Birmingham, Alabama—I’ll call him Denny. Denny lived in a rundown part of town. His was a rundown house with plywood over a busted window.

He drove a truck for a living, he supported his four-person family. But families aren’t cheap, and driving a semi isn't exactly a rich man’s job.

One evening, Denny came home to an empty house. He found a note on his refrigerator. His wife had left him for another, and taken his kids.

It was a cruel blow.

He was in a sad state for the following year. He says he contemplated ending it all with a bottle of pills.

“Just couldn’t,” he said. “Gott’em to my mouth a couple times, but didn’t have the guts.”

One weekend, a knock on his door. It was a little girl. She was looking for a dog.

“He’s a brown Lab,” she said. “His name’s Bo, and he’s kinda fat.”

Denny told her he hadn’t seen any Labs. Her face grew long. She thanked him and walked away with her

head down.

He thought about her all day. She reminded him of his own daughter. Something came over him. He laced his shoes and hit the neighborhood streets.

He spent the weekend walking house to house, asking neighbors if they’d seen a chocolate-colored dog. He estimated that he knocked on seventy doors. Seventy.

He developed blisters on his feet and a sore lower back.

He was met with a string of sorry-haven’t-seen-hims. And he was about to give up, until he knocked on a door in a neighborhood that was a few miles away.

A woman answered. She told him a stray came into her yard days earlier. A brown dog. She’d carried it to a no-kill shelter.

Denny…

She was a tough woman. Forty-some years ago, she was a single parent who'd raised her daughter into adulthood on nothing but pennies and late shifts.

She and her daughter were tight. They lived together until her daughter was in her twenties.

Then, her daughter got pregnant by a man who did a disappearing act.

The pregnancy was a painful and complicated one. Doctors said something was wrong. When her daughter went into labor, things got ugly. They say there was a lot of blood.

It was a boy. The baby almost died, but he pulled through.

Her daughter didn't.

It was a small funeral. She said goodbye to her daughter and stayed until the end. She watched a front-loader dump fresh soil over an expensive casket.

She could've been angry. Angry with doctors. Angry at the deadbeat who got her daughter pregnant. Angry at life. Or at God.

But she had a newborn, there wasn't time for anger. Instead, she fed him, bathed

him, and stayed up late, whispering into his ear. She changed dirty diapers, sang to him, and taught him to speak.

She smoked cigarettes and rocked him to sleep on the front steps, watching the moon.

She wasn’t a young woman. She had gray in her hair and lines around her eyes. She wasn’t far from retirement age, but she was lightyears away from retirement.

She joined a local Methodist church. Not because she was spiritual, but because they offered free daycare. She dropped the boy there while she worked a day shift.

They say she received weekly church assistance—brown sacks of baby formula and groceries.

She was a mother all over again. She did all the maternal things. She packed sack lunches, paid for field trips, attended…

This is a small restaurant. A meat-and-three, where waitresses wear T-shirts. Where your iced tea never falls below the rim of your glass. Where catfish is fried whole on the bone.

I have two dates accompanying me tonight.

My mother-in-law—who holds my arm for balance. I’m carrying her purse. And my wife—who walks ten steps ahead of us at all times.

The dress code is summer weekend casual. I'm wearing jeans. My dates are wearing pearls, pumps, and ruby lipstick.

They always do. In fact, I’ve never seen them exit the house in anything they wouldn’t want to be buried in.

We order a round of teas. My dates scan the menus without conversation. When our server arrives, my dates have questions.

“Is your tartar sauce made with DUKE’S?” asks my wife.

“Are there REAL ham hocks in your collards?” asks my mother-in-law. “I don’t like those ham-flavored packets.”

“What’s in the potato salad?” asks my wife. “If I even LOOK at a stick of celery I start gagging...”

“Are your French fries STEAK

fries, or shoestring?”

“What kind of cake do you have tonight?”

“Where’d you graduate high school?”

“What's your social security number?”

The server looks to me.

“I’ll have a barbecue sandwich, ma’am,” I say.

Two more women enter the restaurant. They have white hair, and they are also sporting pearls. They sit behind us. They speak with accents that are soft and sophisticated.

As fate would have it, my two dates know them—sort of.

