Hi there. This is that Little Voice inside your head speaking. Yeah, I know. It’s been a while. But how are you? How’s life? How’s the fam? You still doing keto?

Listen, I know we haven’t talked in a long time, but technically, that’s not my fault. You probably don’t remember this, but you quit listening to your inner voice just as soon as you hit the fourth stage of puberty.

The moment you developed armpit hair, you became a lot more concerned with getting a driver’s license, French kissing, and eradicating zits.

So over time that voice inside you got quieter. Oh, sure, every now and then you’d hear me droning in the background like Charlie Brown’s teacher. But you never actually listened.

Although there were a few times...

Remember that rude waiter a few weeks ago? When the meal was over, you almost stiffed him with the tip. But then, you dug into your wallet and gave him a ridiculously generous gratuity.

Did you ever stop to wonder why you did this? Well, I’ll tell you

why. Because the teeny, tiny voice reminded you that being generous was not just kind, it was right. That Little Voice was me.

There was that other time, when you gave a ride to two Mexican young women who didn’t speak English. Their car broke down in the Walmart parking lot, and they were crying. You helped them out because that faint voice would not shut up.

Also me.

And let’s not forget about the time you almost got into that fatal car wreck.

No, wait. You never knew about that one. You never did know how close you came to the end. Because the Little Voice told you to pull off the interstate immediately before the disaster happened. And you actually listened. In a few seconds there was a ten-car pile up on I-65, and four people were killed.

Still, most…

Sister Of Mine

Sean Dietrich
Nov 07, 2024

My favorite hymn is the one about leaning on everlasting arms. I got to thinking about this song today when I was sitting on the porch with my sister. We were both singing.

“Leaning, leaning,

“Safe and secure, from all alarms…”

My sister is a 33-year-old woman. She is beautiful. Funny. And she’s got a way about her. She’s meek. And you can just tell that she’s been humbled in her life.

I know a thing or two about being humbled. Which is a very different thing than simply “being a humble person.”

Being a humble person, for example, means that you don’t cut in line, take the last biscuit, or sing karaoke.

But being “humbled” (past-tense non-restrictive intransitive verb) is a thing that is done to you. Usually, without your consent. Being humbled is an experience that feels a lot like getting your head shaved.

I have been humbled a lot throughout life. In fact, I will be humbled as soon as I submit this very column

when a reader with an English degree writes to me and says there is no such thing as a “past-tense non-restrictive intransitive verb.”

My sister has been humbled too many times for anyone’s good.

It all started when my father died in a traumatic way, an event I’ve written about enough. When this horrible thing happened to my family, my sister and I both quit going to school.

At the time, I was 11, and had no use for sentence diagrams dealing with worthless concepts, such as, to pick a concept at random, intransitive verbs. My sister, however, was in kindergarten when she quit school.

As a result, my sister didn’t learn how to read until she was 20 years old. She became highly skilled at hiding this. Some people never knew she couldn’t read.

When you get older, it gets harder to…

One of the first official dates with my wife took place at her parents’ house. That night, her extremely nosy parents promised not to eavesdrop, nor bother us, nor hide behind the sofa and wait for us to kiss.

Her parents agreed to let us have the entire downstairs to ourselves. And I was nervous. What would we talk about? What would we do? Would her parents leave us alone, or spy on us?

My story takes place in an era when VHS cassettes still roamed the earth. My date and I decided to rent a VHS movie. Although as it turned out, we were so timid we couldn’t actually decide on a movie.

HER: Which movie do you want?

ME: Oh, anything you want.

HER: I don’t care, I’ll watch anything you wanna watch.

ME: Makes no difference. What do you wanna see?

HER: Whatever you wanna see.

ME: I don’t care.

HER: Neither do I, you choose.

ME: No, you.

HER: It’s up to you.

ME: No, it’s your call.

And so it went. Because all young lovers are afraid

to come right out and say something like, “Darling, I do believe I’d prefer to watch something produced by the genius that is Monty Python.”

We had the same hem-hawing conversation about which restaurant to choose for dinner. And in the end, we went hungry because we never settled on a place. We ended up driving in circles for three hours constantly saying, “Where do you wanna eat?” “I don’t care, where do YOU wanna eat?”

Eventually we returned to her parents’ house and spent the rest of the evening trying not to exhibit symptoms of dangerously low blood-sugar.

As it happened, our date night got worse. Because the movie we rented turned out to be the foulest, most inappropriate skin-flick Hollywood ever released. It was so bad we could not watch it.

Five minutes into the film…

Today is National Redhead Day. I’ll bet you didn’t know we redheads have our own holiday, but we do. And it’s an important day.

Because countless redheads throughout history fought so that we, as a nation, could observe this holiday in freedom. Our ginger ancestors died protecting precious rights that many of us redheads enjoy today.

Such as the right to wear orange or burgundy; the right to be cast as the little orphan Annie in the school musical production of “Annie”; and the right to get free beer on Saint Patrick’s Day.

You probably know a redhead in your life. And speaking as a genetic minority, we ruddy complected persons could use your support right now.

Because redheads are disappearing.

