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Waiting in line at the check out counter the other day, I watched a young mother’s resolve totally annihilated in less than a minute by her two children, who basically gave her the option of either buying the candy they wanted there or putting up with their incessant, demanding whining. One of the two even resorted to kicking at the shopping cart until he got his way.

Part of me wanted to walk over and start kicking at the kid. Sorry, that was just blatantly honest. But I’m weary of being subjected to the antics of children whose parents practice the “let them do their own thing” philosophy. I watch, with concern, the growing list of young people in trouble because parents didn’t feel the need to build some guidance and structure in their children’s lives.

22A quick catch-up: a couple of months ago I shamelessly advertised in this column the availability of Frank -- that's short for "Frankenplant," the name my kids dubbed a plant that started out as one of a trio of tropical-looking plants in an 8-inch pot and ended up taking over an upstairs bedroom. That probably sounds like an exaggeration. It isn't.

Frank was a quirky thing from the start. The other two plants in the trio accepted the slightly larger pots they were transplanted to, grew to a respectable size, then settled. Frank, on the other hand, just kept growing. To make a very long story short, he hit adolescence as a six-foot-square plant. He crawled across the large pot I planted him in, swung across the room, and pressed himself up to the window, threatening to overtake the entire upstairs if I didn't figure out what to do with him. It was time to let him go, and I was desperate to find him a good home.

There's a road grader in The Pasture.

The thought registers a few seconds after my eyes see it. It takes a few more seconds to make sense of it. Road graders don't usually show up in pastures. It's kind of like seeing a cow in a grocery store parking lot. You just don't expect it.

Then I remember why. The Pasture is going to disappear under a subdivision. That tiny patch on this revolving ball we call Earth has been dirt and plants for as long as the planet has been spinning. But soon -- as testified by the road grader -- that spot will sprout construction and habitation, and another piece of green earth will be history.

Walking right past the guy who greets you

I finish my shopping at the local All-Mart and make my way through the checkout stand. My ride isn't here yet, so when I get to the front door, I decide to sit on the bench inside to wait, with my loaded shopping cart beside me.

From this vantage point I watch the ebb and flow of humans going in to consume, and flowing out with their newly acquired stuff. It's a kind of mechanical stream and my mind goes numb to it.

Most people come to this earth with a natural instinct to want to help their fellowmen. That inborn tendency prompts us to stop to help change the flat tire of a stranded motorist, leap to help reunite a strayed child in the grocery store with her frantic mother, or return the purse accidentally left in a shopping cart to the customer service desk. Occasionally we receive that kind of help from a total stranger. Hopefully we give that kind of help to a total stranger.

Learning how to get along by doing good for one another is one of the reasons we’re here. So lately there’s been a lot of “I wish I could help” crossing the lips of millions of ordinary people. “I wish I could help.” “I wish I could do something.” They’re talking, of course, about people half a world away whose world crashed down, then drowned, then smoldered, and now shudders under clouds of deadly vapors. And millions of good hearts are stirring. With this kind of startling, shocking disaster, hand-wringing isn’t enough. People want to do more. You can hear it. Feel it.

Over the years my mom has become a lot more fun.

She's always been a great person, but as a mom whose kids are now all grown, married and starting to have grandkids of their own, she's considerably mellowed a lot. This thought crossed my mind a couple of days ago as she and I sat up after midnight watching a movie while eating stuff that in my earlier years she never would have let me consume in such abundance, especially at that time of night.

I was staying at her house for a couple of days while we worked on a family project together. The project took longer than we thought it would, probably because we hadn't factored in the breaks to watch her favorite soap opera, sit back and talk, linger over a simple sandwich lunch, or go for a ride all the way into town to pick up something we didn't absolutely have to have to finish the project but wanted to pick up anyway just because. So dinner happened when it did, sometime in the middle of the evening when our stomachs mutually said it was time to eat.