"Everybody wants to be somebody," Sharon Randall wrote in The Monterey Herald, quoting a guy who stuffed nine rattlesnakes in his mouth to break a world record. "I'm doing it for the prestige, the glory and the attention."

Then she told about how her mother wanted…

I call him my first pancake. It's a term of endearment and part of our family vocabulary. All families have their own words and phrases.

When you make pancakes, the first is the one you burn or undercook or make too fat or too thin. First pancakes are hard to get right because you haven't got the process down yet. Imagine taking someone who…

The day that President John F. Kennedy was killed I was 16 and a senior at Archbishop Williams High School. My class was in the cafeteria at a sodality meeting when the announcement came over the PA that the president had been shot. A half-hour later we were back in our homeroom when the PA clicked on again and we learned that the president had died…

You wonder how much people can stand. How they get up and go on under the worst of circumstances. How faith isn't enough sometimes and hope is fickle and how sorrow wears you down. I see her walking the hall, holding her baby. She passes the room where my family waits with my daughter's baby for more tests and more doctors with their maybes and possibilities…

He didn't cry this time. He grinned and handed his sister a baseball, an official major league one. "I've been waiting 26 years for this," he said hugging her, my son a man, but my boy still.

We were at Penn Station on the run - work, responsibility, places to go, things to do. Have to get home. Have to get to class. But before we  separated, some…

Hundreds of people could tell this story, maybe thousands. It could be told in Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, Korean, English - the kind the queen speaks - and the language of the streets. Old people could tell it and young people, too, and though the words would be different, all the stories would be the same: ”This is how Sister Eustace helped me," each would begin…