zzzOp Images

The vote on whether to close Tahoe Elementary in Tahoe Park is being delayed by the Sacramento City Unified School District, which is instead considering whether to close Mark Twain Elementary.

This is an image that will remain with me forever. It shows Jennifer Garza, attending Mass at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, as she battled cancer. A veritable who's who of the Sacramento Catholic Church showed up to pray for her health, a tribute to her work and to her personally.

On a clear, warm October day, the Union Pacific No. 844 steam locomotive slowly made its way under the I Street viaduct with the mournful whistle echoing and steam billowing off the structure.

Before we set out to mow the lawn last spring, my sister-in-law gave me an option: using the riding mower or the push mower to trim those hard-to-get-to places. I decided to do the trimming. Besides, I wanted to see her cruise around the yard on that thing. I was suspect of her driving abilities, with good reason, and envisioned her hitting a tree or two.

The presidential election campaign was well under way in April when the photo went viral of Hillary Rodham Clinton flying on a military plane, wearing sunglasses and studying her BlackBerry.

A pilot stands in front of a sleek wooden propeller and turns it by hand, as if the whole plane were going to fly by a tensioned rubber band. The engine turns over with a throaty roar as the propeller spins faster and faster.

The church was suddenly there with its white walls gleaming against the blue desert sky. It looked for all the world as if the building had been hauled to this site from a Hollywood production set for a movie about the final days of an aging, troubled parish priest.

I am lucky – I had my mother, Eva, for more than 60 years. When she died in March at age 95, it was time. In truth, it was well past time.

After months of bitter campaigning and years of increasingly divisive politics, this photo came along at just the right time to symbolize what politics should actually be.

My own daughter, at 17, does not always want to go to school. When the Sacramento Valley is dark and dripping with early morning tule fog, the road to higher education is literally and figuratively obscure to a high school senior clinging to a warm bed.

If you are still reading this by day's end, then clearly you have survived another overhyped prediction of apocalypse.

San Francisco Giants relief pitcher Sergio Romo throws a nasty slider and a 90-mile-per-hour fastball, but who would have thought that under that snow white Giants jersey beats the heart of a political activist.

I was just a high school student in Modesto when the space shuttle's first prototype was rolled out in 1976. It was an entirely new concept for NASA – reusing five spacecraft to take 135 trips into space.

This is a photo of Charlie's horses. I don't know their names. I don't know Charlie. To tell the truth, I don't know for an absolute certainty that these are Charlie's horses.

If there's one moment that's stayed with me, it came while working on a piece about the increasing use of sports to help heal soldiers injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.