“Despite my respect for the truth, if a badly dressed lunatic crawls in an open window, waves a knife under my nose, and demands to know where my wife is, I’ll tell him…

“After the Atlanta Braves removed Chief Noc-A-Homa’s teepee in 1982, and the team lost 19 of the next 20 games, our son, a devoted Braves fan, blamed the gods. The team’s creation of…

“That was the first time I laid eyes on my future bride, but something was already astir. As J. D. Salinger had written in ‘A Girl I Knew,’ ‘She wasn’t doing a thing…

“Pacifists are often jealous of the fact that Bhutan has more monks than soldiers, Monaco’s national orchestra is larger than its military, and Costa Rica must borrow a cannon from El Salvador when…

“An Austrian tour guide once observed that saying farewell to a group of American tourists she’d known for only two weeks is a lot like grief, for it’s unlikely she and this random…

“Shortly after my first book was published, I received a small royalty check and promptly squandered it on some books that were available at the local libraries. Said my frugal wife, ‘Skip, if…

“As a former reading tutor at the local elementary school, I taught children as varied as the boy who read WWII as World War Eleven and the girl who correctly multiplied 17 x…

“I credit my mentor James Dickey with convincing me that the best teaching is anecdotal. He told a rapt class that when Deliverance was being filmed, the body that Dickey as the sheriff…

“Driving out of the zoo’s parking lot, a student from Israel exclaimed, ‘Oh, look! There’s a peace pigeon.’ It was a mourning dove, of course, and then I had to explain why it…

“As half of my brain struggled not to hate the highly social, carnivorous orca, I was reminded that some Northwest Native Americans regard them as the reincarnated souls of humans. This may be…