I was scared to death. It was my first day of second grade, and I was terrified to the point of regurgitation.

“Please don’t make me go to school,” I begged my mother.

Mama was driving the car. I sat in the passenger seat as she drove our station wagon. I had the countenance of a man wearing a noose.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mama said. “You have to go to school. What are you so afraid of?”

I was afraid of the second grade teacher, Ms. Burns. Ms. Burns was a hard woman who, according to rumors circulating the first grade, had done a stint in Leavenworth.

She was an exacting woman, with a sharp tongue, high standards, at times using rulers, riding crops, or other such instruments of persecution in class. She was nothing like Mrs. Anderson, our first-grade teacher, who was soft spoken, smelled like strawberries, and had soft bosoms perfectly created for absorbing childhood tears.

We first graders would often stand on the playground and cower behind a tree whenever Ms. Burns was present. She had

yellow eyes and green teeth.

“She’s so mean,” I cried to my mother. “Please don’t make me go.”

My mother eased to a stop sign. “How do you KNOW she’s mean?”

“Everyone knows.”

We were nearing the school. The brick building was getting closer. My nausea had transformed from an upper gastrointestinal issue into a lower one.

“Please, Mama,” I was crying now. I was also trembling.

My mother pulled into the parking lot. She just held the wheel with both hands and stared forward at the flagpole.

She looked at me. “What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?”

I shrugged. Then I began breathing into a paper bag.

“Okay. Then let me ask you another question. What’s the worst thing that could happen to anyone in this life? What is the worst thing you can imagine in the…

The story was told to me by a former deliveryman named John.

The Christmas season was the busiest time of year for delivery-persons. Drivers saw a major uptick in workload. This did nothing to improve John’s sunny disposition.

At Christmastime, John was about as cheerful as the infamous storybook character who once purloined Yuletide from Whoville.

One night, at the end of a shift, John was making final deliveries in a rundown apartment complex. There was a little girl, standing outside the building, waiting for him.

“Did you bring anything for me?” she asked in a small Who-voice.

“What’s your apartment number?” he spat back.

She told him. He rifled through his packages. “Nothing here for you.”

The girl was crestfallen.

After he finished deliveries on foot, the girl was still standing on the curb beside his truck.

“Maybe it got lost,” she said. “Don’t packages get lost sometimes?”

“No,” he said.

“Not even sometimes?”

“No.”

She was now his shadow. The girl wouldn’t leave his side. She kept asking about her package.

Finally, he turned to face her. “Listen, I’m really busy tonight. You need to write down the

tracking number and call the company.”

The little girl turned to walk away, hangdog.

He felt one inch tall.

“Wait,” he called. “Let me look in the back of my truck, just to be sure.”

He knew the package was not in his truck, of course, but he saw no harm in digging through parcels in his truck, pretending.

The girl was patiently waiting outside the vehicle, chatting up a storm.

“It’s a Christmas tree,” she said. “We ordered an inflatable tree. You blow it up.”

“You should always write down your tracking number,” he said. “That way you can follow your package.”

“We’ve never had a Christmas tree before because my mom says we can’t afford one. And they’re messy.

“Plus, Mom’s never home, she’s always at her boyfriend’s…

We lit the peace candle for Advent a few nights ago.

My wife and I read aloud from our little Episcopal book, standing before our Advent candles, using solemn voices. The dogs were seated around our feet, trying to interpret our human words, listening closely for words like: “Ham.”

The peace candle is important. Namely, because peace is elusive. A lot of people don’t even know what peace is. I’m not sure I do.

Foster homes are full of kids who have never known peace a moment in their lives. Prisons are overrun with the unpeaceful.

Addiction rehabs shelter souls desperately seeking peace. ICUs are chock-full of people pleading for peace.

I wonder what the world would be like if we had more peace. What if stress and worry and fighting and bickering, which constantly run in the background, like an internet browser with too many tabs open, simply vanished?

