I was at a friend's house, and his young son was doing a school project on a topic I happen to know something about. I offered my assistance, and at first the son seemed to welcome any help he could get.

When my niece was about 12 years old, she brought some friends with her to visit her grandma. While there, she showed them the pictures of her uncles on my mother's dresser, commenting on each of them.

When I think about the immigrants that came to North America over the centuries, I wonder if I would have had the courage to be one of them. Sure, they were escaping desperation, but their attempts to build new lives sound scary and hard too.

A young manager signed on to run a fundraiser at his parish. He asked for 10 volunteers to help pull all the plans together. Then he set them to work during the day; at night after his regular job, he'd stop by the parish to see how things were going.

Somewhere in his college years Mark found himself branded with the nickname “Gramps.” I did not know him then. Years later, when we started working together and I first heard him called that name, I smiled. Somehow it seemed to me to fit him.

I always felt sorry for Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz. She tried so hard to share the wonders of her adventure, and all she got from her Auntie Em and others were bemused stares. "Sure, sure," they said. "You got bumped on the noggin and your imagination went wild."

The novel The Last Temptation of Christ has been criticized because the author saw Jesus tempted not only at the beginning of his ministry but all through his life, even when dying on the cross: to escape and lead a normal life as a husband and father.

Flat on my back for three weeks, fighting an infection that ravaged my body and attacked both legs, leading to surgery and talk of possible amputation of one or both, I awoke intact but with a grueling regimen of physical therapy three times a day.

A truck driver, in a hurry, pulled into a parking spot, jumped out of his car, and ran into a store. A moment later another driver came out of the store, and when she got to her car, she saw that she couldn't open the driver door because the truck had parked too close to her car.

Maybe something similar has happened to you. Sitting at a table in front of an ice cream parlor on a warm summer night, a group of friends and I were gently shaken out of our sugar-and-chocolate reveries by an elderly woman.