Mediocre, at best. That’s how Matt felt at intermission. He loved playing piano with the jazz trio, but these past weeks had been hard.

There’s a family I know that reminds me of the Trinity. Each member of that family is a unique individual with many outside interests and distinct qualities. Within the family are artists, musicians, scholars, business professionals, and adventurers.

Cheryl liked to make things. At school she was much more interested in woodworking class or the machine shop than she was in the things that attracted the attention of some of the other girls. As you might guess, she didn’t get a lot of encouragement from the boys.

We had moved back to the Midwest for my husband’s job, and I was intent on getting our family acclimated to a new city, a new home, and a new school. So I took us all one evening to introduce ourselves to our new pastor. Less than a week later, I opened our front door to find the same pastor on my doorstep.

“Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.” That is the advice prisoner Andy Dufresne, the main character in Stephen King’s short story Shawshank Redemption, offers his inmate friend in a letter Andy leaves for Red the night he escapes from Shawshank Prison.

We had some tough kids in our grammar school. I suppose by today’s standards they were pretty tame, but they scared the heck out of me. We had one guy who could have walked directly onto the cast of Grease without any changes to his appearance.

The same five girls kept showing up for detention after school, so the detention monitor decided to organize them into a kind of detention club, an association of misfits rejected by the other teachers.

One of the very first homilies that I was supposed to preach as a newly ordained priest was the Solemnity of the Ascension. I was to preach at the children’s liturgy. I stopped at a local mall and picked up a dozen helium balloons to use as visual aids with the children in my homily.

After serving as president of the Sears company from 1908-1924, Julius Rosenwald concentrated on philanthropy, giving away $63 million—a much larger amount in today’s dollars—to educational and cultural institutions and charities.

I’m grateful the pandemic didn’t happen 10 years ago—before the ability to meet virtually was widespread. While I had already been working remotely for many years, it made staying in touch with loved ones easier—and for the first time, I created new relationships solely online.