I've never been much for Valentine’s Day – at least not as an adult, anyway. But when I was a kid, it was a ton of fun. It was all about jumping onto a porch, dropping a card, ringing the bell and high-tailing it out of there before the door opened.

I’ve loved movies for as long as I can remember. It started when my mom would drop my older siblings and me off at the Murray Theater. It was here – when I was 4 or 5 – I convinced my very amused my big sister to sit through the original “True Grit” three consecutive times because Glen Campbell kept getting killed. (I had a huge crush on Glen Campbell when I was little.) In those days you could pay for a movie once, and stay through it as many times as you liked.

By nature, I suppose I’m a pretty sentimental guy. I mean I have some rocks I chipped from the walls of my grandmother’s childhood house in Greece. I have my Aunt Tina’s framed picture of John Kennedy, and the first thank you card my niece Lyndsey ever sent me. I know they’re just things. But to me they have real meaning.

Everybody who has ever lived in San Francisco has at least one story about an adventure on the city’s public transit. I, of course, have tons – many of them feature an inebriated co-passenger. For example, there’s the time a drunken octogenarian passed out in the seat next me, woke up, and made a clumsy and very unwanted pass at me. Then there was the time that a guy reeking of cheap booze got into a verbal altercation with the African American bus driver, calling him the “n-word” as he tried to exit, only to discover it’s the driver, who controls the doors.

I’ve always loved Halloween. Maybe it’s because Halloween occurs during autumn, my favorite time of the year, or maybe because the whole idea of it drives the religious fundamentalists nuts. But I’ve loved it since the first time I put on a costume and rang a doorbell. I was dressed in a cute little zebra outfit my mom made me.

The first family vacation I have any memories of was back in 1969. It was also the last time my entire family – all eight of us – vacationed together. I realize that for more than a few Q readers, seeing 1969 is like seeing 1850 or 1624, but I was 4 years old and we were celebrating my oldest brother’s high school graduation.

When I was a kid, barely older than Gus is now, I had this friend named Bobby. During fourth and fifth grades, we were pretty much inseparable.

I’ve been thinking about friendship a lot lately. It started with two email conversations with two close friends of mine. In the first, I was asked if there is such a thing as altruistic friendship, or is there always a value proposition between friends. The second dealt with whether a...