Three Wishes is the story of three best friends who transformed their lives by taking motherhood into their own hands. Carey, Beth, and Pam had succeeded at work but failed at romance, and each resolved to have a baby before time ran out. Just one problem: no men.

Carey took the first bold step towards single motherhood, searching anonymous donor banks until she found the perfect match. What she found was not a father in a vial, but a sort of magic potion. She met a man, fell in love, and got pregnant the old-fashioned way. She passed the vials to Beth, and it happened again. Beth met man, Beth got pregnant. Beth passed the vials to Pam, and the magic struck again. They had setbacks and disappointments, but three women became three families, reveling in the shared joy of love, friendship and never losing hope.

Why was Dewey written? Because I was asked to write it. Not just by one person, but by hundreds, for years. Locals, visitors, book agents, professional writers (they wanted to help), people who had read about him in magazines or seen him in a documentary. There was something magical about this lovable orange cat named Dewey Readmore Books and the small-town library where he lived. So, after years of saying no, I finally said yes. Dewey had recently died, and part of me must have known writing a book would keep him in my life.

A good library is less an institution than a home. 

Not that he could ever go away. I loved him for almost 20 years; everything in the library reminded me of him: the copier where he warmed himself, the front desk where he perched, the Western section where he hid, the book cart he used to ride on. Every morning, he sat at the door waiting for me. When he saw me coming, he'd wave. No matter how bad I felt, that wave made me believe the world was wonderful and everything would be all right. How could I ever forget that?

With the help of a writer (one finally got to me!), I started putting down on paper all those memories: how Dewey wouldn't come down from the overhead lights no matter how we begged, lounged in front of the heater until his fur was too hot to touch, slept in the box so the patrons couldn't get their tax forms, tortured us over his food and litter, enticed us to play hide-and-seek with him, attended every children's Story Hour, ran every meeting and generally turned a cold library into a warm, inviting, friendly place. I wrote about how he sought out those in need: the elderly man who had just lost his wife; an unemployed farmhand; the homeless man. I told how whenever I wanted to give up, because I was a single mother working full-time and going to school, Dewey sensed it and jumped on my lap. And how when I agonized over a double mastectomy or a less invasive treatment (I chose the mastectomy, but never told anyone until this book), he sat beside me while I cried. He was my best friend; he was always there for me. Always. I hope I've honored his life by capturing some of his magic.

I hope I've also captured something else: the magic of libraries. Libraries aren't warehouses for books; they are meeting houses for human beings. A good library is less an institution than a home. It has comfortable seats, desks, computers, friendly people and, yes, sometimes even a cat. Libraries are society's great leveling agent: they offer job listings, financial information, technology, entertainment, any book you want. For free. I hate it when people tiptoe through a library. "This isn't a graveyard," I want to shout. "It's alive. So live a little!"

Librarians aren't little old ladies who spend all day stamping books and shushing people. We love to have fun, for one thing. But we also have interesting jobs that entail, among other things, planning community events; adopting new technologies; battling censorship; and reaching out to underprivileged groups. We provide job banks in tough times, free childcare for working parents, and, in Spencer at least, translators for errands and doctors visits, the town's only Spanish-language outreach. Be warned: librarians are studying you, and they know what you need. That's their job.

I will never forget Dewey's friend Crystal, a severely mentally and physically handicapped girl so withdrawn that everyone thought she was dead inside. But Dewey sensed something, and he started following her wheelchair. Then he started climbing up and sitting on her wooden tray. She couldn't control her muscles, so she couldn't pet him, but she would squeal with delight. One day, I placed him inside her jacket. Dewey put his head on her chest and purred, and Crystal—she just exploded. She was alive with joy. That, to me, is a Dewey story; that's the kind of cat he was. And that's what libraries do. They change lives. Everywhere in this country. Every day.

I have been surprised by the reaction to Dewey. People love the portrayal of Iowa. They are awed by Spencer, a small town that has overcome adversity by pulling together and resisting simple answers (a slaughterhouse, a casino). I agree with them; I love Iowa and Spencer too, but I never thought this was a book about a place. I thought it was a book about an extraordinary cat, and the deep bond that developed between that cat and a woman, and how the two of them dedicated their lives to the last great free enterprise in American society: the library.

​Vicki Myron worked at the Spencer Public Library for 25 years, the last 20 years as its director. Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, written with Bret Witter, is her account of the unforgettable cat who became a fixture at the library.

After years of being told to sit up straight, turn down the music and try, just try, to stop texting friends for a few waking moments, my pubescent son finally found a way to get even. He challenged me to climb a 14,000-foot mountain with him.

At his Colorado summer camp, my son Cass had tripped during a hike of Pikes Peak and slashed his shin to the bone. Strange thing was, he didn’t even care about the 10 surgical staples in his leg. All he talked about was the awe of watching the sunrise from the top of the same mountain that, more than a century earlier, had inspired Katharine Lee Bates to write “America the Beautiful.” Now he was inspired, too.

It was thrilling to see my 12-year-old so excited about something besides consumer electronics. It was terrifying to realize that he expected to repeat the experience with me.

I saw his request as proof that love was truly blind. After all, I was fat, 44 and in the market for a vasectomy. My mortgage was half-gone, but so was my hair. Jon Krakauer was something to read, not try.

Eons ago—back when my inseam had more inches than my waistline—I had hiked a few peaks. Then I got married, had three kids and started working to meet the responsibilities and obligations that came with the change of life. I liked to eat, not exercise. The best days of my body were so far behind me that there was no way I could ever get my behind up a mountain.

Then my son asked me, “Please?”

I could not resist.

