Ali and Nathan: he’s in his early 20′s, has lived with the acute form of spinal muscular atrophy far longer than expected; she considers herself the only “normal” child in her family, with a non-verbal brother with autism and a sister with Williams Syndrome. They meet, fall in love. That was less than 10 years ago. But it’s far more complicated than that.

I regularly read online details of daily life from families whose lives are made far more difficult by having children with major handicaps (my own case). The story-sharing is all part of online forums for families trying to find answers to medical and other problems.

People cope with tragedy or just plain tough times in different ways; I’ve never sought out stories that are harder than my own in the belief that I’ll be helped by thinking “things could be worse”. Of course they can.  I get impatient when writers’ draft tear-jerkers; pity doesn’t create strength and that’s what you need to help children with disabilities.

So I was caught by surprise yesterday when I read the extraordinary story (words I rarely use) of Ali and Nathan, two kids who managed to craft a life together despite all the odds. Those odds, for both, were very steep. This is a real tear-jerker, but these aren’t tears of pity so much as admiration and real sadness. The story came to my attention thanks to an autism parents’ forum whose leader is a friend of one of the families.

This isn’t easy reading, and I’m not asking you to read it out of pity for any of the players, but rather out of respect for the human capacity to love, to be generous, to get on with life however it plays out.

And if anyone is anywhere near Peabody, Mass. in the US and can offer help to Nathan, please, please, do so. My thoughts are also certainly with Ali’s family.

If you read the first paragraph I can guarantee you’ll read right to the (long) end: Ali and Nathan, a love story, by “Lucy” on The Suite Life of Lucy and Ethel web site.

Today’s most surprising story, complete with a happy ending, comes from 45 miles north of Denver, Colorado, in the town of Larkspur, where a black bear went after a peanut butter sandwich left in a car, it appears, and ended up driving the car down the family driveway, reports CNN.

A neighbour of the Story family phoned police after 03:00 Friday 23 July, saying a car was honking incessantly and the people in the Story house were asleep. When police arrived, the car was 125 down the drive from its parking place and inside, they discovered with their flashlights, was an adult black bear who had somehow climbed inside, and then the door closed.

Police, who were concerned for the safety of people, considered shooting the bear or tranquilizing it, but they opted instead to send everyone inside to safety and to open the door from a distance by tying a rope to it. Two hours after it got stuck in the car, the bear left, reports ABC News Denver.

The demilitarized zone between the two Koreas is not a place where one would expect to find good things, but something good has indeed come out of the standoff: an “accidental paradise” for wildlife, according to a CNN report. Tigers are finding that rare thing in this place where no man dares to go: a bit of peace. My favourite bit of the video: when the trackers says he’s not afraid of stepping on landmines because he follows the animal’s tracks. They know where the mines are, he says.

We’re all supposed to be thinking about winter sports today but tennis just caught my attention: it’s hard to believe, but World Tennis magazine reminds us that it’s been only 10 years since Roger Federer played in his first major tennis tournament final. His opponent was Marc Rosset, then Switzerland’s great tennis hope. Federer “lost a nail-bitter 2-6, 6-3, 7-6 (5) in the final of the Marseille Open in France” notes World Tennis. Given that we didn’t yet know that Federer would go on to be one of the best-ever, if not the best-ever player, the news that day was that this was the first time two Swiss players had competed in an ATP final. Lovely read, this.

It makes me watch those young hopefuls at the Olympics with a different eye – is there anyone out there will go on to a sports career that draws the kind of respect Federer has earned in the past 10 years?

Lucerne's crying lion, remembering fallen soldiers - my father said, with tears in his eyes, that he had never been as moved by any artwork as this sculpture

My father would have been 100 years old this week. I’ve thought about him often, as have my sisters, they write, and their children. I can think of few examples as fine as my father of how the best way to teach your children about the value of truth and generosity is to set an example. Live it, don’t preach it. Everyone in my family has rich memories of this.

Earlier this year I sat for some time in Lucerne, a city my father loved, and spoke with artist Hans Erni and his wife because Erni has been celebrating his centenary year. I was in Lucerne with a group of journalists to fete his 100 years, but I quickly realized when I met him that I had been wanting to pull a thread from Erni’s life – the artist, but also the citizen, the family man, the creative soul – and another thread from the wonderful life of that generous man born in a small town in the Midwest in the US, my father, and tie the two together. Put in a room together they would have found much to talk about.

My father, Robert Eugene Wallace, later Robert Joseph Wallace when he took the name of the carpenter of New Testament fame, was born October 19, 1909, in a year when other things happened that had an impact on the world he would live in, things some of us have forgotten or pushed onto the shelves of history.

