Cats are so much easier than dogs, and Chicken and Waffles were no exception. They would meet me each day at the door by meowing and walking purposefully toward their food bowls, where they would sit and stare meaningfully from the bowl, to me, then back to the bowl again.

“What was the cause of the Civil War?” she was asked.

And rather than giving the answer that any ten-year-old American could give, she opted instead for nuance.

The Civil War was fought over “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” she said.

Of course, Haley was right in a technical sense, because embracing or abolishing slavery was all about “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.”

“Probably four or five years,” I said. “I refill it in case I get thirsty through the night.”

She was horrified and started talking about microplastics, forever chemicals and any number of other unpleasant thoughts.

“Then I probably shouldn’t tell you about the plastic water bottle in my car that’s been there for the last five or six hot summers,” I said.

In my estimation, it’s no exaggeration to say that Mr. Band Director’s job has two primary components: 1) leading and educating his students in pursuit of excellent musicianship; and 2) moving equipment. He wraps extension cords as expertly as a cowboy throwing a lasso.

But for me, it’s cookies.

To be specific, it’s the scent of baking cookies, and the clatter of baking pans from the next room.

Long after the other plants in our garden faded and settled in for a winter nap, the rosebush on the southeast side of our house continued to grow and stretch toward our bedroom window so that when we awoke and pulled up the shades, the palest pink, delicate petals rested serenely with faces open wide, patiently waiting for us to begin our morning.

The first was the memory of a powerful passage from a novel by Elie Wiesel, in which a man is waiting to execute a political prisoner who has been sentenced to die at sunset. He says you know night has arrived when you’re gazing out a window in the evening and you suddenly realize that you’re looking at your reflection in the darkening glass instead of the landscape outside.

It would be a stretch to call me a luddite, but it’s fair to say I’m luddite-adjacent.

Yes, I carry my cell phone wherever I go, but I tell myself it’s purely for safety reasons.

Besides the spectacle of war, natural disaster, and crime broadcasted on our screens, tragedy has touched my own community, too.

And when a boy named Jim said his hero was Jean-Claude Van Damme, I asked him why.

He talked about all the characters the actor played, and how much he liked those characters.

The “vegan” part of the recipe went straight out the window the moment I decided a trip to the grocery store for vegetable stock was out of the question: the beef stock in my cabinet would have to do.

This is precisely why I’ll never embrace veganism. I’m simply too lazy and don’t have the discipline required.

But vegetarianism? My fickle stomach might have the discipline to pull that off, at least for a while.

It’s like that with me whenever I hear the name of Chicago Bears middle linebacker Dick Butkus — “the most feared tackler of all time” according to the NFL Network — who passed away two weeks ago on October 5.

I’ve driven this path between my town and their town for decades; I didn’t need to consult a map or use GPS.

Oh, sometimes we choose our demographics willingly, if unconsciously. If you watch a lot of Duck Dynasty, you’re probably glad to see ads for camouflage outdoor wear. Watch a lot of Golden Girls reruns, and you’ll find the best prices for hearing aids and hemorrhoid cream.

But what if you watch a show that might be of interest to pretty much any American?

Early every morning, weather permitting, I ride out of Sun City southward along Sandwald Road all the way to Timber Creek and back, a roundtrip of a bit more than seven miles that lasts me the better part of an hour. I wish it were longer, but that’s as far as I can go in the countryside without too great a risk of being squashed like a bug by a truck or car.

When I learned the news, I did the same thing I did when my musical hero John Prine died of covid three years ago: I pulled out my guitar and started playing as many of his songs as I knew, fighting back the tears before my throat choked each song to a premature end.

Both Jimmy and John were only about a year older than me—and I have a personal connection to each of them.

After WWII ended in 1945, it took 20 years before “Hogan’s Heroes” could crack jokes about life in a German prisoner of war camp. It took a similar number of decades before “Mash” could get us laughing about a Korean War triage medical hospital.

And although I have no jokes to share about Covid 19, I can’t help but feel that in some ways the “pandemic years” were among the best years of my life — because a world-wide disaster like a pandemic can bring sighs of fond nostalgia if you tuck it in between the two most personally disastrous periods of your life.