That’s right. Modern research shows that the number of those carrying the recessive gene causing red hair are declining.

The percentage of redheads has dropped steeply within the last few years. At one time, the earth’s population of redheads was about 19 percent. Today it’s down to 2 percent. That’s barely enough to

form a jayvee basketball team.

We are diminishing in huge numbers each year. And each time we die, we take our genetics with us.

If this trend continues, by the year 2100 there will be approximately 3 redheads left including Willie Nelson.

I am a longtime redhead. My hair turned strawberry in my teens, but I was born with hair the color of Ronald McDonald.

I was also a jaundice baby, which means my skin was the color of sickly urine. My mother said I was also born with a pointy head. “You looked like a No. 2 pencil,” my mother recalls.

My mop of hair, however, was the main attraction in the delivery room. The first words of the nurse who delivered me were, “You know what they say about redheads and preachers…”

Unfortunately, nobody ever learned what they say about redheads and preachers because…

It’s overcast. I’m with my wife and my dog. We are on the wide porch of a vacation rental house.

This is the main road which cuts through this small town. There are sounds of kids laughing, playing. Easy traffic.

This is an old porch. The kind my father used to sit on. I can see him in my mind, shirtless, reading baseball box-scores. Or carving a pine stick. My wife is asleep in a rocking chair. My dog snores beside me.

Then.

I see vehicles.

Lots of them.

The first car is a police cruiser—blue lights flashing. Another cruiser follows. Then comes a slow-moving long black car—curtains and chrome fenders. It’s followed by the world’s longest line of cars. A million headlights.

The cars are flanked by a railroad crossing. The train is running. Ding, ding.

The funeral procession comes to a halt at the flashing railroad-crossing lights.

There’s a man on the porch of the house next to me. He's within spitting distance. They step off their porch together to stand in the

yard.

A few other folks in nearby houses do the same thing. It seems like a good idea. My dog and I walk off our porch to stand by the mailbox. And even though this is a reverent moment, I can tell my dog is thinking about ham.

Across the street, a woman in an apron holds hands with a little girl. An old man is in his driveway. Watching. Kids stand beside bikes.

A few cars pull to the side of the road. We've all stopped what we're doing. We’re all here.

We don’t know the passenger in the hearse. And truth be told, I don’t even know why we do this. It’s a gesture of respect, of course. But why? Why respect a stranger?

Today, there is little respect. A few days ago, I saw a waitress get…

Dear God,

It's me again. Actually, I don’t know what you want me to call you. For all I know, you might prefer to be called something Hebrew, Latin, or maybe you don’t want to be called anything at all.

Anyway, one thing’s for sure: you’re older than the feeble human names we humans call you. That much I remember from Sunday school.

My mother called you, “The Lord.” My granny called you “Heavenly Father.” My uncle used to call you by your first, middle, and last name whenever he smashed his thumb with a hammer.

Either way, I was raised in a staunch church, and I remember hearing your name in the tiny chapels of my childhood. The preachers loved to talk about heaven, and how nearly impossible it was to get there. And about hell, and how easy it was to go there.

And our Sunday-school teachers, who made you sound like an old Communist dictator who was always sentencing people to everlasting damnation. After a while, I thought of you in much the same way

I thought about, for example, the Terminator.

But that’s not you. Not at all.

And even though I don’t know a lot about you, I know a little. Above all, I know what you aren’t. And I also know where I can find you.

I know that you’re the sun. You’re the starlight. You’re the pine trees. You’re the sky over Lake Martin. The smell of baked apples Mother used to cook. You are prettiness. You are the feeling of Christmas. The warmth of a family reunion.

You’re the look on a kid’s face when he or she catches a fish. The feeling a child gets when he or she has just been adopted.

You are every Andy Griffith Show episode ever made. You are Aunt Bee, Opie, Barney, Otis. You had absolutely nothing to do with Matlock.

You are guitar music…

I am in the lobby of my hotel, waking up. The coffee is lukewarm. The breakfast is freezer burnt. And the overhead music playing is “Highway to Hell.”

You can’t get away from canned music. It’s everywhere. Like the IRS. Playing in public spaces just loud enough to hear the music thumping, throbbing, pulsating, lamenting, howling, crying, screaming, bawling, thrumming.

There are no old songs used for canned music anymore. These days, most canned music is young music. The kind currently being produced by kids who are barely old enough to buy lotto tickets.

Kids.

It’s hard to find silence anymore. Silence is not a thing in our modern world. The National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division recently measured noise pollution and discovered noise levels have tripled in the last few years.

The roar of traffic, the booms of bulldozers. Whirring distant blenders, making smoothies. TVs blaring 24-hour news channels. Every 11 seconds, somewhere in this country, someone uses a leafblower.

But

canned music is perhaps the most aggravating of all these things. This piped-in music is constantly running inside supermarkets, restaurants, public restrooms, colonoscopy exam rooms, etc.

Per day, Americans are exposed to an averaged 76 minutes of “unchosen” music in public. Stores use this music to develop what businesspersons call “immersive branding” experiences.

