"To be alive, and feeling free, and to have everyone in our family!” Forty young guys sang out those words at the top of our voices. We were on retreat in our senior year of high school.

I used to be picked last when my grammar school friends and I gathered to play 16-inch softball. It wasn’t because I was that bad a player. Actually, I was pretty good.

Tom is a photographer and art director by profession and a Nebraskan by birth. Maybe the combination of creative vision and Midwestern common sense keep him on such an even keel.

If we love one another, God remains in us.

All you need is love,” one of the most celebrated pop singles ever—written by the Beatles in 1967—said little more than: “All you need is love.

My cousin has decided to become a cop. She’s 39 years old, and the cutoff to enter the academy is 40. She smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish before she decided to make this startling career shift.

When I was a kid my brother Pat and I used to get in arguments with the neighbor kids. We went to Catholic school and they went to public school, and often the rhetoric devolved into snide comments about Catholics vs. “publics.”

Today we have a lesson in produce. A number of years ago, researchers found that in order to get people to eat more grapes, they had to do something about the seeds. Biting into them was unpleasant.

If you’ve ever been given the task of pruning branches on a vine, you know that it is no easy feat. It is often impossible to tell where the vine ends and the branches begin because they are so intertwined and interconnected.

Certain memories remain vivid as years go by. One that stands out clearly in my mind is a memory of my wife sitting in a gold chair in the living room of our first house.