Last week I received a text from a college friend living nearby.

The text read: “Are you free Saturday next?”

Another college friend was stopping by and so I was being asked to drop in and say hi.

My reply read, “Sorry. I have to bail.”

And so I explained, “We had a wasp nest and a good friend who keeps bees sorted it out for us. The trade off was that I minded three kids while the job was being done. Wrecked. Need a few days to recover.”

The response to my curt statement was a sympathetic on...