I miss barbecue made by granddaddies, Little League uniforms, chores. I miss how my aunt used to get the Saturday Evening Post. Sometimes they reprinted old Rockwell covers.

It’s late. I‘m cutting through Lower Alabama on my way home. I’m the only vehicle on the road. I pass barns that barely stand upright. Hayfields soft enough to sleep in.

Behold, the country at night.

Headlights in the other lane. I turn my brights off. It’s the polite thing to do. It’s how I was raised.

The man keeps his brights on full-blast. They blind me. I flash. He flashes back, but keeps his high-beams on.

God bless you, too, pal.

I flip on the radio because my truck is old. I don’t have a working CD player. Anyway, I’m crazy about radios. I inherited this crazy from my parents, who always had a song playing. It’s just how I was raised.

Static.

Then, talk-radio:

“...NO, YOU LISTEN TO ME, SIR! YOU LISTEN TO ME CAREFULLY, BECAUSE I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO ME...”

Station change.

A preacher screams, “...All liars shall have thy part in the Lake of Fire...”

Uplifting.

There’s a billboard in the distance, lit from the bottom.

“Wind Creek Casino, Atmore.” The sign shows happy people playing slot machines. Platters of Lobster Thermidor.

I’ve been to Wind Creek. It’s nice, but there are no tables, only computer games. If they had roulette tables, I’d renew my wedding vows there.

I’m passing Red Level. Not a porchlight for miles. Nothing but sleeping people. These are rural folk. I too, come from rural people. To stay up late is indulgent.

It’s just how we’re brought up.

1. Early to bed.

2. Always offer to do the dishes.

3. Always let supper guests slurp the tomato water in the bottom of the plate.

More static. Heavy metal music. Static. Rap music. Whatever happened to tender songs?

I drive past mobile homes, peppering the long acres near River Falls—I have a soft-spot for trailers. After…

You see, I’m not sure how life works. But I know that just being with a person who holds your hand can make ordinary things become poetry.

It’s early morning. It’s dark outside. And it’s cold enough in our motel room to hang meat.

This is my wife’s doing. She cranked the AC to negative-eighteen degrees. I can see my breath.

We’ve been on the road for weeks now, and my wife has enjoyed sub-Arctic conditions in various hotel rooms. My nose is about to develop frostbite.

Funny. I remember when my father got frostbite on his ears when I was a kid. He’d been welding outside one January day. He came home in bad shape, the tips of his ears were black.

He wore bandages over his ears for a week.

“Why do you have to work outside?” I asked Daddy.

“Because I love you,” he said. “That’s why.”

“You must REALLY love me.”

“I do.”

“How much?”

“Oh, s’pose you take the stars in the sky, multiply them times a billion, then wrap them in sunshine… That’s not even CLOSE to how much.”

Good men die too young.

So, this morning I’m writing you—because I don’t

know what else to do while my wife slumbers in this icy, artificial climate. I can’t feel my toes.

This woman.

She and I have gone through several phases of life together. We’ve changed careers a dozen times.

I laid tile; she worked in a hospital cafeteria. I hung gutters; she taught preschool. I worked landscaping; she was a nanny. I worked nights, playing guitar at an all-you-can-eat-crab-leg joint; she babysat weekends.

Years went by, and my Great Career Ferris Wheel kept spinning. Then, I got laid off.

It was quite a blow. We didn’t know what to do. So we did what all half-broke couples do. We took a lavish vacation.

Well, it wasn’t exactly lavish. We went camping in Indian Pass, Florida—a sleepy North Floridian beach with one seafood shack. We made camp…

Hate is for sale, and it’s buy-one-get-one-free this week. People are killing people. Crime-scene tape gets strung across innocent porches. Explosions right and left.

Huntsville, Alabama—Enrique is a long way from Guatemala. A teenager. He speaks no English.

He works long hours on framing crews. He lives in a tent behind the gas station with two other boys.

Enrique comes down with a cold. The cold gets worse. And worse. He spends days lying on the ground of his campsite, wheezing, moaning. His fever is boiling hot.

One night, he hobbles through town for help. He finds an insurance office with a light on.