The canned music tunes are usually ones you’ve never heard before, produced by artists young enough to be your grandchildren, with names like Rihanna, Ke$ha, and Lady Gaga.

You cannot avoid this music. The music is blasted in parking lots, public parks, and nursing homes. When you are in the hospital, drawing your final breath, Ke$ha will be singing “We R Who We R” overhead, and the nurses will be humming along as they wheel your body off to the morgue.

It’s gotten so bad that some stores are removing canned music. Many Walmarts…

I’m stuck in Nashville traffic. And so, apparently, is everyone else in the Western Hemisphere.

The main culprit here is the highways. Nashville’s highway system is a mess because these roads were built to accommodate approximately 11 cars, whereas there are currently 229 trillion Nashville residents.

So this is a problem. A big one. Because right now I am idling in a thousand-mile line of cars, stuck in a cloud of blue exhaust, and we are moving approximately one nanometer per hour.

I think I’ve figured out the problem here. The problem is, everyone is trying to use the interstate at the same time. Which is bad.

This is just common sense. If everyone in the world tried to take a shower at the same time each morning, the world would run out of water. It’s the same principle. A plus B equals C.

But the traffic problem isn’t getting any better. Because nobody is doing anything about it except buying more electric cars.

Tennessee Department of Transportation reports that, on any

average afternoon in Davidson County, there are strings of electric cars longer than the ladies-restroom line at a Taylor Swift concert.

“The traffic is really difficult,” says a friend who commutes in Nashville traffic every day. Each morning, he spends 120 minutes in his SUV, fighting hundreds of motorists just backing out of his driveway.

He wants a new job, but of course, there are no new jobs in Nashville, only new buildings.

Nashville is one of the leading cites for adding new real estate. In the time it’s taken you to read these paragraphs, Nashville has already built two arenas and one NASCAR súper-speedway.

The skyline changes almost daily.Things have gotten so bad construction-wise that as soon as one new structure is built, demolition crews arrive to tear it down so they can begin erecting a new Starbucks in its place.

This town’s…

I’ve told the story before. But I’m going to tell it again.

She was trash. At least that’s how she was treated. She was found wandering a rural Mississippi highway. Beneath the stars.

It was a wonder the girl hadn’t been hit. This was a busy highway. The kind with transfer trucks.

The dog was walking in the center of the road. On the yellow line. Clearly there was something wrong with her. Animals don’t walk open highways. But the black-and-tan dog was moving by feel. Because she is blind.

All she knew was that she liked open highway because the surface was smooth, and there were no obstructions. And when you’re blind, no obstructions is a good thing.

She was a skeleton. Every rib visible. Every spinal disc showed. There were scars all over her, as though she’d been involved in a host of dog fights.

A scar on her face. A scar on her chest. One behind her ear. On her side. Another on her right forelimb.

Probably, she had been caged with other hunting dogs.

The dogs were probably mistreated and hungry. Hunger makes dogs mean.

Nobody knows how the blindness happened. But it didn’t take a rocket engineer to figure it out.

“Someone hit this animal with a blunt object,” the veterinarian later said, choking back tears. “Someone beat this poor dog. Maybe with the butt of a rifle. Maybe with rebar.”

People say that dogs use smell above all other senses. That’s a lie. A dog doesn’t use her sense of smell to avoid walking headfirst into walls. A dog doesn’t use smell to detect body language in other animals or humans.

A car stopped on that lonesome highway. A Samaritan picked up the dog. The dog was apprehensive to get into the car, but then, she was so hungry.

The Samaritan placed her into the backseat. The Samaritan took photos of the animal and…

It was late. I pulled into the campus after seven o’clock to attend my last class of the semester. My last college class. Ever. It was a night class.

In America, most self-respecting people my age were finishing supper, settling down to watch “Wheel of Fortune.” But I was in school.

I had been attending community college for 11 years. I had been taking a lot of night courses. Which meant that I had perfected the art of eating supper in my truck, on the way to class. I drove with my knees, ate with my hands, and controlled the radio with my big toe.

Supper often consisted of foil-wrapped tamales, purchased from Carmela, a middle-aged Mexican woman who visited our construction jobsites. Carmela traveled in a battered ‘84 Nissan Maxima that looked like a roving salvage yard.

Every time I’d buy a tamale, Carmela would pat my cheek and say, “Joo are very sweet boy, but joo need a bath, joo smell like goat butt.”

So parked my truck. I

rushed into class, smelling like the fundaments of a horned barnyard animal.

Eleven years it had taken me to finish school. Me. A middle-school dropout. My formal education ended in seventh grade, after my father took his own life with a hunting rifle. I simply quit going to school. I was a rural child. It wasn’t a big deal. Nobody seemed to care what rural dropouts did.

I got my first job hanging drywall at age 14. I started working in bars, playing music shortly thereafter. I had a lot of jobs. I hung gutter. I worked as an ice-cream-scoop. I was a telemarketer. I was a nobody. I was white trash.

Until I enrolled in community college.

I enrolled as an adult, and my life changed. I became alumni at Okaloosa-Walton Community College.

I completed high-school equivalency courses. I finished the collegiate coursework. It took me eleven years.…