When I was a little boy, my dad and I would sit on the floor next to his old reel-to-reel tape deck, taking turns talking into it and playing our voices back -- the same reel-to-reel he unwittingly used to gain his 15 minutes of fame.

Buy my food at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.

When I began teaching my sons about the values and beliefs I live by, I found myself quoting to them the opening lines of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

I spent last Thursday evening interviewing people lying on the floor. They were participants in America's largest religious pilgrimage: the annual March for Life from the Mall to the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose ruling on Jan. 22, 1973, legalized abortion.

I was in Haiti in October 2005 researching my book on modern-day slavery when I contracted a severe case of malaria. A young Haitian man named Bill Nathan, then 21, who manages a shelter for homeless boys in Port-au-Prince, took me in and attended to me daily as I lapsed in and out of consciousness. He found the chloroquine that kept me alive.

"What do you want to go to Iraq now for?" joked a journalist in New York. "It's all quiet." I thought about this joke a few days later on my first plane ride into Baghdad International Airport. The descent, once famous for its harrowing, evasive corkscrew maneuver, was peaceful. We looped around the airport, above long rows of tan army tents at camps Liberty and Victory, delayed only by a small dust storm. In the row behind me, Iraqi gentlemen in blazers laughed the whole way. A few aisles up, a mountainous, tattooed contractor dozed in headphones.

Last night for dinner, I served butternut squash. Despite the fact that I drizzled it with olive oil and seasoned it with salt and pepper and then roasted it until the flesh caramelized slightly and got all tender and yummy, I subsequently had to force-feed my four children to consume this delicious, nutritious vegetable.

The malls and the Main Streets will soon fall silent. The ringing cash registers and the happy cries of children will be but ghostly echoes across silent streets as hearths beckon, gathering friends and families.

Since war became a geographically distant but very real way of life after Sept. 11, 2001, no Hollywood star has stepped up to support active duty U.S. military personnel and wounded veterans like Gary Sinise. There is no close second. And quietly, as is in his nature, he is becoming something akin to this generation´s Bob Hope.

Wonder why the United States is such a staunch defender of an international right to freedom of the seas?

It must be the result of an official safety study, conducted by at least three highly trained traffic engineers, culminating in the adoption of a policy on interstate snow removal.

"The report of my death was an exaggeration," Mark Twain wrote amid rumors he was in ill health. The same can be said about all the dire predictions of the end of free-market capitalism. Like Twain's mistaken prognosticators, critics of capitalism around the world will be proved wrong as well.

What appeals to me most about Joe Wurzelbacher of Ohio — better known today as "Joe the plumber" — is his dream. He speaks for men and women we all know, who want to own their own business, who want to make a job, not take a job.

Listen to the news, and you'll hear words that frighten everyone in small business. For the first time in my life, economists and analysts talk not just about recession, but use that most-dreaded term, "depression" — and look to see how we pulled out of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

A few days before the Fourth of July, I read a column in The Philadelphia Inquirer that said America didn't deserve to celebrate its independence this year.