After the president's January 2016 State of the Union address, people were having him sign autographs on the way out the door.

At the end of my work day I have a ТdecompressionУ routine that I try to stay consistent with. I lay on my stomach on the couch, face forward with my head and feet elevated at each end like a backwards ТC.У

It was the 1970s and our school system was putting together a cooperative agreement between three neighboring communities where sixth-grade kids would come together for a one-week camping trip.

Sam and Bruno were best friends. Sam's older brother, Nicco, had picked out his dog, Lucca, many years earlier. At the time Sam was 2 and Nicco was 10.

I look back now and it all seems so comical. The rituals my parents and family followed that were either based on nothing in particular or handed down through ages.

I was on the Planning and Engineering Department team as an intern in 1985 and one of the things they were working on was this caging for one of the zoo animals that incorporated lots of structural triangles.

So perhaps I bored some of you to tears at the end of last month when I gave you my impressions of the inevitable emotion due to the parent/child severance that occurs during college freshman drop-off.

I think back to the simple lyrics above and it seems to me weХll never be able to return to that time again. First of all, there appears to be no large quantity of innocence left in any corner of the world anymore.

We dropped the boy off at college last week. Several hundred dollars of miscellaneous bedding, clothing, books, food and other assorted materials accompanied him but we still felt like weХd forgotten something. He must need more of somethingЙ.

Here's a long-kept-secret story of a boy named Ron who was captain of the Safety Patrol in 6th grade at a homey little elementary school in Berea, Ohio. One of the captain's "staff" members was a bold little girl.