I found a document I’ve kept since 2009.

It’s only a few pages long, and I’ve rarely opened it. I didn’t keep it faithfully or systematically. And yet, somehow, these stories found their way into it. I’ve changed some names.

What follows is that document, lightly edited and rearranged.

◦

Dan told me a story from his life as a police officer.

A woman said it had been days since she’d seen her neighbor, Henderson. Dan went to Henderson’s apartment for a wellness check. No answer. He broke in and found Henderson’s body on the floor, bloated and decomposing.

It was the middle of the day, the sun was shining brightly, but the apartment looked like the dead of night inside. The windows were thickly covered with houseflies, blotting out the light.

◦

Lena told me about her Uncle Ray, who has shrapnel embedded under one eye.

Fifteen years earlier, Ray had been carjacked in Los Angeles and refused to hand over the car. He told the carjacker the car wasn’t his, it was a rental, so he couldn’t give it away. The carjacker shot him in the face.

The carjacker took Ray’s wallet. Inside was a tattered piece of paper Ray had written himself, covered with single words. He called them “joke starters.” Each word was a prompt that jogged his memory for a specific joke. He’d glance at a word like linguini and launch into the one that went with it.

At family gatherings, the kids would crowd around him asking for jokes. By the fourth or fifth joke, they’d wander off bored.

After the carjacking, Ray started a new joke-starter paper.

◦

I saw a news story about an attempted armed robbery.

A 22-year-old gunman entered a check-cashing store, jumped the counter, and pointed a gun at the only employee, a woman who immediately began crying and praying out loud.

The gunman panicked, dropped the gun, and prayed with her. They hugged.

Then he handed her the gun’s single bullet, left the store, and turned himself in.

◦

I watched an ABC News video that played a 911 call.

A seven-year-old boy had locked himself and his little sister in a bathroom while three armed men held their parents at gunpoint in another room. The boy called 911. The dispatcher told him police were on the way.

The boy said: “Send soldiers, too."

No one ended up being seriously hurt.

◦

At the gym, Mara told me that when she was a kid, her parents took her to a casino and gave her a few coins to play the slot machines. On her first coin, she hit a jackpot. Her father told her to quit. She tried a second coin and hit another jackpot.

Mara’s mother gambled rarely. When she once hit a slot-machine jackpot herself, the flashing lights and clanging bells frightened her. She thought she’d broken the machine and fled the casino without collecting her winnings.

◦

I was sitting in Clinton Bagels when two tough-looking workmen came in wearing jeans, flannel shirts, tool belts, and baseball caps. They sat down for lunch.

About fifteen minutes later, a third man walked in from the parking lot, spotted them, and said, “Hey, you guys get a new truck?”

One of the tough-looking workmen said, “Same truck. New decals.”

◦

Erin was thinking about taking a trip to Egypt.

Caleb, who liked to joke while keeping a completely straight face, told her that five weeks earlier a group of mystics near one of the pyramids had held a ceremony and brought a mummy back to life.

“The mummy pushed someone,” Caleb said, “and took their suitcase.”

Erin asked, earnestly, “Really?”

◦

Stella finished eating her Chinese takeout and broke off a piece of fortune cookie for our Shiba Inu, Jofu.

As she bent down to feed him, the paper fortune slipped off the countertop and fell to the floor. Jofu ate that too.

The fortune had read, “A small gift will please the whole family.”

◦

I was writing in a WORD document and misspelled the name of the famed German philosopher, Heidegger.

Spellcheck suggested I change it to “Headgear.”

◦

A stink bug climbed the side of Stella’s soda glass.

Stella hates looking at bugs, but she also doesn’t like killing them, for ethical reasons. As she tried to shoo the bug into the kitchen sink, she said, “Get out of here, you stupid loser.”

Minutes later, our cat Jinx sneezed directly into Stella’s arugula salad. She threw the salad into the garbage.

◦

After his long run with the San Francisco Giants, outfielder Hunter Pence published a farewell note to the fans who had treated him so well. He opened with the following line:

“I definitely wish some of the greatest times in our lives could go on forever and somehow, I believe they do.”