Hodgenville, Kentucky, looks like your all-American postcard town. Brick storefronts. Flawless Colonial houses. No flamingos in the yards. The kind of place where you’d expect to find Jimmy Stewart working at the drugstore soda fountain, and kids playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. 

You might’ve heard of Hodgenville. Our sixteenth president was born here—or just up the road from here. Or just “down the road,” depending on which way you’re driving. 

The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park is the lifeblood of this town. On the town square you see the Old Rail Splitter himself, sitting on a Grecian throne, with a bronze stare. He gazes into forever with a hard and righteous glare. His stern face cracketh not a smile. 

Most of the cars are going to the park. You can see the American tourists on the road. They have plates from all over. Texas. Oregon. North Dakota. I even saw tags from Alaska. 

Abraham Lincoln was born inside a tiny log cabin located on Sinking Spring Farm, in the heart of the park. The cabin is still

there, preserved, surrounded by a Parthenon-style stone temple. The cabin floor is still dirt. There is still mud chinking between the logs. There is still evidence that one of the nineteenth century’s most notable figures was born here. 

So why am I here? I can’t really answer that. The short answer is: I don’t know why I’m here. The long answer is: I REALLY don’t know what I’m doing here.

I am here because in a few days, I’m going to be performing a concert on the steps leading to that childhood cabin. Open to the public. There, I’ll be playing Lincoln’s favorite music, telling stories about our sixteenth president’s youth, and about frontier life. 

I still can’t believe this is real. 

It’s been years since I swam in the Gulf. And I mean really jogged into the surf, hurled myself into the breakers, and let other, much younger swimmers pee on me. 

At least that’s exactly what the little swimmer next to me was doing. We were both swimming in the same crystal-blue Gulf water, just off the coast of Fort Pickens, not more than nine feet from each other’s wake. The boy was splashing and laughing. Then, the boy shouted to his mom with the same urgency often reserved for the threat of nuclear war: “Mom! I have to pee!”

His mother, who was on shore, hollered back, “Just pee in the water!”

The boy glanced at me briefly. We locked eyes for a moment. The boy’s facial muscles clenched. And finally, a cleansing look of urethral relief washed over his face. 

“Okay!” he shouted. “All better!”

I hurriedly swam away, doing a violent rendition of the freestyle, achieving speeds akin to those of Michael Phelps. 

But the kid sort of followed me. And whenever the boy wasn’t tee-teeing on innocent

bystanders, he was usually splashing around and laughing. 

Sometimes he’d engage in various acts of gymnastics, or maybe it was some kind of insane yoga, whereupon he’d start yelling: “Look, Mom! I’m doing it!” 

He yelled this over and over again. 

“Look! Mom! I’m doing it!”

Why is it that kids who swim always yell, “Look! I’m doing it!”? And why do they yell this phrase approximately four million times? What exactly are they “doing”? And more importantly, why does this require everyone to “look”?

But getting back to my beach story. 

So, I was on the beach because I was with my sister and my wife. We met at…

My friend Morgan is still on hospice care. I spent several days at her bedside. I played guitar for her, sitting on a chair beside her. Sometimes we held hands and just looked at each other. Talking about olden times. 

Like the day we first met, some years ago. 

I was younger. So was she. I was writing a piece about service dogs. I would be conducting some one-to-one interviews with animal recipients. 

That day, I had a string of interviews set up. Veterans with PTSD, who use service dogs for emotional healing and support. Diabetic-alerting service dogs. And service dogs capable of detecting dangerously high blood pressure. Which is a slightly different skill set than my own personal dogs who miraculously, although they are not trained, are capable of causing high blood pressure. 

So there I was in the rec room area. I was sitting at a table, waiting for my next interview. 

In walks this girl. 

A teenager. Slight and lean. A shock of red hair, woven in a long braid. She walked with a uniquely unsteady gait.

There was a purple orthopedic brace attached to her lower leg. 

She stood across from me. 

“My name’s Morgan,” she said. “Morgan Love.”

I rose to shake her hand. 

The child’s grip was firm and confident. The skin of her hand was soft and clammy. Sort of sticky. Little-kid hands. 

Her glasses were heavy prescriptions. She seemed to be straining to see. “I’m mostly blind,” she said. “Sorry, can we sit somewhere in the sunlight so I can see you?”

“Of course.” I gathered my legal notepad and backpack. We moved outside to a picnic table. 

