Morning. I went down to the lobby and ordered a coffee. I was carrying my banjo. Nobody even looked twice at me.

“Room for cream?” the guy said.

“No, thank you.”

I waited for him to stare at my banjo and ask what was in the case. Everyone asks.

But not in Nashville. Banjos here are superfluous. In fact, it’s more unusual NOT to be carrying a banjo in Nash-Vegas.

But before I left, he smiled and said, “Break a leg, man.”

I played banjo on the 650 WSM AM morning show. Bill Cody interviewed me and did his best to make me sound interesting and smart. After a lifetime in radio, Bill Cody could make a fire plug seem interesting and smart. Which is exactly what he did this morning.

Then I left the studio and met an older woman from Bowling Green, Kentucky, who has attended well over 500 Grand Ole Opry performances. Elaine Sledge. Tonight she’ll be bringing her sister to see me. We got our picture made together. She told me to break

a leg.

Then, I went back to the hotel. I had a whole day to kill. So I played my fiddle for several hours until someone knocked on the door and interrupted. It was a veterinary doctor with a medic bag.

“Hello,” he said, “we just received a call about a dying animal in this room?”

So I played banjo instead.

Then it was almost time for soundcheck.

I took a shower and kept thinking to myself how surreal this all is. Me, an ordinary fire plug, playing the Opry.

I put on my suit. My lucky red socks. Socks which have not been laundered in over 20 years and smell like it. My wife won’t come within 200 feet of them.

I picked up my guitar case. I walked out the door.

“Break a leg,” the hotel clerk said.

“Yours or mine?”

A truck stop. A little cafe, somewhere off the Great American highway.

The waitress is bustling between tables. She’s an older woman. Maybe mid-seventies. Salt-and-pepper hair. More salt than pepper.

She puts food on my table. Two eggs, sunny. Hashbrowns. Black coffee.

“Anything else, sweetie?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Ketchup for your hashbrowns?”

“How’d you know?”

She smiles. “Just a hunch.”

She produces the bottle like a magician pulling hankies from his sleeve.

Then, I see the woman walk outside. The bell on the front door signals her exit. I see her through the large window. She sits on a bench. Removes a carton. She’s smoking a cigarette now. And something tells me she’s earned it.

A car pulls up. Old car. A Honda. Rusted fenders. The car used to be blue, now it’s beige There’s duct-tape on the windshield.

The driver hops out. He hugs the waitress. Together they remove a fold-up wheelchair. Together, waitress and man lift a little boy from the backseat.

They place the child into the chair. The woman hugs the kid. The boy is rail thin. She bathes him in her kisses and the

kid returns the favor.

They share a long embrace. The Honda leaves, then the woman wheels the kid inside the cafe.

She parks the kid’s chair in the corner and deals with her workload. She checks on her other customers. They all need something. More napkins. Refills on tea. Plates need to be cleared.

She’s warming up my coffee when I ask who the kid is.

“That’s my neighbor’s boy,” the woman says. “And that was his uncle who dropped him off.”

“You two must be close.”

“We are. Sort of. I’m raising him. He’s about to be legally mine in a few weeks. Once I sign the papers.”

I’m looking at this woman, and I’m thinking that she is a little long in the tooth to be raising a child.

“His…

My truck cab was filled with three barking dogs and one idiot. The dogs were in the backseat. The idiot was behind the wheel.

“Sit down!” the idiot kept saying.

But my dogs do not sit when I drive. They never sit. They dutifully explore their space when the vehicle is underway.

To the untrained eye my dogs appear to be acting disobediently. But that’s not it. Really, they are just looking for food.

They are always looking for food. They even look for food in places where there has never been any food, such as my bathroom. In a pinch, they will even resort to eating non-food items such as my reading glasses, my sandals, sheetrock, etc.

But they particularly go crazy when in my truck because they know the odds of finding abandoned food here are exponential. Thus, they are constantly on the lookout for expired Corn Nuts, old pistachio shells, or a petrified French fry predating the Reagan administration.