Miss Marjorie and Miss Sarah are from Hartford, Alabama. My mother-in-law is from Brewton.

And since South Alabama is one large family tree with lots of strings of pearls hanging from its branches, they…

I’m in a truck that hasn’t been cleaned in nearly two SEC championships. There is a coonhound in my passenger seat.

I stop at Chick-Fil-A. The woman at the window knows me. She knows my usual order.

“Morning, Ellie Mae,” says the girl at the window.

Other employees crane their necks out the window to greet Ellie, too.

We come here a lot.

We drive away and eat sandwiches while we ride through traffic.

Like I said, this truck is a mess. Ellie’s half-eaten jars of peanut butter are scattered everywhere. There are dog treats and bottle caps in the ashtray. Empty dog-food cans litter my floorboards.

A dog-food can sits in my cup holder—it holds pencils, pens, loose change, and a plastic-wrapped cigar someone gave me at an Ironbowl party five years ago.

On my dash: Ellie’s toy duck, a dog bowl, and a lasso—which I use for a leash.

This lasso was given to me by a five-foot Mexican man named Esteban.

I sold a lawnmower to Esteban—that's how I met him. His wife came with him to translate. I noticed lassos hanging

in the back of their truck. I asked about them.

In a few seconds, Esteban was doing rope tricks for me and Ellie Mae. Ellie liked this very much. She crouched low and barked. He twirled a flat-loop above her. She wagged her tail so hard it almost came detached.

She was a lot younger then.

Right now, I’m driving into a grass field. There must be two hundred acres of pasture before me. It’s not my land.

I’ve been taking Ellie here for years—long before I ever had permission.

I used to park at the edge of this field and hike over a fence. Then, I’d throw a plastic duck. Ellie would chase it into a small pond. And I’d pray I didn’t get caught by the landowner.

Eventually, I did.

One sunny day,…

My wife wears a green John Deere hat. It’s too big for her head, it’s ratty. It looks ridiculous. Long ago, she almost placed this cap inside her father’s casket. But at the very last minute, she saved it for herself.

I remember seeing her father wear the hat while riding his lawnmower. The cap sat slightly crooked on his head.

There’s something about the way old men wear ball caps crooked. It makes them look distinguished. Many times I have tried to wear my cap, slightly cockeyed. I look like the town wino.

I’m glad my wife kept this hat. It’s become her trademark. She wears it often even though it looks ridiculous on her.

She carries it in her beach bag. She wears it when she works outside. Or on long drives—like the long drive we took yesterday. We landed in a Birmingham hotel at ten at night.

And that's is where I am now. I’m in a hotel room, still wearing my pajamas.

My wife just left me to meet a friend for lunch. I am writing.

The television is playing a soap opera on mute.

And I’m looking at this dumb cap, thinking about things. Important things.

Like my friend, who just lost his thirty-five-year-old wife to cancer. Ten years they were married. He has two kids. He’s a wreck. He smiles when he’s in public, and it’s a phony one.

I also know a man who was diagnosed with a terminal illness in his brain. He is young. He has a good job, a magnificent family, and he’s been eating healthy for most of his natural life.

The doctor told him he needs to get his affairs in order.

There's a man whose wife died nine days after her fiftieth birthday. Breast cancer. I stood in her funeral line and shook her husband’s hand. He cried so hard that he held up the line.

As…

Montgomery, Alabama—the top of the ninth inning. The Montgomery Biscuits are finishing off the Jackson Generals.

This is minor-league baseball at its best. I’m eating a foot-long Conecuh Quick Freeze sausage on a bun. The beer is bath-water warm. I am sweating.

The last Biscuits game I attended was twelve years ago, when they were still new to Montgomery. I was sitting on the other side of the stadium with my cousin. The Biscuits lost that night.

But they are winning tonight. The man behind me is not surprised.

He’s white-haired. There is a bag of popcorn in his lap. He doesn’t move much, he’s past the age of unnecessary movements.

His name is Paul. He lives outside Montgomery, he’s been coming to games since 2005. He comes as often as he can. He wears a butter-yellow team cap, thick glasses. He looks like he forgot to shave this week.

“I love my Biscuits,” says Paul. “Them players are just kids, but they good players. Gotta good coach, too.”

That’s why he’s here. He loves the game. It’s in his blood.

