Cape San Blas—The Gulf of Mexico is outside my window. I am eating breakfast. These are some very good biscuits.

Biscuits are the reason I am writing this. I love biscuits, you see. When I was a boy, my mother made them by dusting the counter with flour and stamping dough with a drinking glass. Hers were big enough to be used in professional wrestling matches.

Right now, my wife and I are in Cape San Blas, staying in a rented beach house with the windows open. The kitchen is tiny, but my wife managed to whip up magic.

In its lifetime, the cape has seen its share of hell. Four historic lighthouses have come and gone due to hurricanes. Storms have been beating this peninsula ever since Adam’s heyday.

Recently, Hurricane Ivan, Katrina, and of course Michael. But you can hardly tell it. The remote cape looks as lovely as it always has.

“If you live in Cape San Blas,” said one local man, “you expect

things to get rough, but we don’t worry too bad, that’s life, man. You get your tools and rebuild.”

There’s something poetic about that.

Years ago, I had the first breakfast my wife ever prepared for me, right here in Cape San Blas. We weren’t married. I was a younger man.

My father had been dead for years. I was damaged goods, but somehow I managed to get a girlfriend. I was staying with her family in a rental house on the cape. That first breakfast lives in my memory.

Her father was frying sausage, her mother was eating a grapefruit with sugar, and her brother was getting his fishing rods ready.

There was an old man in a recliner, they told me he was a politician once. He wore seersucker. He was reading the Port Saint Joe Star.

Breakfast was a grand production.…

I turned on my television. A reporter announced that there had been a school shooting at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte campus.

The TV showed scenes from a nightmare. Paramedics. People on stretchers. Police cruisers. The reporter said that two people were killed, four had been injured.

I didn’t mean to, but I started crying. It just sort of happened. You can’t control these things.

My dog began scratching the door to go outside. So I wiped my face and took her for a walk to help clear my head.

The sun was lowering, the sky was orange, the clouds were perfect. And I started thinking about the devastated students in Charlotte.

They were children, young adults, teachers, adjunct professors, and custodians. Some of the students might have been sitting in their classrooms daydreaming about the same things I once thought about in college.

Maybe they wondered if they would pass algebra. Maybe they wondered if the blonde in social science class ever noticed them. Perhaps they wondered why professors

go to the trouble of printing syllabuses when nobody reads them.

Then. All hell broke loose.

The thought made me cry again. “Get a hold of yourself,” I whispered. “You’re turning into an old woman.”

That’s when I saw my neighbor’s children, playing in the street. A girl knelt on a skateboard, dressed as Batman. She had the mask and everything. Her brother was rolling her on the pavement.

The girl threw her arms outward, her cape waved behind her. They wore smiles bright enough to set the woods on fire.

I doubted that these children had any idea about what happened today in Charlotte. Thankfully.

The little girl whizzed by.

“I’m flying!” she screamed. “Can you see me?”

“I see you!” her brother shouted. “You’re doing it!”

It was sweet enough to bring a tear to a glass eye.…

I’ll never forget it. One year ago, we pulled into a long dirt driveway in Molino, Florida. The grass was long. The sky was blue. A farmhouse sat in the distance.

I opened my truck door and saw a litter of bloodhound puppies running in all directions. One puppy in particular caught my attention. A girl.

She ran slower than the rest. She had paws that were ten sizes too big for her body. Her ears were long enough to be featured in a Disney animated film. Her clumsy gait was more bounce than run.

“She’s the runt,” said the man. “Can’t quite keep up with the others, bless her heart. She tries so hard.”

The puppy’s brothers and sisters had left her in the dust. They were chasing something together in a pack, but their runt sister was too far away to catch up. So she stopped and caught her breath, watching them play without her.

“See?” said the man. “She’s sorta slow, they always leave

her out, but she sure is sweet.”

I wandered toward her, talking to her in a high-pitched voice.

I come from rural people. Something within my DNA makes me use a high-pitched voice around babies, animals, and during arguments with my wife.