“There,” she announced. “I can see you so much better now. Look at your hair.…

3:42 a.m.—Three hours before sunrise. Sarah and I are awake. Sort of. We begin our marathon route in the hamlet of Manitou Springs, a town where everything is organic, even the Subaru exhaust.

We start our journey alone, in front of the little courthouse, the official starting line of the Pikes Peak Marathon. Before we begin running, we hug each other tightly.

“We’re doing this,” we say before we sprint off into the silent streets.

We’re doing this.

Our path, lit by our headlamps. Our feet, slapping the pavement in a two-beat rhythm. We are the only living creatures awake for miles except, of course, for the prairie rattlesnakes, most of which are, thankfully, at Whole Foods Market right now.

3:49 a.m.—We are running uphill now. We are heading toward the mountains. And, since this is the Amazing Age of Technology, we are using our GPS to lead us to Barr Trail. You have to love technology. It truly is incredible. Even though we don’t know where we’re going, we are safe in

the knowledge that our sophisticated, expensive, specialized trail GPSs will lead us along the official race route.

4:07 a.m.—We are lost.

4:19 a.m.—We are nowhere near the mountain; we are running in circles through random Manitou Springs neighborhoods. My sister is very upset right now. She has never been one to hide her emotions. She is assaulting my small GPS unit, which costs about as much as a tactical government helicopter. The unit keeps saying it’s recalculating. My sister keeps telling it where, exactly, it can lodge its recalculations.

4:22 a.m.—Even though we’ve been running for 40 minutes, we seriously have no idea where we are. I think we are in Iowa.

4:28 a.m.—Sarah is really pissed now. Also, my GPS has gone to be with…

Morning in Manitou Springs, Colorado. My sister and I have a rental cabin located near the base of Pikes Peak. I am sitting on a picnic table outside our cabin, drinking crappy instant coffee, finishing my third chocolate bar. 

My sister brought the chocolate. It’s artisan chocolate. She is asleep in the cabin right now. She’s not going to be happy when she awakes and finds out I’ve eaten all her fancy chocolate. I will undergo one of her famous improvised gender reassignment operations. 

I can see Pikes Peak in the distance. The mountain looks significantly bigger than I remember. About 14,115 feet bigger to be exact. 

We scattered my father’s ashes up there when I was 11. It was a bad day for me. There were a lot of emotions that fateful afternoon. 

The predominant emotion was, of course, altitude sickness. Thanks to the thin air, I could not feel my face, my hands were numb, I was spacey, and I was pretty sure I’d seen Abraham Lincoln and Alexander the Great

in the gift shop. 

Also, there was anger. I was mad. At everyone. At everything. At circumstances. At life. And, most importantly, at Major League Baseball players, who were currently on strike that year. I was just mad all over. And I stayed like that for about 21 years. 

In my defense, I had a lot to be mad about. My dad was in his prime when he shot himself by inserting the barrel into his mouth. He was healthy. He was smart. He was a marathon runner. He ran this mountain every year. 

And then. One day. Bang. Over. 

On the day of his scattering, I was supposed to recite the 23rd Psalm atop the mountain as we upended his ashes. But I never finished…

This is a big trip for me and my sister. We are visiting Pikes Peak to see my dad. And it’s going to be big.

The first thing you should know about my sister Sarah and me is that we like people. It’s just who we are. She and I are both what you’d call extreme “people people.” My father was a people person. And we definitely got his genes.

Like him, we love meeting strangers, talking, laughing, and forming lifelong friendships with random individuals in public who are edging away from us slowly as we continue conversing with the backs of their heads.

It’s what we do. Sarah is even more of a people person than I am. She is outgoing, friendly, and extremely talkative. She has not paused to take a breath since 1994.

My sister takes the art of peopling to the next level and is capable of making friends with anyone, even non-people entities. I know of at least one occasion wherein my sister

made close personal friends with a municipal fire hydrant by trying to feed it dog treats. After the incident, she upgraded her prescription glasses.

Sarah has an extremely amiable personality. I cannot take her to a supermarket without spending several hours waiting for her to finish various spontaneous conversations in the produce department, dairy department, canned vegetable aisle, bulk dried goods department, clearance displays, vitamin section, and women’s restrooms, where I sometimes stand in the bathroom hallway and hear echoes of her conversations drifting past the water fountains.

