Another Side to the Story

Here are my sentences for The Great American Sentence Contest, but the contest allows only five entries. Which ones would you choose?

I held the envelopes in my hand and scanned one after the next, moving the envelope on top to the bottom of the stack, looking for anything that might require immediate attention, when my eyes fixed upon a business envelope, addressed like all the others to “Samuel Schuman,” my father, but with the return address from the New York State Lottery. (from Lucky Numbers)

My father was a storyteller, so it was easy to tell his stories, but my mother was not, and while it’s easy to tell a story, it’s hard to tell a hug.  (from It's Hard to Tell a Hug)

I pulled that hat over my head and the earflaps over my ears and I tied that itchy wool string under my chin—I hated that hat more than the coat—and I stood there in the middle of the living room waiting for my mommy.  (from It's Hard to Tell a Hug)

We were down there, all the boys, expecting our parents to show up before long, and we were neatening things up, shaking the leaves out of our sleeping bags, trying to make it look like we were taking care of the place, when I heard this voice bellowing from the top of the hill.  (from It's Hard to Tell a Hug)

I picked up the trumpet that Sam had taken out and, noticing how Sam and Anna’s eyes followed it, placed it carefully back in its well-worn, purple velvet-lined case, closed the hinged top, snapped in the clasps, and pushed it back under Sam’s bed. (from Sam's Saxophone)

You'd have to be crazy to go swimming on that day, the weather was so bad, but we didn’t want to miss the one day of the week that we had to swim, so we went out onto the beach and swam way out to the raft, which was not so difficult for my older brother, but more than a bit of a swim for me.  (from The Swim)

As I lost sight of him in the distance—the wind blowing harder, the waves bigger and choppier, the streaks of lightning and cracks of thunder more terrible—finally I jumped in and began to swim.  (from The Swim)

There, among the dirty old screws, washers, and nuts, was a small, plastic magnifying glass—the round, magnifying end the size of a nickel, with a plastic handle that ended with a little hole so you could put it on a key ring—and I was transported to a day, probably 45 years earlier, when I was four or maybe five or six years old. (from The Prize Inside)