I have lived in Greensboro for 13 years, and have researched and written hundreds of stories in and around downtown Greensboro. In the early years of the last decade, I worked out of an office building that stood on what is now Center City Park. Back then, walking to my car after dark was a lonely experience.

We also made some changes to the Voices section. We will no longer be running Chuck Norris’ weekly column. Frankly, he’s neither an exceptional thinker nor a practiced logician, and I’m coming to believe that syndicated content like this has no place in a local newspaper.

First off, you’ve got to give the kid some credit. He’s 10 years old, and up to this point, because of a domineering big brother and slightly overcompetitive father, he very rarely gets to win at anything — chess, Monopoly, Yu-Gi-Oh, water fights, bedroom wrestling matches, footraces, staring contests… you name it.

I didn’t know it back then, but Harold Hayes sparked a revolution just a few miles away from where I was sitting when he came to the venerable New York men’s magazine after its postwar pin-up period, survived a power grab against Clay Felker and managed to change the face and tone of the American magazine forever.

There was a time when it took me a week to celebrate my birthday: a frenzied build-up loaded with discussions and plans, a preparty galvanizing the potential for the Big Night, which could roll on for another two days if the money and the celebrants held out.

The middle child sat at the computer while his older brother had his first shave in the bathroom around the corner; I took the oldest son through his manly paces: the hot towel, the lotion, the strange facial contortions ones makes to the mirror to maximize contact between skin and blade.

It’s a regulation-size basketball, and the small, wooden cage that holds it, with just enough room for the ball to wobble around a bit, and the challenge, here at SciWorks in Winston- Salem, is to remove the ball without using force. And I can’t do it until a kid in a New York Yankees T-shirt, maybe 10 years old, gives me a hint.

The stream that runs through the grounds of Harrah’s Cherokee — is it a stream? Maybe it’s a brook, with a rise of rock on the bed and breakwaters making rushes in the shallows. Or it might be a creek, maybe 15 yards across, meandering through the compound.

In 1989 at Loyola University in New Orleans, eight young trees went into the ground to commemorate the six Jesuit priests slain in el Salvador, their cook and her daughter. The area, previously known as the Activities Quad, was renamed that day to the Plaza De Los Martires De La Paz.

I haven’t done any reporting, haven’t spent any time in contemplation of a great idea triggered by an everyday occurrence, haven’t seen one of the kids do something that inspired 800 words or so, haven’t hit any milestones, went to any story-worthy...

She’s been living out west for almost 15 years, first in Las Vegas and then the Inland Empire, outside of Los Angeles. And while the beauty of the area cannot be denied, my sister lived far, far away from the rest of us, far enough that we only laid eyes on her every couple of years and felt completely removed from her day-to-day life.

We retraced our steps in the airport, badgered the staff at the lost and found, tore through every pocket and peered into the car to see if I had left them in the ignition. No dice. As I sat on the ground with my head in my hands, I remembered something: I was finishing a soda when I parked and had tossed the cup into a garbage can near my spot.

I would call him up in the middle of the day to discuss strategy. “You should go out right now and eat a dozen doughnuts,” I said. “You think you can do that?” “Of course I can do that,” he said. My friend is a large man, though I believe he would not, for an American, be categorized as fat.

He is, of course,  best known for his portrayal of Samuel “Screech” Powers in the four incarnations of that series, which began on Saturday mornings in 1988 when it was known as “Good Morning Miss Bliss.” Screech, you remember, was a spazzy nerd known for his aptitude in the classroom and ineptitude away from it.

But this time it was different. TLC spun a new reality show off its successful 2009 series “Toddlers & Tiaras,” which gave a farcical inside look at the world of child beauty pageants and the culture it creates.

It’s fine. I had the privilege of enjoying more than a dozen Carnival seasons in my beloved city, seven of them as a bartender on St. Charles Avenue, the main thoroughfare of Mardi Gras, where the Uptown parades roll by, leaving in their wake bouquets of beads in the boughs of the ancient oak trees.

I used to hate coats, too, particularly the big, bulky ones my mother bought me: the puffy, down-filled blue one that made my eyes water; the itchy, woolen job with the toggle buttons that practically begged for an asskicking to be delivered to the wearer; the red one — red! — that was handed down from my sister.

Or maybe you’ve seen him on TV. He was a regular on “Law & Order” — not the original series, but the other one. No, not “Special Victims,” but “Criminal Intent,” playing Det. Graziano. He also starred in an Eclipse gum commercial and a public-service announcement about secondhand smoke.

It wasn’t the first time I had ever seen him play — Andy pretty much had a guitar in his hands from the moment his older brother Tom put one there at age 10 or so. And I had known Andy long before that because we grew up  just a couple miles away from each other in Garden City, NY.

Already it’s shaping up to be a good one. Some time in January or February, my big sister is moving to town. After almost two decades of living in different cities, we’ll be in the same zip code. I look forward to showing her what Greensboro is like and having her participate in the family life my wife and I have created here.