So we finally arrived at the dog park. I turned

them loose. They ran. They chased squirrels. They wrestled. They hunted around for any threatening or suspicious objects so they could sniff them, bark at them, then pee on them.

And then, basically, all the dogs in the dog park just stood around. That’s all the dogs do there. They play for short bursts, then they stand around and look at their owners.

“Why do dogs just stand around at dog parks?” one dog owner asked the group of us dog owners who were also, as it happens, just standing around.

Another dog owner said, “I drove forty-five minutes to get here, just so my dog could stand around.”

One of the other dog owners remarked, “You ever wonder what would happen if dog and human roles were reversed? What if DOGS took US to human parks? Would we go to the bathroom in front of each other?”

“I enjoyed our vacation together,” the 12-year-old said.

It was the last day of beach vacation. We stood in our driveway. It was time to part ways. Becca’s ride was waiting.

Vacation was over. She had school. I had work. Real life awaits us all.

But we had four days of beach. Four days of sand. Four days of seafood joints. Four days of lethargy wherein the biggest problem of the day was: Should I scratch my butt now or later?

“I’m going to miss you,” Becca said, clutching her pocketbook.

So grown up.

Her little face was sunburned. She wore her platform sandals, like a big kid. She wore cutoff shorts and a colorful Tee. Hair in bobby pins. Cuter than a duck with a hushpuppy.

I forget she’s 12 sometimes. She was a child when we met. Itty-bitty. She still knew all the words to “Baby Shark.”

Now she’s on the cusp of teenagehood. You never know what she will say. One moment she’s eating a popsicle, with a purple tongue, talking about puppies. The next moment, she’s

discussing the finer points of existential free will like a French poetry major.

We’ve had a good four days. And after four days of living with my blind goddaughter, I’ve learned things. The main thing I have learned is that never once does one get a break from being blind.

Not once is blindness not a factor in her interaction with the world. Not once.

A few days ago, someone emailed about a column I wrote. “Why do you ALWAYS feel the need to mention that Becca is blind? It’s offensive to me.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this remark was made by a non-blind person.

It’s simple really. The reason I always mention Becca’s blindness is because Becca is always blind. Believe me, she never forgets it. And neither do her loved ones.

“Tell me a story,” said the 12-year-old girl.

His goddaughter was lying in bed. He was tucking her in. They had spent a full day playing on the beach. They were moderately sunburned because both are fair-skinned and ruddy.

“There once was a little girl,” he began. “She lived in a village far, far away.”

“What color was her hair?”

He paused. “Um. I don’t know. Her hair was… Um. Blond.”

“Was she tall or short?”

“I don’t know. Short.”

“Was she a blind person like me? Or did she have her vision?”

“She was blind, just like you.”

“Thank you for making her blind,” said the girl. “There are no stories about blind girls like me.”

“Well,” he went on, “this is a story about a blind girl.”

This pleased her. “What’s her name?”

“Um. Rhonda.”

“No. That’s a really weird name.”

“Okay, her name is Sherry.”

“Nobody is named Sherry.”

“What do you think her name should be?”

“Rachel.”

“Okay. It’s Rachel.”

“Thank you.” She smiled. “Continue.”

“Little Rachel was a brilliant young woman who had a voice like an angel. Whenever she sang, people came from miles around just to hear her angelic voice ring

throughout the land.”

“What songs would she sing?”

“I don’t know. Regular songs.”

“Does she know ‘Thunder’ by Imagine Dragons? It goes like this...”

The little girl began to sing.

“I guess so,” he said. “She probably knows that song.”

“Good for her. That’s a good song to know. Go on.”

“Well, sometimes, the young princess was sought out by people who were going through very hard times of their own. Pilgrims and travelers were always stopping by the little girl’s village just to meet her and talk to her.”

“Wait? She’s a princess now?”

“Um. Yes.”

“Why did they want to meet her?”

“Because, the little girl was special.”

“Why was she special?”

“Because Rachel had gone through a lot in…

Day Three of beach vacation. They awoke early. The sun wasn’t fully up, but obscured by a quiltwork of gray. It was balmy and warm. The seagulls were still asleep.

