title: Not by Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life
author:  Samantha Dunn 
description: These two engaging memoirs by California freelance journalists demonstrate how lives, family, and friends change after serious accidents. Thrown and trampled by her horse, Dunn (Failing Paris) survived with a badly fractured leg requiring extensive reconstructive surgery and the threat of future infection and amputation. As she convalesces, she candidly reviews her life and reflects on what it means to be accident-prone. Is this calamity not the first, but the most serious just a coincidence, or does it indicate something deeper that needs to be examined? Barely able to walk again, she takes up yoga, explores complementary therapies, and embarks on a path of emotional and physical healing. Dunn concludes that her accidents were an unconscious message telling her that she did not care enough about herself and her future. She returns to writing, divorces her husband, gets back on her horse (literally), and survives a second fall. Both active sports enthusiasts, Parker and her retired scientist-husband, Ralph, were planning to move to Colorado when he was knocked off his bicycle and paralyzed from the neck down. In a series of short essays that first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications, Parker candidly relates the fears and frustrations of learning to be a primary caregiver for a quadriplegic. Friends desert her, but colorful Momma Scott and her African American neighbors step in to lend emotional support. Two live-in personal attendants, an ex-con, and a Tibetan immigrant form an unconventional household centered on caring for Ralph and for one another. With humor, Parker spares no details describing the personal routines; the clashes of class, culture, and caregiving; and her delights in new friends and small pleasures. Both books are recommended for public libraries. Lucille M. Boone, San Jose P.L., CA <br />Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: Star Bright 
  by Mark Clifton 
  
   
   
  Friday, June
   
  At three years of age, a little girl shouldn't have enough functioning
  intelligence to cut out and paste together a Moebius Strip.
   
  Or, if she did it by accident, she surely shouldn't have enough reasoning
  ability to pick up one of her crayons and carefully trace the continuous line
  to prove it has only one surface.
   
  And if by some strange coincidence she did, and it was still just an accident,
  how can I account for this generally active daughter of mine-and I do mean
  active-sitting for a solid half hour with her chin cupped in her hand, staring
  off into space, thinking with such concentration that it was almost painful to
  watch.
   
  I was in my reading chair, going over some work. Star was sitting on the
  floor, in the circle of my light, with her blunt nosed scissors and her scraps
  of paper.
   
  Her long silence made me glance down at her as she was taping the two
  ends of the paper together. At that point I thought it was an accident tha