But my father, with the passion for history he developed as an adult, would have corralled and later remembered with passion and huge pleasure these threads in  the tapestry that made up his own life:

• in January of that year US troops left Cuba after a presence that dated back to the Spanish-American war
• the NAACP was founded on Abe Lincoln’s 100th birthday in February 1909 and “colored” became a word of racial pride
• construction work began on the Titanic in Belfast, a passenger liner that would become the pride of the shipbuilding industry before it became more famous for sinking
• Joan of Arc was beatified in Rome, an event in which my devoutly Catholic father would take pride, as he told me in 1959 when I did a school project on this strange French girl, martyr and patriot
• Louis Bleriot, a Frenchman, became the first person to fly across the English Channel, a place where not many years later young men my father’s age would carry out the Battle of Britain in the air
• the US Navy founded a naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the US entry into the second world war as a result were what prompted my father to go off and fight a war as a volunteer, leaving a wife and two little girls at home
• the Ottoman Empire slaughtered thousands of Armenians, a subject he read about in disbelief in his later years, when he found world history to be a fascinating tapestry coloured by the lives of ordinary people.

The Hans Erni museum in Lucerne has cuts from three 100-yr-old trees to show the size of trees that age grown at different altitudes. My father, who loved woodworking, would have been enchanted by it

My father had an extraordinary ability to transmit values through the richness of what he lived rather than through discussing them. He was born before the first world war, scrambled to make money and find a job during and after America’s Great Depression, married and had two small children and then volunteered for the US Navy and was sent off to the South Pacific during the second world war. Later, when he came home, two more children were born, and I was the youngest.

I don’t know if he left for the Marianna Islands fighting for decency, freedom, family values, and even deeper, a belief that love and generosity are at the root of human success, but he certainly came home with those notions.

They didn’t always come easily: when I told him I’d been terrified of rats squealing in the dark in China during a bicycle trip I’d made there in 1985 he recounted how much scarier it was to watch a rat running rapidly towards him on the line inside  his tent in 1943 than it was to think about Japanese bombers coming at the island. When I recounted a stupid mistake I’d made traveling, embarrassed by my own foolishness, he chuckled and said he’d gone as far as New Orleans with the idea of riding a banana boat to South America, took one look at the cut-throats on the dock and he headed north again.

For some people, these would have been events that marked their lives and explained their behaviour, but for Bob Wallace, my father, these became threads that he rewove into a lifelong series of small quiet gestures and acts of generosity. When his mother died he quietly took me out to the end of our garden to plant carrots and, in silence, we worked the earth, which spoke volumes to the small girl I was. He spent hours explaining the constellations to me and sharing his sense of enchantment with the skies. I was never lectured about religion, but the quiet nightly example of him praying, on his knees by the side of his bed, meant that while I might argue with him about God I would never question the sincerity of others’ beliefs.

Once, driving home from school, I was astonished to pass by the football field and see my father breaking up a fight in the middle of his business day. He never mentioned it, but later one of the boys at school said my father was good at that kind of thing. When I infamously wore a forbidden skimpy bikini to the beach for a day with my friends, my father showed up and made a lasting impression on the others by wordlessly, without anger, telling me we were going home. The quiet disappointment taught me more about respect than any lecture could have.

My father was a good raconteur, and his stories stick with us, of being an independent traveler before anyone knew what that was, or fighting in a war, or trying to be decent and successful in business when the competition appears to be winning through dishonest means. The stories nevertheless pale next to the examples, a multitude of them, that he set of making us feel we were loved, and that we, too, could be good or even better: truly fine individuals.

This seems to be a week for farm animals to put in surprise appearances. Friday we were driving up the hill to Etoy when traffic was suddenly halted to let several cows cross the road. A couple hours later I was in Valais where we have a chalet and as we arrived the gate of the farm next door suddenly opened and out poured Farmer Bernard’s cows.

“Are they headed up to the high alps right now?” I shouted, for human voices don’t carry well over the noise of excited bellowing cows, especially ones wearing hefty Swiss cowbells.

The men running with the cows shouted back yes. Running is the word, for when the cows see that gate open they kick up their heels, some of them literally, and rush off. They are capable of running at a good trot right up from our 1,100 metres altitude to fields at about 1,800. If you’re driving a car on that road, too bad – best to just pull over, rather than get between a happy but large cow and that glorious field of wildflowers and long grasses she knows is waiting for her.

I’ll miss those cows, who are now gone until October.

Meanwhile, two pigs came to Saint Prex and charmed many of us as they wandered around the beach, part of the Cirque Helvetia, visiting the village for two days.

Two gentlemen in suits were a bit taken aback to see an unattached pig walk up and sniff them, not an everyday occurance in Saint Prex!