Thus was born my book, Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled—and Knuckleheaded—Quest for the Rocky Mountain High. Cass and I tried and failed to summit another 14,000-foot mountain, but I came away grateful for the hours alone with a son far beyond the range of any cell phone, Xbox or Facebook account. I was hooked.
I learned my home state of Colorado has 54 peaks higher than 14,000 feet—more than any other state or province in North America. Every year more than 500,000 people try to climb a Fourteener, but fewer than 1,300 have ever reported standing atop them all. Colorado’s Fourteeners have been summited by skiers and snowboarders, racers and amputees, dogs, cats, cockatiels, monkeys and horses, people as young as one and as old as 81. One Texan spent three weeks pushing a peanut to the summit of one peak with his nose. There have been gunfights and cannibalism, avalanches and helicopter crashes.

Together the peaks have killed more climbers than Everest. They also were powerful enough to convince a stay-at-home dad with a pot belly that he had a chance to summit them all.

My wife of 17 years was generally supportive of my Fourteeners quest, but, worried about my safety, insisted on one big catch: I could never hike alone. Unfortunately, I knew no one who was remotely interested in joining me on climbs of more than four dozen 14,000-foot mountains in the three-month climbing season between Memorial Day and Labor Day. I tried bribing friends, neighbors and friends of friends with free booze and car washes in exchange for their company on a mountain hike. No dice.

So I followed the lead of lonely and desperate people all over the world and sought help on the Internet. At a fledgling website, I found other people just as addicted to altitude. The result: several times a week, I would put the kids to bed, drive through the night to a wilderness trailhead, and sleep in a tent with a total stranger with hopes of summiting a peak the next day.

My man-dates turned out to be my favorite part of climbing the Fourteeners. I ended up hiking with, among others, an ex-drag racer trying to perform a handstand on the top of every Fourteener summit; the lead oboe player in a Hebrew salsa band; a 21-year-old college student who survived a 400-foot fall that killed his father; a man so shaky around heights that he chain-smoked Marlboros on ridgetops to calm his nerves; a widower at age 38 who turned to hiking to ease his grief; and, best of all, my oldest son.

Along the way I learned about the gold rushes, hangings, wildlife and geology of one of the world’s great ranges, the Rocky Mountains. I lost 15 pounds but gained some wisdom. The best lesson of all, though, came when I discovered that age, like summit height, was just a number.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Obmascik lives in Denver with his family.

<B>Exploding the ‘Heroic Teacher’ myth</B> Everybody knows the story: brave, heroic teacher enters a tough school, faces seemingly insurmountable difficulties and finally earns both the distrust of the stuffed-shirt administrators and the trust of the tough-but-tender students. At the end, the unlikeliest of all the students gives a heartwarming speech and/or the students spontaneously break into song, and everybody cheers, sways to the music, and leaves with a tear in their eye and a lump in their throat.

It’s a pretty good story. The only problem is, it isn’t my story. My story, like the stories of most teachers, is a lot messier. Yes, I did start teaching in a tough school, and yes, I did encounter some heartwarming success, but I also encountered stomach-churning failure, and sometimes I failed at the exact thing I had succeeded at the day before. At the end of my first year, nobody made a heartwarming speech, but I did leave with a tear in my eye: I got laid off.

I got another teaching job, and once I reached the point where I was succeeding more than I failed with the students (this kicked in about year four), I had to wrestle with the question of how or why to continue doing this job year after year. The Heroic Teacher Myth never mentions this. Yes, the students inspired me, but some classes also drove me crazy. Yes, I worked with some wonderful, admirable people, but they were outnumbered by cranks and burnouts. Just when I found myself at a fork in the road, with one road leading out of teaching and the other leading to the Land of the Burnouts, I ducked the longevity problem by switching schools. And then I switched schools again, finally landing in an urban charter school, where, despite the fact that I was working really hard for embarrassingly low wages, I felt like I was finally home, like I had finally found the place where caring colleagues and a sensible administration would sustain me. After eight years of teaching, I felt like I had finally come to the end of the beginning of my teaching career. Having just sold my first book, <I>It Takes a Worried Man</I>, I thought I could now write a sort of counter to the Heroic Teacher Myth. I thought of it as The Lucky Teacher Story: the story of how a flawed but caring teacher could find happiness by eventually finding the right school. I started to write, but it was slow going. It was fun to remember some of the things that happened to me early on, but I didn’t feel much urgency about it, so I wrote irregularly.

Then, suddenly, the school where I worked got a new administration determined to remake the school in their own image and, in a stunning success, they transformed the school almost overnight into an ugly, unpleasant place.

This was horrible for me and my colleagues, but it ended up being good for the book. Suddenly, what had been something I wanted to do became something I <I>had</I> to do. The story became urgent. Writing this book was no longer about telling everyone how great I had it. Instead, it became about figuring out whether I was going to continue. I had to tell my story, not to supplant the Heroic Teacher Myth (probably a hopeless task anyway), but, rather, to figure out what the hell I was doing in this profession that kept breaking my heart. I quit my job at the charter school and spent the summer writing. Ultimately, after reviewing my entire career up to that point, I decided to keep teaching. My rationale feels embarrassingly sappy: in spite of the loss of my idealism, in spite of the transformation of my dream school into my nightmare school, in spite of everything that I complain about, I love working with my students too much to give it up. So maybe the whole lump-in-the-throat thing is not as artificial as I thought. I am, however, still waiting for the big, heartwarming speech from an unlikely student, or maybe for my class to serenade me with a few choruses of a touching song that causes everyone to link arms and sway.

Well, maybe next year. <I>Brendan Halpin’s new book,</I> Losing My Faculties: A Teacher’s Story<I>, chronicles the joys and challenges of his teaching career. An earlier memoir,</I> It Takes a Worried Man<I> (2002), depicted his wife’s struggle with breast cancer. Halpin lives in Boston with his wife and daughter and continues to teach high school English.</I>