have your Magnificent Reason, it could still be dull as Nebraska and that's no one's fault but your own. Well, if you feel it's miles of cornfields, find something to believe in other than yourself, preferably a cause without the stench of hypocrisy, and then charge into batttle. There's a reason they still put Che Guevara on T-shirts, why people still whisper about The Nightwatchmen when there's been no evidence of their existence for twenty years.
"But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don't care what those themes are--they're yours to uncover and stand behind--so long as, at the very least, there is courage. Guts. Mut, in German. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those burn into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last."
"How do you know?" I always asked, and when I spoke it sounded tiny and uncertain, compared to Dad.
"I just know," he said simply, and then closed his eyes, which indicated that he didn't want to talk anymore.
The only sound in the room was the ice melting his glass.