“When my son was just a baby,” said Paul, "he liked baseball right away. I knew he was the real deal.”

Paul started working with his son during grade school and middle school. It was your typical Great American childhood. Games of catch at sunset. Homemade batting cages in the backyard—constructed from chicken-wire fencing.

“My son was a good pitcher,” said Paul. “Good, good pitcher.”

Good.

Major League scouts were at his son’s games during his sophomore year. By his junior year, Paul was getting phone calls.

“Had one scout tell me, ‘Make sure you keep that arm healthy and de-inflamed.’ So I’d ice his arm down after every game.”

A drunk driver killed his son during his senior year.

His son was on his way home from a friend's house. A two-lane highway. A woman driving a Bronco…

Entering Conecuh County. That’s what the little green sign reads, off Highway 31. I’m going north, passing through a small sliver of the county. I love it here.

A few weeks ago, I was driving to Birmingham, I listened to an audio book. The narrator spoke with an accent like a New Jersey paperboy. He pronounced Conecuh as “Koh-NEE-koo.”

That hurt.

Now entering Butler County. Wingard’s Produce Stand. B&H Cafe. Dollar General. There’s the McKenzie watertower.

And, God said, “Let there be kudzu.” I love kudzu. I planted some in my backyard in hopes that one day it would swallow my house. Everything looks better swallowed in kudzu.

Georgiana is eight miles away. I love it, too. I’ve visited the Hank Williams boyhood home in Georgiana too many times.

Anyone who knows me knows I love Hank. It goes back to childhood.

My father’s workbench. A radio. Hank, blaring from a small speaker while he changed the oil.

My favorite part of the Hank museum tour is the underside of the house. Miss Margaret says Hank used to practice his guitar there.

“It was cool down there,” says Miss Margaret. “He’d sit on an old car bench-seat to avoid the heat.”

Miss Margaret. I love her, too. She is old. Half her face is paralyzed. Her accent sounds like a Camellia garden on the Fourth of July. I wish she would adopt me.

Georgiana also has Kendall’s Barbecue joint. “Love” is a weak word for Kendall’s. I WOULD tell you more about this place, but someone wrote me an ugly letter last week, saying:

“You talk about Kendall’s TOO MUCH! I'm from Texas originally… I KNOW good barbecue, Alabama barbecue SUCKS, man!”

I understand Texas is beautiful this time of year. I’ll bet they’d throw a nice party if you went back.

I’m passing the Greenville and Pine Apple exit. Greenville is a town like Mayberry. I love it. Pine…

Chelsea, Alabama—this church is small with a capital “S”. The fellowship hall is a basement with ceilings low enough to graze my hair. The walls are painted rocks.

“Dug out this basement my ownself,” says the eighty-four-year-old man. “When I’s younger. Lotta sweat.”

He’s attended this church all his life. Long before the town was called Chelsea.

The tables sit loaded with church food. Casserole dishes. The kind of fare that requires a visit to the confessional after eating.

I’m standing in line, trying to decide between six different kinds of potato casserole.

At my table, I meet Doctor Brent. “Used’a practice country medicine,” he says. “Mostly, we delivered babies out in the sticks. You ever deliver a baby?”

No sir.

“It’s rock and roll, buddy,” he says. “The room looked like a hog-killing took place when we were done.”

One older woman adds, “My sister was born on our kitchen table.”

A few people nod.

I meet a man and woman in their mid-fifties. A nice-looking couple. He’s wearing a chef’s jacket, she’s in her Sunday best. They have a young daughter.

“I was in my fifties

when I got pregnant,” says his wife. “We were in total shock. Didn’t think I could ever have a baby.”

Her husband says, “Some of my friends were like, ‘A baby? At your age? Oh no, what’re you gonna do?’

“But my buddies in the kitchen were high-fiving me, saying, ‘You da MAN!’”

I high-fived him.

Because he’s the man.

I sit a few chairs down from Father Eric. He’s tall. Soft-spoken. He used to be a teacher in a previous life. We have things in common. Once, he was a hardworking man with bills. Today, he’s a hardworking man with bills who wears a collar.

He’s been here since last January.

“This place is like nowhere I’ve been,” he says. “These people are a family. I mean a REAL family.”

Before…