The dog looked at me. And because she descended from generations of rural dogs, something inside her said “attack him.”

The puppy bounded toward me like a floppy piglet. I dropped to my knees. She tackled me. She ate my hat. Then she chewed on my earlobe.

And I knew that Heaven had made her just for me.

I wanted to call her “Thelma Lou” after Barney Fife’s girl on the Andy Griffith Show. Because in the great sitcom of life I am a lot like Barney Fife. I would love to be heroic like Andy, but I’m not. If you ever…

I’m warning you beforehand, what I’m about to say is going to seem utterly ridiculous.

Here goes:

My mother once told me that I could conquer the world if I ate a decent breakfast. The whole world. All because of breakfast.

See? I tried to warn you.

Anyway, to this very day I’m still not sure how this meal can make conquering the world possible, but my mother never lies.

I remember the day she told me, I was having a devastating morning. I was about to take an entrance exam into the sixth grade. And this was a big deal because earlier that year, I’d failed fifth-grade—which drained my confidence.

But back to breakfast.

Mama made the greasiest meal. Three eggs, cooked in fat from a Maxwell House can, bacon, potatoes, grits, and toast hearty enough to sand the hull of a battleship.

I passed my test. I made it to the next grade. And eventually, my confidence began to improve. Thusly—and I’ve always wanted to use that word—I can

only assume that breakfast played an important role.

Since then, I’ve always believed in the first daily meal. I ate a good breakfast the day I got married. A big one. That day, the waitress kept bringing me plates of pancakes.

“You must be starving, honey,” she said.

I smiled. “Thusly,” said I.

But I was only nervous-eating. Truth told, they weren’t even good pancakes—the blueberries tasted like freeze-dried goat pellets.

I also ate a big breakfast the day I got fired. My boss called me into his office and chewed me a new nose-hole. He said things so hateful I can still remember them. I quietly walked out of his office before he finished speaking.

I went to eat breakfast. I read the paper, I watched the sunrise. I had one of the best mornings I’ve had in years.…

Moreland, Georgia—it is almost midnight. The stars are out by the billions. I am pumping gas at a filling station, watching them.

I like watching stars. I don’t know why. Somehow, they remind me that I am never forgotten by this universe.

A few hours ago, our plane touched down, and it felt like coming back from the moon. The South is my home, and when I’m gone too long I start to miss it.

We’ve been traveling for seventeen days—most of those days were spent out West, where humidity is a foreign word. And I missed home something fierce.

We left the airport and I started driving southward on a dark highway with windows rolled down. I passed kudzu, longleaf pine trees, and old barns.

I drove past trailer homes with lit windows glowing in the dark. And tiny churches, abandoned long ago. I passed a stray dog, wandering the highway in the dark.

If I had a nickel for every stray on these backroads.

And I pulled over here, to fill our tank in Moreland. I still have a long way to travel, but I’m close enough to be excited about seeing my front porch.

There is a gentleman on the other side of the pump, filling his tank. He drives an ugly truck. He wears boots. He shows a two-finger wave.

I return the favor.

He introduces me to the dog in his front seat.

“Her name’s Uga,” he says. “‘Cause I’m a dyed in the wool Georgia Bulldog fan.”

Nobody says things like “dyed in the wool” out West. But they say it in our part of the world.

My favorite writer was from Moreland. I read every one of his books before I hit age thirteen, and I silently declared to the Georgia stars, one summer night on my aunt’s sleeping porch, that…

I am thirty-five thousand feet above the rest of the world. Below me is Texas. Or maybe it’s Oklahoma. I’m on a flight back to Atlanta, sitting beside a stranger.

The stranger is from New York. Earlier, he was talking on his phone before takeoff. He was using swear words like they were basic adjectives.

Folks on the plane were beginning to stare, like maybe the stranger and I were buddies. I just smiled.

But now that we are in the air, and he’s chewing ice cubes. That’s right. Big, loud, ice cubes. And he’s listening to rap music on headphones.

