It’s a sunny July day. Kids are riding bikes. Climbing trees. Little League teams are yelling “Hey batta batta!” And Morgan is in a step-down unit from the ICU.

Morgan is a college freshman. She is pretty, smart, and redheaded—so you know she’s trouble.

She is a student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She made the president’s list last year. Which is impressive when you consider that Morgan is epileptic, diabetic, and has paralysis on the left side of her body; her left hand doesn’t work.

Also, she has low vision, and is nearly blind in one eye. Her intestines are paralyzed, too, so digestion is an issue.

And yet she made the president’s list.

We became friends when I wrote about her a few years ago. She’s soft spoken. She’s always smiling. And she has an Alabama drawl that sounds like ribbon cane syrup.

A few days ago, Morgan sent me this text:

“I’ve been in the hospital for the last six days, with no discharge date in sight.”

The doctors can’t figure out the cause. They can’t get her

ketones down. On top of it all, the paralysis of her stomach has worsened, so doctors are trying to come up with a plan.

Morgan’s text finished with: “It’s been pretty rough but I’m making it!”

She ended her message with a heart emoji. She always closes texts with a heart emoji. Her last name is, after all, Love.

Since then, I’ve had my friends praying. Since then, she has had more tests. Since then, they did a scope to see what was going on inside her gastrointestinal tract.

“I have erosions and inflammation... Still high ketones. It’s been a busy but productive day! Also, my sorority sisters stopped by which was sweet!”

Heart emoji.

Yesterday, six Delta Gamma sisters surprised her with a visit. Multiple sisters have been coming all week. The halls of UAB hospital…

Ten years. That’s how long I’ve been writing this blog/column/whatever-the-heck-you-call-it.

It started as a blog. Sort of. Back when we still had blogs. Remember those? Blogs existed during a primitive technological era when we still had DVDs, landlines, 4-1-1 directory assistance, and older people in your family still did not understand Facebook.

Namely, because before social media, we did not “share” photos with loved ones. It wasn’t possible.

To recreate the social media experience back then by, say, posting a photo, we would have had to (a) take a picture with a Kodak camera, (b) develop the film at Walgreens, (c) physically mail envelopes containing hundreds of photos to loved ones and random friends, then (d) wait weeks for people to reply with comments, such as: “Why did you send me a photo of your dinner?”

Also, 10 years ago we still had taxis. Today, taxis are extinct. On my last trip to New York, my Uber driver, a former taxicab driver, said that 10 years ago there were 11,000 cabs in New York.

“Now there are less than 800,” he said.

But getting back to blogs. As a wannabe writer with no credentials, no training, and no pedigree, frankly, I always found a blog to be a magical notion.

You could write something, send it into the universe, and interact with real humans! Your writing didn’t even have to be good, or contane propper punctuashin

People would actually read your stuff, and if you were lucky, the next morning, you would receive hundreds of heartfelt emails from Nigerian princes.

We had a lot of Nigerian-prince emails back in the day. I personally received many of these emails. These were messages sent by members of the Nigerian royal family, telling me how much they enjoyed my blog, how they hoped someday we might meet, hug each other’s necks, and—God willing—exchange intimate financial information.

So anyway, I remember the morning I…

I sat in the old woman’s living room. It was a gaudy block home. The walls were outdated pastel colors, á la 1986. She was smoking menthols.

She knows she shouldn’t smoke, her daughter wants her to quit. Eventually, the old woman says she will.

“Quitting smoking ain’t hard,” she said. “I’ve done it hundreds of times.”

She is 93. By her own admission, she’s never been religious. There are no Bibles in her house. No cute embroidered scripture verses on the walls. She’s tough. You can see it in her face. The lines on her cheeks tell the tale of a life spent in the company of hard work.

She worked in cotton fields when she was a girl, in Georgia. She worked in a textile mill when she was a teenager. She survived two husbands. One of which abused her. She raised six kids. And she did it without any help, thank you very much.

She tapped the four-inch ash on her menthol 305. “I always thought, ‘Hey, if God’s real, he

sure don’t care about me, so why should I care about him?’”

And that was her philosophy. She didn’t bother God, and he mostly stayed out of her way.

Her mind changed when she turned 50. It was a pivotal year. The doctors found breast cancer. It was a cruel joke on God’s part, she said.

Here was a woman who had raised children, who was about to retire. She had finally reached a time in life when she was supposed to be on Easy Street. And along comes aggressive ductal carcinoma.

The woman pauses, then falls into a coughing fit, which finishes with her spitting a gob of mucus the size of a regulation softball into a handkerchief.

“I thought I was as good as dead.”