Enrique walks inside and mumbles, “Ayudame.” Then, he collapses.

One man drives Enrique to the hospital. Then, the man gives Enrique a place to stay—for two years.

And well, that was a long time ago. A lot of people have helped Enrique throughout his life.

They helped him get his citizenship, for instance. They also taught him English. They helped him through school. They helped him through nursing school, and clinicals.

Most of those same people, and fellow nurses, were at Enrique’s wedding.

Morgantown, West Virginia— Cindy is a recent

widow. She is driving the interstate, on her way home from work. It’s late.

She sees a girl, walking the shoulder, pushing a stroller. She wears a fast-food uniform.

Cindy stops. “Can I give you a ride?” she asks.

The girl refuses and says she doesn’t mind walking.

Cindy sees her again the next morning. This time, it is raining. Cindy offers the girl and her baby a ride.

The girl tells Cindy she was kicked out of her apartment by her boyfriend, she has no family, and no place to stay.

The last few weeks, the girl’s been living in a friend’s garage, sleeping on an air mattress. Her baby has been sleeping in a cardboard box.

Cindy considers giving money, but it doesn’t feel like enough. So, she brings the young woman home.

The next day,…

Me. A kid trapped in an adult’s body. Me. Someone who once wanted to be a journalist, but hit too many roadblocks. Me. Someone who finally got around to finishing high school in his mid-twenties; college in his thirties.

Monroeville, Alabama—you couldn’t ask for a prettier day. The sky is cloudless. The town square looks like it did when Harper Lee’s book was first written.

And I’ll never forget reading TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD for the first time. I was a chubby kid with a very bald head when I first read Atticus Finch’s words:

“Hold your head high, and keep your fists down.”

Let me explain the baldness: I was fourteen. I’d just lost my hair in a senseless act of home-haircutting. The clipper guard on Mama’s electric razor slipped. I bore a bald spot the size of an aircraft landing strip.

To fix this, Mama scalped me.

When I saw my reflection in the mirror, I cried. My mother kissed my bald head and said, “It’ll grow back.”

To cheer me up, my aunt gave me a paperback book. I read it in one day. The next afternoon, I wrote a five-hundred-word story. I entitled it: TO SHAVE A MOCKINGBIRD.

Many years later, as an adult, I drove to Monroeville to cover the stage adaptation of MOCKINGBIRD. I’d

been invited by veteran journalist, stage-actor, and highly-decorated Methodist, Connie Baggett.

I’ll never forget it.

I arrived in Monroeville at sunset. It was mid-March, but outside it was colder than a brass toilet in a single-wide trailer.

I met Connie in the parking lot of the famed courthouse. She took me on an impromptu tour of the whole town.

“I used to cover Monroeville,” she said. “When I worked for the Press Register, this was part of my territory.”

She was a real newspaper journalist. She was the kind I had wished I could’ve been when I was a kid, but never was. And she had good stories.

She told me about the first time she’d interviewed Harper Lee. She told me local tales and folklore. She pointed out the best barbecue joint in town—on Rutherford Street.

Then, she…

I walk inside to pay for gas. There is a cardboard box near the counter. The box is filled with Ziplock baggies of boiled peanuts. On the bags are handwritten words: “P-Nuts $1.00.”

An old gas station. They have the old pumps with spinning numbers. There is a handwritten sign on the front door: “No dogs in the bathrooms.”

I wonder how that sign came to be.

There are men sitting in chairs out front. One man holds a plastic Coke bottle full of brown spit. The other men are relaxing on the axis of the wheel of life.

There are two Auburn University caps, one Roll Tide, and a cowboy hat. A dog sleeps beside them.

“Howdy,” says one man. “How ya din today?”

It’s been a long time since anyone asked me how I was “din.”

My answer is pure reflex. One I can’t lose.

“Middlin’,” I say. That’s what old timers in my youth said. Phrases like that were used at feed stores, covered-dish socials, and in hardware store aisles, while weighing a pound of nails.

“How ‘bout y’all?” I ask.

One man spits. “If I’s din any better, wouldn’t be able to stand myself.”

