After a fifty-year absence in my life, a word that once filled me with fear and loathing found its way back into my world. It arrived one day, quite by accident, when my granddaughter Kylee was talking to her sister Kelsee about a classmate.

The other day, as I drove my fourteen-year-old grandson, Nate, to a local theater-in-the-round to watch a live performance of To Kill a Mockingbird, he stopped texting a friend for just long enough to learn that not only had I seen the play before, but I had also read the book and watched the movie.

Gifts come in all shapes, types, and sizes. Some arrive with the sounds and excitement of the holiday season and some do not. Some are beautifully packaged while others aren’t bundled at all because they’re completely intangible.

In the early 1980s, I slowly transitioned from teaching MBA classes to designing corporate training programs. Surprisingly, with this change in focus, my design partners and I soon found ourselves in, of all places, Hollywood—not the glamorous version that produces dazzling movies, but the not-so-glamorous version that produces industrial videos.

When I was a little tyke, I loved insects. Sometimes I’d watch ants for hours as they hauled Lilliputian bundles down footprint valleys and up tennis-shoe mountains.

As a child, my parents fiercely protected me. At their insistence, I remained close to home and under their tight watch. And then, one day in early 1959, they let go.

When I was twelve years old and William “Pop” Noonan first invited me operate his corner grocery store while he spent his Saturdays running errands, I quickly accepted the job—and then repeatedly botched it. I took so many missteps, I’m sure he would have fired me were it not for the fact that he was my grandfather.

One day, during a particularly boring stretch at church, I leaned back and noticed, for the first time, the laminated beams supporting the chapel’s roof. The beams reminded me of my summer job after my freshman year of college when I worked at a plant that made (any guesses?) laminated beams.

“You know what I’d like for dessert tonight?” I asked my mother one morning as I hovered over a bowl of cereal. “Does it look like I’m taking orders?” Mom replied with a smile. I was twelve at the time, so I wasn’t completely blind to social graces. I knew that it wasn’t polite to demand a favorite dessert and now I suspected that treating Mom like a waitress taking orders was tactless as well. But I really wanted something special.

Yesterday, my grandson Tommy asked his mom (our daughter Christine) if later that day he could watch a TV show that was probably more suited to his older brother than it was to him. Undecided, Christine replied, “Maybe,” and returned to making lasagna. A few minutes passed before Christine felt a pull on her sleeve—it was Tommy. Smiling brightly, he made the same request.