The old woman says she lost her will. She quit trying. She woman freely admits she did not want…

Last night, the young man found himself in an old hardware store. There were a bunch of old timers, sitting around drinking coffee. Lots of laughing. The irreverent kind of laughs you hear from old men.

Now and then, customers would walk into the store and ask for this or that. An old guy in the group would lead them to the correct aisle, to help them find whatever they needed. The old guy looked familiar.

But the young man couldn’t put his finger on how he knew him. The cotton-white hair. Those horn-rimmed drugstore glasses. The waistband of his trousers, pulled clear up to his nipples.

He looked like the guy who used to sit on the front porch when the young man was a child, playing mandolin.

The young man’s grandfather used to play mandolin. As a boy, he could remember seeing his grandfather sing old-time music while stomping his right heel onto the porch floorboards, picking away on “Turkey in the Straw.”

The young man left the store. He was in the street

now, walking. He was, evidently, in a little town.

Lampposts. Sidewalks. A barbershop pole. The whole deal. There were people everywhere. It was evening, the world was lit with a beautifully pink sun. He half expected to see Bernard P. Fife making his rounds.

A woman bumped into him. She was carrying groceries. She was young. Pretty. She looked like someone he once knew. Like Meredith Alison, from his grade school days.

As a girl, Meredith had misshapen lower legs. The doctor said her spine was as crooked as a congressman. By fourth-grade, she couldn’t walk and used a wheelchair. Eventually she didn’t need the chair because she died from health complications. The young man never forgot her.

“Do you remember me?” said the young woman.

“Meredith?”

She was smiling. “Yes, it’s me!”

“But, you can WALK!”

They were interrupted when the young man…

I am sitting at my airline gate. I have been waiting here since the Peloponnesian Wars. I am people-watching because there is nothing else to do while I wait for my plane.

The main person I am watching is a guy in the seating area. He is maybe mid-80s. With him are six children. He appears to be the sole adult in their company. There are no other grownups with him.

These are all little kids, too. Really little. Kindergarteners, I’d guess. The kids wear oversized backpacks and sneakers. And they have been blessed with energy.

The kids call this man “Bill.” Not Granddaddy, Uncle, or anything like that. Just Bill. They are shouting his name over and again. Bill this. Bill that.

I’m wondering what Bill’s story is. And more importantly, I’m wondering whether Bill has called for reinforcements.

The kids are getting more rambunctious with each minute. They are constantly running around, falling down, roughhousing, and asking Bill important questions at the tops of their voices.

“Bill!” the kids are saying. “Do people

ever die in bathtubs?” “Bill! Why are my underpants white?” “Bill! How do mommies get pregnant?”

God bless Bill.

Bill finally gets the kids to stop running around by telling them to sit down and start coloring in their little coloring books. I can tell that Bill is a patient man. I never hear him raise his voice. He never once loses his smile. Lesser men would have already had a cardiac infarction.

Soon, the kids are coloring, and all is well. Mostly. Because while it is true that the kids ARE behaving—technically— they are also making a lot of noise by laughing loudly.

Other people glare at the laughing kids. Grumpy adults nearby give the kids looks of parental disapproval, just to let the kids know laughter is not appreciated. This is an airport, dangit. You’re not supposed to laugh in airports. You’re supposed…

Morning. I am driving two-lane highways in the backcountry of Missouri. I have been sharing the highway with mostly rusty pickups and Massey Ferguson farm implements. Also deer.

Missouri. The place where the western prairie meets the southern cotton patches. It’s a foreign land to me.

You’d never know I was born in Missouri. You’d never guess my father died in Missouri.

We lived in Kansas for a short time. A place where Missouri and Kansas were indistinguishable from one another. And that’s where our lives went to hell.

Daddy ended his earthly career here, by his own hand. I come back to town on a pilgrimage every few years.

It’s weird, because I don’t know anyone here. I don’t have any friends. People listen to me talk, they smile, and they immediately ask where my accent is from.

“Alamaba,” I reply.

Then they nod and edge away from me.

I spent the morning driving around Kansas and Missouri, the place where it all happened. The bad stuff. My father did not simply kill himself. On his last

night alive, he tried to kill us too. My mom. My sister. Me.

But it wasn’t actually him doing the bad stuff. Not really. He lost his mind. And when someone loses their mind they lose their wholeself.

Before sunrise, I went to the creek where I was the day he died. I had been catching mudbugs that day. Playing. Splashing. When the shot rang out.

I haven’t been to the creek in over 30 years. Never wanted to go. But today I felt like going.

So, I parked on the shoulder of an old gravel road. I hiked through the suffocating woods to the spot. The same creek where my mother once ran barefoot, in her nightgown, as my father chased her with a pistol. I remember all the shouting and the wailing.