Who would we be if we had total peace? How many more hours in the day would we have available? Would we finally quit interacting with our

phones and start living?

FACT: Every day, an estimated 660,000 motorists text and drive. That ain’t peace.

What about culture? What would society be like during absolute peace? Or is such a thing even possible? Is world peace even a real thing?

Or is peace just a storybook idea, but not physical reality?

After all, our biological and ecological environment is anything but peaceful. Life itself is always moving. All the time. Planets orbit, spin, and rotate. Animals and plants struggle for survival. Living things procreate. They grow, they age, they buy real estate, then die.

Atoms vibrate. Cells divide. Bacteria multiply. That doesn’t sound very peaceful.

Then again, maybe I’ve got peace all wrong. Maybe peace isn’t stillness. Maybe peace isn’t even something we “do” at all. Maybe peace simply “is.”

Maybe peace on earth IS here, right now, and we humans…

They left him in a dumpster. They just didn’t want him. Simple as that. So they threw him away. Like garbage.

He was six weeks old. They could have taken him anywhere. A church. An adoption center. They could’ve left him on a doorstep, for crying out loud. But they put him in the trash.

When someone found Dennis, he was crying. His furry body was cut up, bloody, from head to foot. Maybe the cuts came from rolling around in a dumpster that contained shards of glass. Or maybe they came from the person who put him here.

No way to know. All anyone knew is that Dennis would probably die.

He was found in South Oxfordshire, England. Someone took him to Blue Cross animal shelter where they cleaned him, and bandaged his wounds.

“I didn’t expect him to be so small,” said a shelter worker. “He was absolutely tiny. I’ve never seen a dog of his age quite so little and thin, and with so many injuries...”

Dennis’s little body was weak. He hadn’t

eaten in days. He was frightened, and trembling violently. If he would’ve had any fluid in his bladder he would have released it out of fear. But he was too dehydrated even swallow, let alone tee-tee.

When they washed him, they found more severe wounds beneath his fur. They rushed him to the emergency vet. It was evident, Dennis would probably die. He was too small. Too weak.

Then, the emergency vet discovered something else.

Dennis was blind and deaf.

“His eyes couldn’t focus… and he couldn’t really hear what you were saying, or [figure] out where he was. So, he would sort of go to the corner of the room or try to nestle into you in order to feel safe.”

Blue Cross placed him in a foster home with experts. The fosters had worked with blind dogs before. But Dennis presented a…

George wanted to be a musician. He was born to a working-class family. His mom was the daughter of a minister. His dad was a barber.

His mom supported her son’s passion, but his dad was deadset against it. Music was a waste of time. Frivolity. George’s dad wanted him to be a barber, just like his old man. He prohibited any music in his household.

So George’s mom took matters into her own hands. She secretly bought a secondhand keyboard and placed it in the attic, where George’s father couldn’t see or hear it.

George would practice when his father was at work. Sometimes, spending all day practicing scales in the attic.

As an adult, music became George’s career. He actually became quite famous. He wrote for important people. He performed in prestigious places. But the life of a musician is an unsteady one. Audiences are fickle. Trends move fast.

As he aged, George’s career took a downturn. Nobody wanted his brand of music anymore. It was too old-school. Audiences wanted young

blood, new talent, rebels with weird hairstyles. Not old-geezer musicians who looked like your dad’s barber.

Before long, George was washed up. Work disappeared. He was drowning in debt. Soon, he was accepting donated food just to survive.

Sometimes he wished he’d listened to his dad. But it was too late to become a barber now. God knows, he was no spring chick. George was 56. This, during an era when average life expectancy for males was 45 or 50. People George’s age were considered seniors.

He downsized. He relocated to Ireland with his proverbial tail between his legs. Maybe he could find work there. Earn some money. Perhaps, rebuild whatever career he had left.

He was forced to take a job as an organist for a small Irish church. Also, he accepted charity gigs performing for places like local hospitals, prisons, and institutions for the mentally…