I pump gas. When the pump reaches seventy dollars it shuts off. Seventy big ones. It feels like highway robbery.

Long ago, my daddy thought paying ninety-six cents per gallon gas was disgusting. He would mumble colorful words, then say: “When I was a kid, gas was only TWENTY-FIVE cents.”

My granddaddy would say the exact same thing. Only he would add: “I remember when gas was a DIME a gallon.”

And so it went. I come from a long line of old men who reminisce about the price of crude oil.

These were old-world gentlemen who carved pine sticks with pocket knives. Every day, a few more of these men disappear, and I miss them. When they’re gone, who’s going to complain about the price of gasoline?

Before the War, my grandfather pumped gas at a country store. He wore a ball…

Flowers are pretty. And that’s what you are. Pretty. You make life pretty, just by being alive. You might not feel pretty right now, but that’s only because it’s not your season.

“People are flowers,” an elderly church lady named Miss Rebecca once told me.

She was a white-haired sweetheart who made poundcake that was good enough to make strict Baptists take the name of Andy Griffith in vain.

Anyway, there are a lot of ideas on life. Some folks think life is a journey. Like hiking a mountain with the Boy Scouts—who usually smell like the backend of a filthy goat.

Everyone has their own ideas, but if you ask me, we’re flowers, like Miss Rebecca said.

Bear with me here.

Flowers are pretty. And that’s what you are. Pretty. You make life pretty, just by being alive. You might not feel pretty right now, but maybe that’s because it’s not your season.

We can’t all bloom in April. Some of us have to wait until July. But you will bloom. Soon. I promise.

Maybe you’ll turn into a purple violet. Maybe you’ll be a red tulip, or a rose. Maybe you’re a magnolia. Or maybe you’re like me.

I am

a common dandelion.

I know being a dandelion doesn’t sound like much to get excited about. And believe me, it took me a LONG TIME to be happy about being one. But this is only because most folks call dandelions “weeds.”

For many years, that’s how I thought of myself. And that’s why I’m writing this to you.

Dandelions aren’t weeds. They might be overlooked, unwanted, uncared for, and sprayed with pesticides, but they are flowers.

Yes sir. Dandelions are strong, and bright, and yellow. We open every morning to the sun. We close at night. We have the longest flowering season of ANY dadgum plant out there.

Roses might be breathtaking, but we are long lasting. And if we’re lucky, after we die, some grade-school kid will blow our fuzz into the wind.

Our seeds can travel…

So days turned into months. Clark was weak from treatment. He spent entire weeks in bed. He sat on the floor near the toilet a lot.

Clark was a cool kid. He had a bald head, brown eyes, and a nice smile. Clark was not his real name. But they said he liked Superman. So “Clark Kent” it is.

Before Clark lost his hair, he had a head of blue-black, just like the superhero.

When his parents found out he was sick, it nearly knocked the life out of them. But they say Clark didn’t get bothered by it. Nobody knows why. Maybe he was too young to be afraid.

Maybe he was made of steel.

Anyway, I don’t know much about pediatric oncology, but his diagnosis was bad. His mother called it a “death sentence.” His doctors were not hopeful.

But that’s not the story here.

One afternoon, on their way home from a medical appointment Clark saw a man walking the shoulder of the highway. He was near an overpass.

The man was dark-skinned, with white hair, holding the waist of his blue jeans to keep them from falling.

“Stop

Mom!” said Clark.

His mother stopped the car. Clark rolled the window down and asked the man why he was holding his pants like that.

“Lost my belt,” the man said. “And these pants are too big.”

Then, the man asked Clark’s mother for money. That’s where she drew the line. She refused to give cash to a stranger. She rolled up the windows and drove.

“We can’t just leave him,” said Clark. “He needs our help.”

Clark begged his mother to give money. Her only response was “no.”

Her son finally convinced her to stop at Walmart. They bought a belt, some sweatpants, and a few T-shirts. Then, they bought a sandwich from Subway.

They found the man beneath the overpass again. Clark gave him a plastic bag full of goodies. The man was overcome.

So days turned into…