It’s morning in Alabama. I’m driving. There is green everywhere. Live oaks that are old enough to predate the Stone Age.

Tin sheds. Peanut fields with perfect rows that run for miles in straight lines.

American flags are hanging from most mailboxes, horse trailers, workshops, treehouses, and semi-truck garages.

There are plenty of curves ahead, winding through the landscape. They will take you past Faith Chapel Church, Providence Primitive Baptist Church, New Chapel Baptist, First Assembly of God, United Methodist Church. And a heap of other three-room meeting houses with well-kept cemeteries.

There’s the Perry Antique Store—which used to be a gas station one hundred years ago. It sits on approximately thirteen million acres of flat earth.

Old men sit on its porch, chewing the fat. Watching traffic.

There are ancient mobile homes with brand new Fords parked out front.

There are brand new mobile homes with ancient Fords.

I pass red-dirt-road offshoots that lead to God-Knows-Where. Horses in front yards. Cattle in backyards.

Weathered brick chimneys, standing in empty fields.

Telephone poles with signs that read: “Elect Twinkle for governor, for a brighter Alabama.”

I pass small towns, small communities. Brantley. Pine Level. Elba.

Kinston is about as big as a minute, but they have a nice baseball field.

Baseball is serious business in Kinston.

“Now entering Geneva County.”

I pass bumpy creek bridges—I have to slow down to drive across. There’s a crumbling red house—probably older than the late great Kathryn Tucker Windham.

Bass boats sit by the highway with for-sale signs. Farm-implement graveyards stretch clear to China.

There is a man, burning trash in his front lawn. There are manmade bream ponds.

Dead corn fields. Overgrown yards with rusty swing sets and children's playhouses, with wood rot.

Rusty mailboxes with flags up. Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church. Lowery Church of Christ. Grain silos.

Chicken farms. Cattle farms. Tree farms. Dirt farms.

The yellow line in the center of…

I played music and spoke to a room of white-haired women. It was a dark-lit bar, with decent onion rings and heavy burgers.

Ladies from all walks of life held glasses of beer and wine. A few had canes and walkers.

Eighty-two-year-old, Jo, approached me first. She wore a white blouse with houndstooth scarf. She asked if she could buy me a beer. I yes-ma’amed her.

“Don’t yes-ma’am me, boy,” she said. “I’m trying to hit on you. Ruins the excitement.”

We sat at the bar together. She lit a cigarette.

“Doctor says I shouldn’t smoke,” said Jo. “But I smoke two a day. One in the morning, one at night.”

Jo is an M-80 firecracker. She is from rural Alabama and she sounds like it. She is a writer, a poet, an artist, and a shameless flirt.

She told stories, of course.

Her words were a trip backward on the timeline. Suppers on church grounds, childhoods with calloused feet. Chicken pens, hog roasts, cotton-pickers, fish fries, front porches.

By the time her cigarette was a stub, she was talking about her husband.

“I miss him so much,” she said. “He was a precious man, the best thing in my life. You look a little like he did.”

There was another woman. Ella.

She was eighty-nine. She asked if the band would play “Tennessee Waltz.” We played it at an easy tempo.

She slow-danced with her son. He was careful with her. When he dipped her, she was nineteen again.

Ella’s husband died when she was forty. She never remarried.

“Always had me a few boyfriends,” she said. “Seems like I went dancing almost every weekend. My sister would watch my kids, us girls would go out jukin’.”

Whataburger is crowded with little boys in dusty baseball uniforms. The place is alive with laughing, happy voices, and cleats clicking on the floor.

They stand in line and pay with handfuls of sweaty cash.

When the herd gathers around tables, nobody is eating. Not yet. They are waiting for something.

One of the adults tells the boys to remove caps. Everyone bows heads.

“Dear Lord,” the man says. “Bless this food…”

All eyes close tight. All mouths clamp shut.

“And God,” he goes on. “Be with Brian and his family tomorrow, when they put his daddy to rest.”

One boy starts crying. The prayer stops.

The kid is becoming hysterical. A team-mother takes him outside. I can see them through a window. She lets him cry into her shirt.

Another boy follows outside. Then another. Soon, the team is huddled together on the sidewalk.

Brian.

So I’m doing a lot of thinking about Brian. I’ve never met him, and I have no idea how his

daddy met his end. But I know this kid.

In fact, I’ve lived with him all my life.

A little about him: he's a first baseman. He likes cowboy movies, he wants to learn guitar one day.

He likes biscuits and gravy—but only the kind his mama makes. He likes old and rusty things. He likes anything Ford. He has imagination, and sometimes this lands him in trouble.

He fishes, but isn’t very good at it. He climbs trees, but scares when he gets too high.

I also know that on the day after his father’s funeral, the kid will sit in his father’s work truck and talk to a ghost.

The truck smells like his daddy. There…

How I got invited to a corporate business convention isn’t the story here. But let's just say there are lots of people wearing nice suits and finishing sentences with: “Did I already give you a card?”

There is a guest speaker. He is famous. I don't care for him. His talent: complaining.

He complains about America, religion, the economy, pro-sports. About lukewarm fried eggs.

The people love him. They applaud after each purple-faced rant.

The woman next to me says, “Oh, I watch his show on TV all the time. Don't you just love him?”

I do not. If you ask me, he needs more fiber in his diet.

I leave the main event and make the long drive back home. The sun is setting. It is a stunning sky.

I don't know what's happening to the world. People are angry. TV personalities earn seven-digit incomes by getting peeved.

Well, maybe I am feeling particularly inspired by the guest speaker. Because I have a mind to make a list

of my own complaints.

My first complaint: sunsets.

Sunsets don't last long enough. They only give a few minutes of sky-painted glory, then it’s goodnight, Gracie.

I know. That's not a real complaint, but give me time, I'm new to this.

Complaint two: puppies. They grow up too fast. There is nothing half as marvelous as razor-sharp puppy teeth.

I'm also complaining that there aren't more barbecue joints.

I don't mean the fancy kind where waiters wear all-black and use iPads to email copies of your receipt. I'm talking concrete-block joints with ugly bathrooms, decent service, and food served in red plastic baskets.

Something else: I wish people gave more compliments for no reason.

Hardback hymnals. I’m…

Steve Latham died this morning. They tell me he slipped in the shower. His brother, Aubrey, was able to be with him during his final moments.

I still can't believe it.

Steve was a big man. He wore a Santa-Claus beard and had the jolly disposition back it up.

He was a writer. A teacher. A media specialist. A good man. And he liked Andy Griffith more than anyone I know.

We spoke a few days ago.

“Remember that one episode?” said Steve. “When Andy thinks about leaving town? And Barney tries to talk him out of it?”

Do I.

It’s a classic. Andy gets offered a job in Raleigh. He considers taking it. Barney tries to convince him to stay. It's TV magic.

“I truly understand how Andy felt,” Steve said. “Andy just wanted to start the next chapter of his life, that’s kinda how I feel.”

As it happens, Steve did just that. He retired earlier this year from the Shelby County school system. He

was going to start his own new chapter.

He was going to write.

“I've always been a writer,” Steve told me. “I just haven't taken the final leap to let myself BE a writer.”

He deserved that much. After thirty-two years of helping Shelby County’s youth achieve their dreams, it was Steve's turn to follow his.

I drove four hours to attend his retirement party. I stood in the high-school library with my shirt tucked in. A handful of his friends and family were there.

Folks told heartfelt stories. I watched Steve wipe his eyes when Patricia, Ann, Rose, and Aubrey took turns hugging his neck.

There were tears. Laughs. People took pictures with him.

One woman thanked him…