On a long trip with a carload of friends, for no reason a driver in another car pulled out a rifle and pointed it at us at a rest stop. Then he threatened his own girlfriend as he pulled her into his car and drove off.

Those of us of a certain age remember with a twinge of laughter and horror Secretary of State Alexander Haig claiming he was in charge when Ronald Reagan was shot.

I once saw an ad in a magazine with the headline: “Will it take six strong men to carry you back into church?” Beneath the headline was a picture of pallbearers carrying a coffin up the church steps.

After spring break, a priest and fellow teacher with few remnants of the full head of hair he once had, returned to school fitted with a toupee.

“I just want my $1,500 dollars,” the man complained to the agent answering the compliance hotline. “It’s reimbursement for my gas and mileage. The clinics I service are refusing to pay even though it’s in my contract, and now they’re calling into question my job performance.

The day after 8th grade my family moved, and all summer long I missed my friends back in the city. So I invited my friend Billy to spend the weekend.

Remember the little cardboard Valentines with their odd shaped envelopes? Some had a little clasp that allowed a part of the card to move. We used to be able to buy the cards by the bagful, sometimes paying as little as 50 cents for a hundred of them.

Every time I hear the story of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, I stand amazed: The woman is lying in bed, sick with fever when Jesus takes her hand, pulls her up, and instantly cures her. She then waits on him and his pals.

As a young girl, she always tried to avoid getting drafted to work in her mother’s garden. She disliked the planting, the pruning, the watering. She disliked the weeding the most. And so she would rush off to play with her friends.

I was walking past a schoolyard yesterday and the kids were hanging out waiting for the bell to ring to start the school day. As kids will, some little third grader was taunting another one. She said, “Why should I listen to you? You’re just a dork.”