Well, I guess you might say that Gary is not my neighbor, but my tenant, because Gary is a garter snake living in my garden. I call him Gary because… well, he looks like a Gary to me.

I first met him in early June when I skirted the edge of the lawn, yanking weeds, and I almost stepped on him.

She was an avid gardener, so most of her flags were inspired by the season. Goldfinches and lilacs in April and May. Red cardinals and orange leaves in October. Turkeys and pumpkins in November.

Of course, sometimes she honored other things with her flags. Sundays during football season she flew a Bears flag. During July every other year she flew a soccer flag to honor the World Cups, both men’s and women’s.

The old microwave had served me for nineteen years, a long enough career I suppose for kitchen appliances and quarterbacks not named Brady. It still worked well enough, except that the handle had cracked and was held together by packing tape, and when turned on it whirred and sputtered like an asthmatic chipmunk riding a bike with a baseball card clothes-pinned to fan the spokes.

Oh, it’s not something I’m proud of. It’s just that over the years, roadkill and I have often crossed paths, and I guess you could say that I took the path less traveled by most people.

Take, for example, that freshly killed mink I found on Springinsguth Road in Schaumburg 35 years ago. It lay at the edge of the street next to the bridge over the creek, and I could see that it had been a beautiful, healthy animal before it crossed paths with a vehicle just the night before.

But sometimes you know exactly to the moment when it happens.

The house where our kids grew up was in Schaumburg. It was ten years old when we bought it, so it had already been somebody else’s home, and as my wife and I toured it during their open house, we wanted to see what would make us feel that this house could be home to us.

For me, that happened when the owners took us into the attached garage.

The word was “sonder.”

She did not include the definition — which was either a passive-aggressive prod to get me to join the rest of the Facebook folk, or a generous compliment implying that I must surely already know this word.

It was 1970, and I was just finishing up my Bachelor of Arts degree at Western Illinois University, about to start a career as a high school teacher. I was married with a very pregnant wife, and Barrington High School, where I had completed my student-teaching, had offered me a teaching job once my degree was complete.

Well, I can’t tell you why she was ordered to change seats, because as I write this, I am in the Free State of Florida, as the governor calls it without a hint of irony.

It was a Saturday, and a small art fair and music festival was under way. I strolled past the booths of ceramics, paintings, and nature photography as John Prine lyrics echoed through the park. Savory scents of burgers and brats wafted on the air, and I ambled down to a small aluminum floating pier rocking in the salty backwaters between the mangroves and sea grapes.

It took two accidental scar-kisses upon that table to remind me daily of how blessed I have been in love.

I don’t remember what I did for that stranger — it was some little kindness any thoughtful person would do for another. Maybe she dropped a dollar and I called out to her. Or maybe she struggled with an armful of groceries and I offered to carry some out to her car. It was some kindness so small and commonplace, I don’t recall it.

We had taken little Jenny to the Woodfield Mall to see Santa Claus so she could sit on his lap and tell him about all the toys that were on her Christmas list.

I refer, of course, to the suit filed by the Jack Daniel’s Whiskey company against an Arizona company named VIP Products, which makes doggy chew toys.

The toy at the heart of the case is a rubber squeak toy shaped and decorated like a Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey bottle.

The nest was tucked six or seven feet up into the crook of a maple tree, and Dandy, filled with puppy curiosity, enthusiasm, and energy, would leap into the air to go nose-to-nest. Then she would sprint around the yard and do it again.

The nest was just inches higher than she could leap, so I didn’t worry that she would turn the yard into some grisly horror show of flesh and feathers.

And the news has been pretty cringe-worthy lately.

All over America, most notably in Texas and Florida, over-zealous authoritarian governors have passed state laws banning books not only from classroom curricula, but also from school libraries. While these laws are framed as being responsive to a parent’s right to have a say in what their child reads in school, in fact the laws give restrictive powers to a small handful of small-minded parents, elbowing aside the rights of all other parents who want open-minded books on school bookshelves for their children to experience.

The occasion was the sudden death by stroke of the love of my life, Carol Felvey, a death that came completely out of the blue on Labor Day weekend this year.

Carol and I have been happily together for four years. I first met her a few months after I lost the other love of my life, Gail, to whom I had been married for more than 48 years.

How much — or how little — a student achieves is directly proportional to a teacher’s trust in their ability to master difficult lessons. Students will usually live up to — or down to — your expectations of them.

Buoyed by your trust in them, students will usually reach a level of achievement far higher than even they imagined they could reach.

Quitman was the legendary high school basketball coach who led Maine South High School to an Illinois state championship in 1979, beating powerhouse schools like De La Salle with a smallish bunch of suburban boys. Team after powerful team they beat, and each team went away knowing that they were not outplayed; they were outcoached.

Oh, I know that there’s plenty of warm weather left before the air chills and the leaves tremble orange and red, but when you’ve spent your life hopping from square to square on a school calendar, the start of August means the beginning of the end of summer.

Once I entered kindergarten in 1953, I didn’t leave school for more than a half-century.

The grand prize, of course, was the cherry bomb. Its waterproof wick meant that it could be used to sink the ships of yuletides past.

Every Christmas we asked Santa for plastic model kits of the great ships of America’s proud naval history.

I know that’s a crazy thing to say, unless you’re an ambulance-chasing lawyer or a psychiatrist who sees dollar signs in other people’s misery. But I’m neither of those things, so go ahead — call me crazy.

Still, it was the rush-hour slow-down at a four-way stop sign that brought a smile of contentment to my face.

Like everybody else on the road, I had someplace else I would rather have been.