Birmingham, Alabama—the 1970’s. The hairstyles are ridiculous. Fashions are even worse. It’s Christmastime in the Magic City.

Early evening. A young couple arrives in town to visit family. They are working-class poor. He is overworked and underpaid. She is too.

Still, things are looking up. Even though it’s hard making make ends meet, they have each other.

It hasn’t been a great day. But it’s going to be. They just coasted into a Magic City on magic gasoline fumes. They have enough magic cash for the return-trip home, but that’s about all the magic they have left.

They wander into Bruno’s supermarket. They are shopping on a shoestring budget.

The music overhead is Bing Crosby. “Silver Bells” is the tune.

She pushes a cart. He follows. They are only buying necessities. No fancy stuff.

He listens to the music on the intercom. He lets his mind wander while Bing sings:

“Strings of street lights,
“Even stop lights,
“Blinkin’ red and bright green,
“As the shoppers rush home with their treasures...”

He sees something that interrupts his daydream. It’s a five-dollar bill, lying

in the aisle. Crumpled. Nobody is around. He looks both ways.

He bends to pick it up. This is the ‘70’s, five bucks can do a lot. It can buy six gallons of gas, or canned goods for a few suppers.

“Honey look!” he says.

And just like that, a bad day has become a good day. He unfolds the bill. He looks at Abe Lincoln’s stoic face. Even old Abe seems happy about this particular holiday blessing.

“Wow,” she says. “Aren’t you lucky?”

Luck isn’t the word. It’s a blessing from On High. Magic, even. It’s a sign that things are going to get better. That’s what it is.

But it’s short lived. Something’s wrong. There’s a pang in his stomach. He can’t keep this five dollars. He doesn’t know why.…

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. It’s chilly. The department store parking lot is filled with cars.

A woman rings a bell, standing beside a green bucket. She’s raising money for kids with cancer. She wears a Santa hat and sings “Joy to the World.”

I put a few bucks in the bucket. It’s not much, but every bit counts. Ringing a bell for donations is rough work.

Once, I rang a bell outside a supermarket. I was a pathetic, skinny, nineteen-year-old Southern Baptist wearing a stocking hat.

I stood beside a bucket from morning until late afternoon. Hardly anyone noticed me. A few smiled, some tossed in pennies, but most pretended I didn’t exist.

My first day ringing the bell, I raised seven dollars for a program at our church that bought gifts for children in the cancer ward. Seven lousy bucks.

That night, Brother James, looked at my stack of quarters and said, “Don’t feel too bad about it, son, lotta people are busy.

They ain’t bad people, just busy.”

But I did feel bad about it. I had met some of the pediatric cancer patients. They were normal, happy, fun-loving kids with hairless heads and big hearts. For some of them, it would be their last Christmas. I wanted to know that these children would get a few gifts from a fat man in a red suit.

I decided not to give up. One night, I went to my uncle for advice.

He listened to my problem without responding. And after I vented my frustration, he smiled, patted my shoulder, and said, “Reach into my cooler and get me another beer.”

He popped the tab. “I think the key here, Sean, is to reee-lax. You’ve done all you can do, that’s all that counts. You want a beer?”

“But,” I explained to my uncle. “I’m only nineteen…

Point Clear, Alabama—Christmas here is merry and bright. I am in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, writing you. The place is decorated to the nines. Pinery everywhere. Red ribbons. Twinkly lights.

I have always wanted to stay at this elegant place, but I have never been able to get past security. I am here to speak for an Alfa Insurance conference to seventy insurance professionals.

This is the swankiest hotel I’ve ever been in. My room has a wine refrigerator, starched sheets, and complimentary cucumber mint shampoo. The bath towels and bathrobes are so thick you can hardly get your suitcase closed.

There is an older man sitting on a bench across from me. He is sipping coffee and reading the morning newspaper. I notice him. He is well dressed, and slender. He looks familiar.

Finally, the man lowers his paper and glares at me.

He says, “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“That’s funny,” I say. “I was wondering the same about you.”

The next thing I

know, he’s sitting beside me. He says, “Wait a minute, are you Sean of the South?”

“That depends. Are you with the IRS?”

“Hey! You used to date my daughter a long time ago!”

Somebody please knock me unconscious with a cold chisel.

Suddenly, I remember him.

His daughter and I never actually “dated,” per se, but we went out once or twice. It was not a love connection. But what I remember most was a terse disagreement we had.

It’s a long story, but his daughter believed wholeheartedly that I ran over her mother’s marigolds with my truck.

