When a song triggered a fond memory of an old friend not seen in several years, a woman decided to send him a quick note. To her surprise, her friend had become a ghost.

I see him, cup in hand, every time I drive past that corner. He works it well every day, rain or shine, getting to know the regulars like me who are willing to roll down our windows and give him a dollar or two

Recovering after serious surgery, I found myself attached to multiple machines and lines distributing and infusing my body. 0ne by one these connections would be removed. But I remained fearful.

My daughter was having a meltdown in the middle of the lobby of the Playboy Building, which, oddly enough, houses her pediatrician’s office. She did not want to leave, but she didn’t want to stay.

How we delight in our garden’s first fruits: the succulent strawberries of a well-tended patch, beans that curl their way up a tripod trellis. It’s the same with grateful farmers who gaze on rows of leafy green—relieved their corn will again be “knee high by the Fourth of July.”

I distinctly recall the day when my faith took firm root. I was 7 years old and my sisters and I had just been summoned by my dad to join him around the kitchen table while my mom fixed him dinner.

Jesus is often perturbed by his detractors’ illogic. They say Jesus drives out demons by the power of Satan. But, Jesus asks in disgust: “How can Satan drive out Satan?”

Many of my friends are starting to go through their children’s difficult teen years. In the eyes of their kids, they can’t do anything right, while the kids themselves are doing a whole lot wrong.

In beautiful script painted above the door to the former monk’s cell I was assigned for my retreat, it said in Latin, “Those who guard their mouths preserve themselves; those who open wide their lips bring ruin” (Proverbs 13:3).

I was in my friend Billy’s kitchen waiting for him to come downstairs so we could go out and play. Billy was the oldest of nine kids. Dinner was over, and his mother stood at the kitchen counter and dealt out the bread for eight sandwiches—12 pieces of bread, side by side, for the six kids who were in school, and four more pieces next to them to make the two sandwiches her husband would take to work with him.