More photos of Etoy cows, Saint Prex pigs and Valais Farmer Bernard’s cows, including his Swiss fighting cows, racing up the road to the high Alps: GenevaLunch photo album, “Farm animals run the show”

By students at Collège Voltaire, Geneva

When we first heard the name of the play, we thought it was very long and weird for a title. It interested us and we were curious to see what the play was talking about.

The authors of the play wanted to talk about the subject of death, because nowadays our society avoids any contact with death and they believe perhaps it is good to talk about it.

The play “J’ai l’impression qu’André est mort dans les toilettes” was written by Hélène Cattin, Sandra Gaudin and Christian Scheidt, who are members of the Lausanne company “Un Air de Rien”.They were inspired by philosophers like Spinoza and Platon as well as poetic and scientific research.

We were expecting a boring play, but in the end we found it very interesting. There were some dark, sad, anguished, deep moments, but we laughed a lot at sketches on the subject of the death.

Going to the theatre is a real change in our habits. It talks about a serious and taboo subject, which is death, but with a lot of humor.

At the Saint-Gervais theatre, the last week of April 2009

Ed. note: This review was written by two students in the OS English classes at Collège Voltaire in Geneva, part of a week-long programme where the school and GenevaLunch collaborated to help students set up their own online newspaper.

Bettie Page has died and she made the front page of the New York Times. To be honest, if you’d just given me her name I would have given you a blank stare. But the minute I saw her picutre, I remembered Bettie, born Betty Mae Page in Tennessee. She was more than just a Playboy pinup. She represented a world that shivered between sexual excitement and repression in the US before the sexual revolution came along.

Now how would I know this? Time for the confession to come out: when I was a young teenager in the mid-1960s, Bettie was at her Playboy best. I grew up in a conservative home in the middle of the US where religion and ladylike behaviour went together. Like so many of my girlfriends, I made pocket money babysitting at night. One of my families lived close by and the father worked with my father.

One night when the kids had long been asleep and I’d finished the Coke and potato chips the parents had left for me – things we never had at our house – I decided to look for the vacuum to clean up the mess I’d made. It was in the parents’ bedroom closet.

So was a huge pile, perhaps a metre high, of Playboy magazines, shoved to the back of the closet. Hard to imagine this straightlaced church-going couple looking at these! I had barely heard of Hugh Hefner and his bunnies.

I sat down and began to work my way through them and for the next year, while I went through the pile and leraned about sex, what adult women looked like and more, I loved babysitting.

Bettie was one of my favourites. Cheesecake poses, an astonishing body, those black bangs on her forehead (fringe to you, maybe)! And she came from a world of cornpoke and country music and truck drivers that had all the appeal of the alien and forbidden. In my family, people like that were a bit lower class.

And then I stopped babysitting, discovered that boys and sex in Iowa weren’t very closely related to Mr Hefner’s version of it (my first kiss, I told a friend, was like rubbing lips with a camel – a real letdown), nor did any of my friends or I grow into Bettie bodies. We were saved by the sexual revolution which gave us another perspective on women, our bodies, our sex lives, our potential. We spent evenings in our university dormitory reading The Joy of Sex, the original version which feminists hadn’t yet pounced on, aloud to each other. Then we started reading feminist literature and discovered yet more about ourselves.

But I still have a soft spot for Bettie, who offered me the sex ed class no one else thought I needed, until a Catholic nun gave us one session in biology. Guess which one was more interesting, the nun or Bettie?

Every woman needs a pair of crazy red shoes at some point in her life and if she’s young and has long legs and the right pair of shoes come along, “yes” is the only answer at the shop. GenevaLunch’s contributor Catherine Nelson-Pollard has written, on her own expat blog, about a pair of shoes that are more than just something to keep a woman’s feet dry. Check it out.

Meanwhile, in my household, red shirts are the order of the day for young men: CHF15, made overnight in Shanghai for a crazy dance contest so it doesn’t ride up when you’re upside down and it looks good when you salsa.

Plenty of time for safely chic black in the years ahead.

I’ve thought several times in recent days about Carol Gotbaum, the woman who died at the Phoenix Airport when she tried to break out of handcuffs after she was arrested. I watched the video, to my own surprise, for there was no reason other than curiosity and I detest voyeurism (I am probably in a minority on this point). What exactly is it about Carol Gotbaum’s sad tale that is so disturbing?

Judith Warner’s excellent article, "Where’s the Safety Net," in the New York Times Opinion section sheds some light on this: the extraordinary thing about Gotbaum’s story is that it was so ordinary. She snapped, just as so many of us come close to doing at one point or another in our lives. What makes the article really special, though, is its plea for a little more kindness in this world. The safety net for any of us should be all of us, our kinder selves.