My favorite Wordle days are the ones when my first guess yields five gray boxes.

Then I have to come up with another word that uses none of the letters of the first, sending me in a totally different direction than usual. No E’s, no A’s.

Most of the time, this will result in more total guesses before I can find the correct word. But that’s okay! I have six guesses in all, and that’s enough.

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Every couple of years, my father does battle with the humid, salty coastal air to painstakingly, single-handedly repaint his entire cedar-sided home.

And every step of the way, he wants to show off his progress. “Come look!” If I am not available for a physical audience, I will get a report by phone of which sections have been done since we last spoke.

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In my early twenties, when I was trying to figure out my life, I briefly pursued the idea of moving to Boston, which is just over an hour from the small town on the southernmost coast of Maine where I grew up.

On a hot summer day (yes, they have them in New England), I drove down to an outlying commuter station and took the T into Cambridge, where I met with a really cool and interesting young woman and her roommate. They were looking for a third. I remember that the monthly rent for one room of this shared three-bedroom apartment was more than I ended up paying for my first one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta, which was a palace compared to these potential digs.

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With wide-eyed innocence, a ten-year-old student shared the words her mother had used to comfort her when she had hurt herself.

“She sad there are always bad things swirling around, and sometimes they land on you.”

I was flabbergasted. I imagined a world in which evil butterflies have the power to curse hapless humans with a touch.

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How do you measure the value of a human life?

Is it measured by how successful someone is? Well then, how do we define successful? And how do we measure success?

Parents want the best for their kids — that appears to be universal. But there is no objective measurement of what best means.

To generalize mercilessly, I have observed three ways in which parents grapple with this issue.

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