You should hear the music leaking out of his headphones. I cannot repeat the lyrics because my mother raised me in a fundamentalist home with a framed picture of Billy Graham on my nightstand.

So I will substitute all swear words using names from the 1953 roster of the New York Yankees.

One of the verses to the rap song I am overhearing goes like this:

“You no good sack of Phil Rizzuto,
“Yogi Berra, Berra, Berra,
“You stupid mother Whitey Ford,
“I mean, what the Johnny Schmitz?
“What the actual Johnny Schmitz?”

Commercial flying has changed over the years. The first time I ever boarded a plane was to visit my aunt in St. Louis. I was a kid, traveling with my mother.

We flew because my father didn’t like the idea of my mother driving long distances alone. He was afraid she would get a flat tire.

Once, to prepare my mother for a road trip, he taught her to change the rear tire on our station wagon. My mother got so good at changing tires, Daddy would clock her with a stopwatch.

Her unique skills were a source of entertainment at family barbecues for years thereafter.

One time my father’s friend, Buddy, lost a…

It’s a small cinder block restaurant in the middle of an American desert. “Comida Mejicana,” the painted sign advertises. We are far from town. Very far.

We park in an empty dirt area. There is only one car in the parking lot. A beat-up Chevette. Red.

I learned how to drive stick in my uncle’s Chevette as a kid. I’ll never forget the sound of my uncle, screaming from the passenger seat when I coasted down my first hill.

I never knew he could cuss like that.

I push the restaurant door open. A bell dings. A little girl comes from the back of the restaurant. She is nine years old.

An old man stands in the corner, watching her. He has skin like wrinkled paper, a white mustache, and an apron. He supervises her with a gentle smile.

The girl asks what my wife and I want to drink.

“Sweet tea,” we say.

The little girl makes a face. “Sweet tea? What’s that?”

“We’ll just take water.”

The girl

hands us menus. They are written in Spanish. I recognize a few words, most I don’t recognize.

For example: “pambazo” and “capriotada.” These seem like words my uncle might shout while speeding downhill in a Chevette.

Finally, I say to the girl, “You know what? Tell the cook to surprise me.”

“Really?” she says.

“Is he a good cook?” I whisper.

“Good? He’s SUPER AWESOME!”

Then the girl says something in Spanish to the old man. He laughs. He pats her hair. He kisses her cheek. And if there’s anything sweeter, I don’t know what it is.

In the kitchen, I hear a stove hiss. I see the old man behind the window, cooking. The smells are heavenly. The mariachi music overhead is hard not to appreciate.

The girl is playing in the booth behind us. She…

I am enjoying a rural Arizona morning. I am on the patio of a rental house. The birds are greeting the day.

Beside me is a dog. A neighborhood stray maybe. The dog is white, and he smells like a billy goat. I place my hand on his head. He is smiling.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

No answer.

I’m good at naming dogs. It’s a gift. Show me a dog, and I’ll name it.

“You look like a ‘Duke’ to me. Do you like that name?”

He does not. He sneezes at it. And this is a shame because I’ve always thought Duke was a perfect dog name.

Next door is an old woman working in her backyard garden. I can see her through the fence. She is dressed in a nightgown, white-haired, she is barefoot, smoking a cigarette.

Arizona is a different place than I’m used to. People here talk differently, they dress differently, they do different things.

Yesterday, for example, I saw a young lady in a grocery

store wearing a golden leotard with turquoise hair. Her husband was dressed like a wizard.

Even so, people are people, no matter where you are. Leotards and all. All humans have the same basic needs. To love. To be loved. And to eat lots of cheese.

The elderly neighbor woman is digging holes, planting things. Her son is helping, but she is not friendly to him.

“Mom, why’re you planting whole apples?” he says.

“Because I like apples, dumbass.”

“You don’t expect them to actually grow do you?”

“No.”

“Then why plant them?”

She throws a shovel at him.

This is what I’m hearing right now.

On the street before me, I see a man in a cowboy hat, walking. On his shoulder he is carrying a lizard. A very big lizard.

Like I said.…