Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never – in nothing great or small, large or petty – never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense.

In this life, we only get one go-round.  There are no ‘Mulligans’ (dressed-up golf-speak for what six-year-olds call a “do-over”).  We’ve got one life to do good to others, and to ourselves.  One of the hardest things for some people,…

You never know who you might meet.  Sometimes I wish I could see my path plotted on a map in bright red like in the Indiana Jones movies – a dotted line showing everywhere I’ve been in my life.  Then…

Sleep.  Beautiful, blissful, blessed sleep.  How I love it so . . . how I miss it so!  Homer tells us that “the gift of sleep” is “sweet” and that sleep will “speedily free [us] from toilsome weariness.”  Jeremiah says…

Traveling can introduce you to interesting people.  Once I was sitting on an airplane next to a hippie and a Marine.  I know, it sounds like a joke, but this is a true story.  The hippie was youngish, maybe late…

The Dutch are, on statistical average, the tallest people in the world.  To anyone with even a passing familiarity with Dutch cuisine, the question is:  how is this possible?
I spent a month in Holland on an exchange program, living…

Once when I was in London, I stopped on a street corner to buy a ticket for a double-decker bus tour.  A 20-something young lady was selling the tickets, and upon hearing what she thought of as “my accent” (as…

My wife attended a conference recently and reconnected with some old acquaintances.  One she hadn’t seen for years, a woman who’d been home raising her kids.  She’d been absent from the conference circuit, but now her kids were grown and…

My brother John has a great photo from the birth of his first child.  It’s a picture of his daughter’s unbelievably tiny baby-hand gripping his finger.  His daughter’s whole hand, so perfectly formed and so amazingly small, can only just…

Growing up, we were eight kids, Mom and Dad, and the occasional stray cat, in a tiny 3 bedroom house.  With one bathroom.  And no shower.  There was Mom and Dad’s room, the boys’ room, the girls’ room, and a…