His blind 12-year-old goddaughter’s first words were “Can we go swimming in the ocean?”

“It’s not the ocean,” he explained for the 3,429th time. “It’s the Gulf of Mexico.” Then he defined the important differences once again.

She wanted eggs for breakfast. So he made eggs. She ate hers, then asked if he was going to eat his.

“I planned on it,” he replied, mid-bite.

“Well,” she said, “I can eat your eggs if you’re not hungry.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you.”

She smiled at him.

So he ate a granola bar.

After the kid polished off two plates, she said, “Can we go swimming in the ocean?”

“It’s not the ocean,” he restated. “It’s the Gulf. And isn’t it a little early for swimming?”

“What time is it?”

“Seven,” he said.

“That’s not too early for swimming in the ocean.”

“Gulf.”

“Whatever.”

So the odd couple left the rental condo. They were barefoot, carrying beach towels, wearing bathing

suits.

One dorky, pale, out-of-shape, middle-aged writer with a hairy back and oversized feet. And one 12-year-old blind girl in floral-print swimwear.

Together they walked along the unstable sand. He held her hand tightly because sand is difficult to navigate when you’re blind.

No people were on the beach that morning because it was too early. So the man and the girl had the whole Gulf of Mexico to themselves.

They eased into the green water a little after sunrise. It was bitingly cold at first. The first wave crashed around their knees and delivered a shock to the system. What an exciting way for a middle-aged man to wake up.

“Don’t worry,” said the 12-year-old, “the ocean will get warmer, you just have to get used to it.”

“Gulf,” he…

Day Two of beach vacation. It’s sunny in Florida, I’m sitting on the beach with a blind 12-year-old girl. We have sand in all major orifices including the crevices between our teeth.

The gang’s all here. My wife is reading a book. Becca, my blind goddaughter, is eating sand.

“Well, I just wanted to know how it tasted,” Becca pointed out.

Becca is eating sand, of course, because she is from a North Alabama region called Sand Mountain, and they do different things on Sand Mountain.

This is not Becca’s first time at the beach, but it’s her first time being in Florida with actual Floridians.

My wife and I grew up on the Gulf Coast and thought it would be fun to take our goddaughter with us on a beach trip so we could introduce her to some uniquely Floridian pastimes. Such as, standstill traffic, highway construction, and DR Horton subdivisions.

So far the trip has been great. Yesterday, Becca had boiled peanuts. There was a learning curve. It wasn’t easy teaching a blind child to eat

boiled peanuts, but we eventually got there.

I taught her how to open the peanuts, how to suck the Cajun-spicy juice, and most importantly, how to wipe her messy hands on the seat of her shorts so that she had little orange Cajun handprints on her rear.

“Are you sure this is how I should wipe my hands?” she asked. “It doesn’t seem very neat.”

“You’re fine,” I insisted like any guy would.

Then we pulled over to eat seafood. We stopped at a genuine Florida fish house called Boon Docks in Panama City Beach. It was the kind of authentic place with tin roofs and seagulls soliciting handouts. There was a long wait.

When we arrived, the hostess pulled me aside and said, “Did you know there are orange handprints on the seat of this little girl’s pants?”

Becca was thrilled.

Day One. The first day of beach vacation. We have been in the car for seven and a half hours. I am seeing double.

There is a 12-year-old girl in our backseat, steadily talking. She is blind, and she is our goddaughter. She is going to spend the weekend with us at the beach. And she has a lot to say.

The child has not paused to take a breath since we passed through Atlanta.

Many, many hours ago.

“...Why are there lines in the middle of the highway?” she asks happily. “Why does some cheese have holes in it but others don’t? Have you ever eaten a whole pumpkin? Why is it called Cracker Barrel when they don’t have crackers? Don’t you think it’s fun to drive? Who is Jimmy Carter…?”

Currently our vehicle is packed full of beach gear. We have so much vacation paraphernalia crammed into our van that we all have to take turns breathing so we don’t blow out the windows. There is an umbrella tip stabbing me in the rear.