Most of these random supermarket conversations are centered around extremely womanly issues, and feature no place for a man to insert his thoughts.

Take me. I have been a man for almost as long as I can remember. I do not know how to contribute…

Our plane touched down in Albuquerque. No sooner had my feet hit the airport terminal floor than I knew immediately—call it gut intuition—that Albuquerque is definitely a city with two Qs.

Jamie, my cousin Randa, and I arrived at the theater where I performed my one-man shipwreck before an audience of extraordinarily friendly Southwesterners who were kind enough to give me a standing ovation. True, the ovation was moving toward the exits. And true, nobody in the ovation was facing me. Come to think of it, nobody was ovating, either.

But after the show I went to the lobby and met some lovely people from the audience.

I met a young woman who grew up in a strict Mennonite sect, who loved music but was prohibited from playing instruments. As a little girl, she learned the fiddle in secret, taking lessons up in town, despite the risk of being excommunicated from her community.

We also met a man who arrived wearing braids and a bandana. The resemblance was shocking. He looked

exactly like Willie Nelson would have looked if Willie Nelson had been born looking like someone else. 

I also met an Apache elder and cowboy who was chewing an actual mouthful of tobacco and used words like “pilgrim” non-ironically.

I met a 95-year-old New Mexico woman named Martha Ann who hugged me and then grabbed my butt.

“I may be old,” she said, with a firm handful in her grasp, “but I ain’t dead, sonny.”

Next, we awoke in Texas. Texas was nice, but Amarillo was windy. And hot. The ambient heat index was approaching 2,106 degrees Fahrenheit. It was windy, too. I haven’t experienced that much hot air since the Baptist sermons of my youth.

That morning, we traversed the Oklahoma Panhandle, briefly.…

Over the years, I’ve written about Morgan many times, keeping notes on many of the conversations Morgan and I have had, so I’d never forget the things she told me. 

They are the words of a young woman with a wisdom deeper than I am able to understand. She spoke these things in casual conversation, with no idea that her words are extraordinary. We call them “Morganisms.”

Some of the following paragraphs were spoken directly after she was placed under hospice care. Here are a few of my favorites: 

—“I don’t think it’s fair that life is measured in years. There are some people who live many years and don’t do much with their lives. There are also people who live a short time and do a lot of stuff. I think life should be measured in the amount of love you collect. And the amount of love you give. If that’s how life was measured, I would be very, very old and very wealthy.”

—“Life is too short to fight with people. I’m

hard to fight with. I just stay silent. Let the other person win.”

—“Every day is a chance to make a new best friend.”

—“I’ve heard that in heaven there is no time. No clock, no future, no past. Only eternity. So, since the future and past are all happening at the same time, this means everyone is already there in heaven. I’m there. You’re there. My mom and dad are there. All my loved ones are there. We’re all in heaven. Right now. All the people who are alive right now on earth, they’re waiting for each other in eternity. 

“This means that as soon as I close my eyes in death, time won’t be holding you here. So the first thing I’m going to see is all…

Dearest Morgan, 

It’s four in the morning. And I’m awake. Just sitting here. Thinking about you. 

I haven’t slept since your last text. Your text about how doctors placed you under hospice care. Your text asking me to come say one last goodbye. 

Here I am, in the dark of morning, sitting in my kitchen. Lost. 

And for some reason, I’m thinking about the thief on the cross. The Sunday school story about the remorseful thief who hung crucified next to the Humble Nazarene. Remember him? I’m thinking about how in his final moments of life, life became so clear to him. 

Right now, I feel a little like that thief. I’m thinking about the impact you’ve had on my life. Thinking about all the little ways I have changed since we first met. So many changes. Too many changes to count. 

Beautiful little changes. Millions of them. 

Like the way I say “yes” to stuff now. Even stuff I don’t want to do. I choose yes instead of no. I say yes to friends’ schemes more often,

whereas once upon a time I wouldn’t have. I do this because it was you who once told me, shortly after you almost died, “I’ve learned to ALWAYS say yes to fun, especially when it’s bad timing.” 

You were 19 when you said that. 

Also, I work less now. Because it was you who once told me—and you said this while attached to life support—you said: “I’ve learned that life is not about how hard you work.” 

I also hang out with people more often now, even when I don’t feel like peopling or being social. Because you once told me, after one of your near-death experiences, you said you learned that life itself wasn’t the main gift. You…