These are the reasons.

My daughter's under-eight soccer team lost every single game this season. Every one. They scored two goals all year, one of which was an own goal by the other team.

My nine-year-old's piano recital was in a church basement with folding chairs and a slightly out-of-tune upright. She had practiced "Für Elise" for four months.

My husband and our neighbor across the street, Kevin, have had a Christmas lights rivalry for eight years. It started with a few strings on the porch. It has become a full-blown arms race.

I was struggling to carry six bags of groceries up the three flights of stairs to my apartment when a kid of about twelve came bounding up behind me. Without asking, he grabbed three bags and carried them up for me.

Every Saturday at nine a.m., about a dozen men in their fifties and sixties play pick-up basketball at the park courts. I joined at fifty-two after my son told me I needed "a hobby that isn't the lawn."

I've bought an almond croissant at the same bakery every morning for nine years. Every single morning. Same time, same order, same seat by the window.

Dear Bus Number 12,

On a work trip to Taipei, a colleague named Mei took me to Shilin Night Market after a long day of meetings. I had no idea what I was in for.

My college friend Elif got married in her grandparents' village in the mountains of Turkey, and I flew halfway around the world to be there.

At my naturalization ceremony this spring, I was so excited I put my tie on inside out. Nobody told me until after the photo.

A friend had an extra ticket to the opera and dragged me along. I'd never been. I assumed I'd hate it. I wore jeans.

My daughter's first haircut, at two years old, was a big event. My mother insisted on coming. My father came to take photos. We brought a stuffed elephant for moral support.

My coworker, Abdi, brought a jar of his sourdough starter to the office in a little cooler, and announced that he was giving everyone in our department "a piece of the family."

Every August, my whole extended family rents the same old cabin on the lake. It has creaky floors, a temperamental stove and exactly one bathroom for fourteen people. We love it.

There's a stone footbridge in my neighborhood with amazing acoustics underneath. On Sunday afternoons in summer, a cellist plays there. Nobody knows her name. She doesn't put out a tip jar.

When I was eight, my best friend, Lucía, moved from our town in Texas back to Mexico with her family. We wrote letters for a year, then lost touch. I thought about her every so often for thirty years.

My best friend and her husband met in a hardware store in the paint aisle, both reaching for the same can of "Seafoam Green." So, naturally, they got married there.

My wife signed us up for line dancing lessons at the VFW hall for our anniversary. I'm not a dancer. I'm a man who thinks the electric slide is advanced.

My mother has grown roses in the same small backyard for forty years. There are sixty-two bushes. Each one has a name, and each name has a story.

While helping my grandmother clean out her bookshelves, I found a copy of "Charlotte's Web" with a library stamp inside the cover. It was due back at the Elm Street branch library on March 14, 1962.