Becca sits in

the backseat of this crowded vehicle, nestled in a cove of stacked luggage, swinging her legs cheerfully, wearing a starfish barrette, conducting a one-woman monologue with nobody in particular.

“...What makes thunder? Is there a difference between hail and ice cubes? How many cups in a quart? Do you know how tall you are in centimeters? What is the square root of 298?”

“Becca?” I’ll periodically say toward the backseat, glancing into the rearview mirror. “Isn’t your voice getting tired?”

“No. Is yours?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s okay, I’ll just do the talking so you can rest your voice.”

And the streak of dialogue remains uninterrupted.

We have just crossed the state line into Florida. There are advertisements for discount liquors and lottery tickets, factory-farm oranges, alligator eyeballs, and other Native Floridian touristy wonders.

We pass a sign at a little roadside…

I didn’t believe him. I thought he was pulling my leg or similar appendage. I was at the airport bar. He told me April 18 was National Columnists’ Day.

“Surely you’re joking,” I said.

“Nope,” he said. “And don’t call me Shirley.”

The bartender pulled us a couple to celebrate. Except, of course, the bartender wasn’t an actual person. Artificial intelligence now pours beer in some airport bars. These robotic bartenders are designed to reduce foam, spillage, flavor, and overall class.
Like the rest of America, everything in airports is going AI. Last week, I saw a robot cleaning up trash in Chicago. Recently, in Cincinnati, I saw a robotic waiter roving terminals, delivering hot meals.

In one airport, I saw a robot selling hotdogs to some ladies from the UK who had never tasted hotdogs before. They placed their orders. The robot dispensed the fare. The ladies looked at their buns with confused faces.

“I say,” the lady asked her friend, “which part of the dog did you get?”

So our beers

came. They were artificially perfect. We toasted our plastic glasses. We drank to AI, which experts predict will put the American columnist out of business before the end of this paragraph.

And they have a point.

Last month, an English teacher from Texas sent me a collection of essays turned in by her students, all written by chatbots. It was eerie. The grammar was slightly imperfect, like REAL high-schoolers wrote it. And there were REAL dirty pictures drawn in the margins.

The scary part was, the essays were actually pretty good.

I have another friend who edits a respected newspaper. He discovered his employees have been using ChatGPT to write news reports.

“They let ChatGPT write the rough draft, then clean it up. The whole process takes maybe three minutes.”

My friend Lindsey is a former marketing writer whose job was replaced by a chatbot this…

“Dear Sean,” the email began—people are always calling me that. “Who were your role models growing up? My father died last week… I am 14 and I don’t know who my role model will be.”

Dear friend, my role model was born the same year Ty Cobb retired. The same era The Bambino was selling Old Gold cigarettes in the back pages of “The Saturday Evening Post.”

It was a period in American history when cowboy movies were silent, radios were loud, and Charles Lindebergh was still considered to be a little off.

The boy was born to Carl and Geneva, two average North Carolinians in an average house in an average town. They lived modest lives. They lived beneath the water tower, for crying out loud.

He was their only child. He got all their attention.

“I loved my father,” he once said. “He lived to be eighty. He smoked cigarettes every minute of his life.”

His father had a notoriously wet sense of humor. He was the kind of guy who

tended to be popular in places like barbershops, feed stores and any place where old geezers play checkers.

Years later, when the boy started performing his one-man comic routine before Rotary Clubs, civic leagues, and Elks Lodges, the boy admitted that his brand of hayseed humor came from simply impersonating his old man.

His mother, Geneva, was known by her friends to be sugar sweet. She was born just over the North Carolina state line in Old Virginny.

To get to her hometown you’d have to hop on the Blue Ridge Parkway and head north from the Carolinas. After about an hour you’d arrive in the meadows of Patrick County.

If you veer onto County Highway 602 and follow it into the sticks, eventually you will find the remnants of a tiny mountain hamlet so remote they have to mail-order sunshine from the Montgomery Ward catalog.

It…