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.

Rule 1: Do nothing.

Rule 2: See Rule 1.

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.

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.

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. (This is the microwave I’m talking about, not the quarterback, who may or may not whir or sputter when he’s turned on. How would I know?)

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.

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.

The word was “sonder.”

For the record, he tells me that often.

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.

Sure, easy for him to say: A man known the world over, credited as being America’s greatest writer. That’s like Sylvester Stallone or The Rock telling us that muscles aren’t everything. Swill like that is hard to swallow when you’re one of the huddled masses yearning to be honored for something. Anything.

Of course, “sexy” can be defined in different metaphorical ways. If by “sexy” you mean “important or exciting,” then there’s plenty of sexy to go around on this date in history.

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.

What you don’t expect to learn is that an old friend of yours has died.

That’s what happened when I watched the Netflix documentary “Sr.” created by actor Robert Downey Jr as he interviews his father, filmmaker Robert Downey Sr, over a period of about three years.

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. She had heard of Santa all her short life, of course, and had seen him on television and on posters at the store, but she had never met him in person. This would be her first time.

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 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 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.

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. But if they sense that you have low expectations of them, they will almost always fall to those low levels, and often even lower.

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.

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. We assembled them through the dark, dreary months of late winter, and by summer the kits had been built, played with, and abandoned to the back of the closet.