Far be it from me to offer parenting advice. In my lifetime I’ve made two attempts at it. While I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome to date, they’re both still working toward their future potential -- and only time will tell how my wife and I have done.

Several times in recent months I’ve been asked to return to writing an occasional commentary about life “stuff” ... the life “stuff” I used to write about consistently when I began working at this paper some 12 years ago. While I often attribute those requests to people simply being “nice” when they run into me out in public, the fact of the matter is that we’ve been getting similar messages through other channels -- my boss, email, Facebook and the like. My wife used to encourage me to write an entertaining book of stories about my upbringing in a small rural Missouri Ozarks town. I would say something like  “no one cares about the shenanigans of some little snot-nosed mischievous kid in a small Missouri town.” She would reply, “ummm, how about Samuel Clemens?”