The kitten’s piteous meowing sounded weak. 

It had fallen down an old well in our yard. My son carefully removed the sheets of corrugated metal and peered into the grimy blackness.

“It’s so far down,” he said. “I’m not sure I can get it out.”

As one of my daughters went for a long-handled net, I remembered a time I had heard a child’s piteous sobbing from a trash can. The six year old hadn’t been too far to reach physically, but emotional rescue was another story.

That scene played ...