I was offended. No matter how many times I swore that I didn’t destroy the aforementioned flowerbed, she refused to believe me. Then, she told me in no uncertain words that I was a “loser.” This hurt me. So, I said a few ugly…

I love this time of year. Holidays, food, and college football. The Iron Bowl is upon us. I’m going to a friend’s place for the game. I will be the only University of Alabama fan amidst twenty-nine Auburn University sympathizers in “War Eagle” T-shirts.

I have time to kill. I stop at a small bookstore. The kind with narrow aisles, and off-the-wall books.

I am a book guy. I am crazy about bookstores. I even like the way they smell. I have always wanted to be a maker of books. It was my earliest ambition until I discovered cheese. Then I wanted to dedicate my life to cheese.

When I was a boy, I read the newspaper with my father. He would point to the text and teach me to pronounce the words of columnists.

“What’s a columnist?” I once asked.

“Someone who writes for a paper,” he said.

“What about?”

“Oh, everything and nothing.”

Everything and nothing. Some phrases you don’t forget. This is

one such phrase.

The Christmas before he died, my father gave me a gift. It was a hardback book of American newspapermen like Mark Twain, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, and Will Rogers. When I asked him what it was about, he said, “Stories about everything and nothing.”

They were glorified columns, and I read the book so often the pages went limp.

A few years after his passing, I wrote my first attempt at a column. I was a teenager. It was ridiculous copy, written longhand on yellow legal paper. It was about nothing, really. It was meant to be a humorous commentary about Thanksgiving spent with unstable family members.

I sent it to a small newspaper via snail mail. Every morning thereafter, I ran to the end of the driveway to be the first to search the pages. The paper actually ran it.

There…

This is not my story. I am hearing it for the first time, just like you.

He is the one who tells it. He is old. He is in a wheelchair. He is carving a piece of basswood with a pocket knife. He speaks in a drawl so thick it’s poetry.

There are children around his feet. A few third graders, a fifth-grader, a fifteen-year-old, and one red headed writer who still watches Saturday morning cartoons. Occasionally.

The old man is telling stories. That’s what old men do. They are inherently good at this.

The man removes a five-dollar bill from his pocket.

“See this?” he says.

The kids nod.

The redhead nods.

Age has slowed his speech down. But not his mind.

“Why, I remember when five dollars was like a hundred bucks,” he goes on. “Back when times were hard.”

The Depression. A time when America was on the brink. He tells a story about the tail end of these lean years. He

was six. A rural towhead. He wore ragged clothes.

His shoes had given up the ghost and went barefoot most of the time—even to preaching.

“That’s what poor folks did,” he explains. “Our feet were always bare.”

It was December. Christmas was around the corner in the humid South. He found a five-dollar bill on the ground. And during his era, he might as well have won the Florida Powerball.

He ran home to give the money to his father.

“LOOK WHAT I FOUND, DADDY!” he shouted.

But his father didn’t want the money.

“Son,” his father told him. “It would be wrong for me to keep that money. Lotta folks need it worse than we do.”

But how could that be? They ate beans for supper. His brother worked labor jobs for chicken feed. His mother took in wash.…

Thanksgiving Eve, and I am writing you. I know you’re probably with family. Maybe Granny is with you. I don’t want to interrupt.

I only wish you knew how much you’ve changed my life. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that.

You see, I’ve been writing to you for four years. Just about every day. It’s one of the longest gigs I’ve ever had.

It started as a whim, now it’s life.

I’ve written from all sorts of places. The mountains of North Carolina, the hills of Arkansas, the Texas plains, the Arizona red rocks, the Rockies, beer joints in South Alabama.

You might not know this, but when I started this column—if you call it that—I didn’t like myself too much. And I didn’t like the pathetic jobs I worked.

I worked swinging hammers, running power drills, playing music in beer joints, and in Baptist churches. And I was tired.

But that changed the day I met you. And you can tell Granny I said that—in case she‘s

reading over your shoulder.

I remember the exact day I decided to write you. I was laying tile in an old man’s house. A thought shot through my brain. It was a flash, but sometimes flashes mean things.

I thought: “What if I write a blog? Yeah, I could do that.”

Usually, these ideas enter in one ear and slide out the other. But that day I got excited about it. I went home and wrote a 250-word column. To you.

And that’s when we met.

You became everything to me. From then on, wherever I traveled, I thought of you.

I wondered which sorts of things you might care about, what kind of day you were having, whether you needed to laugh. So I tried. I tried to make you smile. I fail a lot. But I…