Spent some time on a small household project: refinishing an old chair my wife bought a few years ago. (Danish Modern, oil finish, very nice.) Those hand-rubbed finishes you see in the furniture ads require lots of rags (plus elbow grease), and I grabbed a handful of them from the bag of worn-out clothes we keep in the storage closet. They turned out to be three-month-size undershirts that were too stained or tatty to become hand-me-downs. And they’re tiny. TINY.

He got so big so fast! Boring-boring-boring parent observation, I know. They all do that. But it’s true.

Actually, it was Friday night, not today, and it happened in, of all places, Vancouver. Every time they come around, I watch the Olympics’ opening ceremonies, which are very possibly the strangest entertainment event in the world.  They fail to move me, unless by “move” you mean “cause me to wonder aloud what on earth I’m looking at.” This time was no different: The big First Nations dance sequence was a charming idea and was probably a blast if you were there, though it looked pretty loosely choreographed and thus played poorly on television (a giant aboriginal rave, my friend Janet called it).

But the parade of nations gets me choked up, every damn time. It’s mostly seeing thousands of  athletes — so young! — who have been driving themselves to exhaustion for, literally, most of their nascent lives. All the ugliness — the will and aggression behind the scenes, the screaming fights with coaches and parents, the fishing for corporate dollars to get them there, the weird mascots, the general sense that floods of that cash have corrupted the Olympic movement — falls away. The athletes from the first-world nations look impossibly bright-eyed, knowing that this is their moment to be the best on the planet at something. And the ones from the unlikely-to-win countries — that one cross-country skier from Algeria, for example — get a moment on a level playing field, bearing their flags, incredibly thrilled to have a shot. You know that, even if they come in last, they will be listed in the record books for the rest of time, and they will, when they go home, hang framed certificates from the IOC on the wall. It’s beautiful.

Also, I can’t help feeling a little happy when the nation at the head of the parade enters the stadium. We Greeks no longer run much of anything, but we have our pride, and a few very good ideas. And the flame, hand-carried, carefully tended, all the way from Athens! Oh, I’m getting teary all over again.

The daily Google News summary of fatherly doings is typically full of death and misery—a machete murder, a snowmobile accident, Marky Mark producing a fourth child—but at least one tidbit today is topical and, with a bit of imagination, inspiring.

In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a New Zealand girl was found alive underneath the dead body of her father in a collapsed building. The 2-year-old is “pretty badly injured,” said the girl’s mother. “She’s bruised and she’s got at least one broken leg and maybe the other one as well.” Okay, so this isn’t really so great: Dad’s dead, and the girl’s two sisters are still missing, and there are no aid services or rescue workers or embassies to help out. Actually, it kinda sucks.

But, well, I like to at least imagine that dad’s last moments: A sudden realization that something was wrong, a quick hunt for the baby, an instinctive sheltering of her body as the building came down, a final last hope that, even as he died, the girl might still somehow survive. It’s not much, but in the face of tragedy on an unimaginable scale, we’re free to cope however we can. I choose to do so by inventing minor moments of heroism.

Anyway, it’s either that or read news that David Beckham helps his kids with their homework over Skype.

Update (8 a.m. Friday): Apparently, there truly is no good news coming out of Haiti. It turns out the girl was not found under the body of her father. The information was based on some kind of miscommunication. *sigh*