These are the reasons.

Every Thursday afternoon, my grandmother hosts her card club: four women, all over eighty, who have played gin rummy together since 1971.

My aunt gave me her old cookbooks when she moved overseas. I expected to keep one or two. Instead I've ended up reading all twelve, cover to cover, like novels.

The first time I visited my wife's family in the Philippines, I was terrified of her grandmother, Lola Fely. She is four foot ten and has opinions about everything.

My mother's seventieth birthday was coming up, and she had always said she wanted to see a thousand paper cranes. So the family decided to fold them.

My older brother and I didn't speak much for a few years. Nothing dramatic, just busy lives and different cities and the slow drift that happens sometimes.

Our small town got hit with thirty inches of snow in February, and the plow drivers worked all night for three nights straight.

A woman in my town teaches free yoga at sunrise on the fishing pier every Saturday from June to September. I went once on a whim. Now I haven't missed a week in two summers.

When we cleared out my great-uncle Stanislaw's attic, we found an accordion in a leather case, red and pearl and smelling of mothballs. Nobody in the family knew he played.

Our kitchen sink exploded on a Sunday morning, which is apparently the most expensive day of the week for it to happen. The emergency plumber arrived at nine: a big man in coveralls named Giuseppe, who hummed Puccini the entire time he worked.

The outdoor concert was supposed to be canceled. The forecast said thunderstorms. My friend Lena and I went anyway, with ponchos, because the band was from our hometown.

A regular at the café where I work is Deaf. For the first month, we communicated by pointing at the menu and smiling. Then I decided to learn a little American Sign Language from videos on my lunch break.

On my way out of the dentist's office it was pouring, and the receptionist pressed a polka-dot umbrella into my hands. "Bring it back whenever," she said. I didn't have another appointment for six months.

My eight-year-old learned chess at an after-school club and decided to teach me. I knew how the horse moved, roughly. That was it.

When my sister got engaged, our grandmother announced she was going to sew the wedding dress. She's eighty-six. Everyone was quietly worried.

For my grandparents' sixtieth anniversary, we tried to take a photo of all forty-three descendants in front of their farmhouse. It took two hours.

A thunderstorm knocked out power on our whole street one July evening. By seven o'clock, everyone was standing on their porches, staring at their dark houses and their slowly warming freezers.

On a trip to visit my college roommate in Taiwan, she took me to the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival, where thousands of paper lanterns are released into the night sky at once.

Somebody put a small wooden crate of paperbacks at my bus stop on Delancey Avenue with a sign: "Take one. Bring one back. Or don't. Happy reading." Nobody knows who.

My mother-in-law brought a 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle to our house for Thanksgiving. It was a picture of a Venetian canal, mostly water and sky. Everyone groaned.

Things I appreciated this afternoon, lying in the hammock in my brother's yard: