Articles

I WAS AT MY WIT'S END. I had completed all the orders for my small floral business.

AN ANCIENT TALE GOES LIKE THIS: As a man and his camel cross the desert, a great sand storm arises. The man jumps off the camel and raises his tent.

• NEGOTIATIONS ARE GOING NOWHERE on a permanent peace agreement between warring factions. One labels the other obstructionist and stubborn.

1. LaMeice Harding tells it straight.

AS A GIRL OF EIGHT OR NINE YEARS OLD , I remember walking home in the dark one summer night with my dad. Earlier I had gone to the little brick library near the entrance to our rural road.

AFTER THE DEATH OF A FRIEND in seventh grade, I carried around a feeling of sadness and guilt. I felt that I had made mistakes and let people down, and hadn't always been the friend I could have been.

A few months after the school year started at my boarding school, I had an ear problem. One night I noticed a buzzing of some sort in my left ear when I went to sleep.

YOU'D THINK AFTER BEING HEALED OF A LIFE-THREATENING DISEASE , my great-grandmother on my father's side, Mimi, would have become a devoted student of Christian Science. But the way she told it, she was "ungrateful.

Shortly after my first wife and I got married, we lived in a somewhat rough neighborhood of Brooklyn. One night, while walking home from a movie at a local college campus, we witnessed a mugging in process.

THE PSALMIST DAVID WROTE , "Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man: preserve me from the violent man" ( ps. 140:1 ).