This morning, I looked into the treetops. All…

Kansas City International Airport. I was standing in a long, LONG line, waiting to board my plane. We were like cattle, clogging up the chute. Nobody was happy.

Namely, because yesterday the whole world underwent a historic global internet outage, which delayed and canceled nearly 3,000 American flights. And on this particular historic day in human civilization, I happened to be flying.

You could see boiling anger and frustration on every face in the airport.

The young man in line ahead of me was with his mother. He was maybe 15. He had Down syndrome. He was shouting hellos to people in line. He was a natural comedian. He was Mister Personality.

And you couldn’t help but smile when the kid landed his miracle gaze on you.

“Hello!” the boy shouted to a businessman in line. “How are you today?!”

The business guy was on the phone, having a heated conversation at the time.

“Uh, I don’t know,” the guy says.

Then the boy hugged the man. “Does this help!?” he said.

The businessman tentatively hugged back. Until, finally, he broke

a smile, ended up terminating the phone call, and he said to the boy, midhug, “I guess I’m good, how are you?”

“It’s not ‘good,’” the boy said. “You never say ‘I’m good,’ it’s bad grammar. It’s WELL. You should have told me, you’re doing WELL!”

Everyone laughed at that. All the people in line, in foul moods, some of whom had been living in KCI for the past 20 hours, surviving on vending machine food, actually began chuckling.

The businessman was laughing too, when he said, “Okay, then I am doing WELL, and how are you today?”

“I’m good,” the boy said.

More laughter.

Then the boy addressed another woman in line. She was playing on her phone. She was mid-forties. She looked like she’d just sucked a lemon.

“Hi,” the kid said.

She looked up from her…

I have written a lot of stories about pediatric cancer. Hundreds, actually.

When I started writing for newspapers, I visited lots of children’s hospitals. I sat in lots of waiting rooms. I conducted lots of bedside interviews.

I embraced too many weeping parents, skeleton-thin from stress. I fell in love with too many bald children.

There was Benny, who vomited throughout most of our interview. He was crying while vomit trickled down his chin, saying, “Help me, Jesus.” He died two weeks later.

I wrote about Lydia. She was a middle-schooler. Glioblastoma took her from this world. We played Rook at her bedside. She lasted another year.

So when they found cancer on my 12-year-old goddaughter’s ear, I was a wreck.

All I could think about were those waiting rooms. Those emaciated parents. And the words spoken to me by the mother of a child who died of kidney cancer.

“My life is split into two parts,” the mother explained. “BC and AD; Before Cancer, and After Death.”

Our Becca. Precious Becca. The same Becca

who was born to drug-addicted parents. The same Becca who’d been shuffled around foster care until being adopted by two loving parents. The same Becca who went blind. Who has lost some of her hearing. The same Becca who did me the honor of becoming my godchild.

The same Becca who has been my best good friend. My constituent in crime. The same Becca who sends me text messages every 8 to 10 minutes. The same Becca who used to crawl into my lap so I could hold her like a baby.

That Becca.

The worst part has been watching sadness overtake her. She would never admit to being sad, of course. She NEVER tells anyone she’s sad. But you could just tell.

There have been few smiles. Fewer laughs. She doesn’t even laugh when I make poot noises with my hands. That’s how bad.

It was late. I was leaving South Carolina, where I’d just made a speech in Columbia. I had an all-night drive ahead of me.

I stopped at a gas station off the side of the road. Middle of Nowhere. There was nothing around for miles except a few shotgun houses with couches on front porches. The frogs were singing a nightly chorus.

I walked inside. The bell over the door rang. I was buying vittles for the ride home.

I tossed a few bags of Chili Cheese Fritos on the counter.

The girl behind the register was pretty. She was tatted up. Rings in her nose. Rings on her lip. Her hair was a shade of purple not found in nature. Her name was Angela. I know this because her nametag said so.

She was crying. She used a hand to mop the tears from her face. She approached the cash register. She scanned my bags of Fritos and said, “I love these chips.”

“Me too,” I replied.

“I could freakin’ live on these things,” she said, sniffing her nose.

“Some of

us do.”

Her makeup was smeared.

I knew it was none of my business, but I just had to ask. “Ma’am, are you okay?”

She smiled. It was a pretty smile. She could have been a homecoming queen. A very purple homecoming queen.

“Can I show you something?” she asked.

We were alone in the old convenience store. Nothing but the hum of old coolers working overtime. This was not the question I expected her to ask.

“You want to show me something?” I said.

She nodded. “That okay?”

“Depends,” I said. “Is it something that will send either of us to prison?”

She reached into her pocket and showed me a picture on her phone. “Do you know what this is?” she said.

“Yes. It’s a phone.”

She smiled. “No, on the screen.”

The girl pinch-zoomed on…