The wedding was held at an abandoned bank building in small-town Florida. It was a rundown building with old security cameras still mounted on the walls and ballpoint pens on chains. The bride got the venue for a bargain.

I was working as a Sheetrocker at the time. I got off work early and showed up with John Tyler to erect the folding chairs.

There were 40 chairs, the brown kind that every church and civic league used back in the day. We also unfolded old-fashioned card tables with steel legs. The sorts of tables that were responsible for 99 percent of all finger amputations within the U.S. at one time.

Next, the caterer arrived. Although, she wasn’t an actual caterer, she was the groom’s grandma. Her name was Marge. She was gray-haired, wiry, from Queens, New York. And I fell in love with her.

Marge barked orders like a jayvee football coach. She had a northern accent that sounded like submachine gun fire, and everything she said sounded like she

was supremely ticked off.

Marge and her daughters prepared so much food they had to rent a U-Haul van just to carry all the casseroles and chafing dishes.

The designated gift area was located at the old walk-up teller windows. When guests arrived they were to bring presents to the windows that were manned by Laney Daniels and her mom. Laney accepted all gifts and jokingly asked guests for valid IDs and account numbers.

Gifts were then stored in the walk-in vault.

The altar was a couple music stands I stole from a local school, both covered in text which read: “Property of Okaloosa Walton Community College.” Which I thought was a nice touch.

And the flowers. You should have seen the magnolias and lilies, Marge did the place up nicely, you would have never recognized the old bank.

Soon, cars began arriving in the parking lot. Before the…

It’s raining. Hard rain. Old Testament rain. I’m driving and I cannot hear my truck radio over the roaring water on my windshield.

This is what our local meteorologists calls “overcast with 10 percent chance of some precipitation.”

This is definitely “some precipitation.” This is what we in West Florida call a frog choker.

I am wearing my nautical-yellow rain slicker. Water drips from my hat brim like someone recently emptied a mop bucket onto my head.

My dog sits in the passenger seat beside me. Her head follows the windshield wipers. Left. Right. Left… I don’t know how she doesn’t pull a neck muscle.

We are caught in a ridiculous traffic jam. There is a major gas shortage in Florida, which is causing a gasoline panic. Everyone is hitting the highways in search of filling stations, draining the gasoline supply.

All our local gas stations have gone belly up. I’ve tried six different stations this morning. Bupkis.

Throw in “some precipitation,” and you get the slowest moving gridlock known to civilized man.

In traffic like this it will

take me 14 hours to get to the supermarket; 23 hours to get to the post office; and I might as well forget going to PetSmart. Which is where I was going.

Now traffic is moving again. Hallelujah. I’m driving at a pretty good clip when suddenly...

I slam my brakes.

Tires screech. My truck fishtails.

There is a guy is running across the highway in front of me. And I’m caught in a skid, braced for ultimate disaster.

The young man is holding up both hands, screaming at traffic. I can read his lips. “Stop!”

Thank God my truck does.

The kid jogs across a slick highway, through the booming rain. Cars slide to a halt. This boy is out of his mind, he just came scarily close to becoming a full-time harp player.

Car horns blare behind me. All-weather…

Out of the 7 billion people in this world, I saw you.

It was yesterday. You let a lady cut in line at the supermarket. An elderly lady. She was wearing a plastic COVID face shield, toting a fanny-pack oxygen cylinder. I watched you follow this woman to her Nissan Altima and load her groceries.

And last week I saw you. You were mowing a lawn. You, your teenage son, and your friends had all organized a weekly lawn maintenance schedule for a man whose legs were amputated due to diabetes. You work free of charge.

It was also you who returned my neighbor’s dog when the animal went missing. You hiked through four miles of backwoods with a pocketful of dog treats, calling its name. You aren’t even from our town. Someone told me you were vacationing here from Oregon.

Oregon, of all places. The Beaver State.

You sent money to 16-year-old Sara, a terminal cancer patient, as part of an online fundraiser. Altogether Sara raised nearly one hundred thousand bucks before she

died. And while you couldn’t save her life, you certainly showed the world how beautiful her life was.

You adopted a baby with fetal alcohol syndrome even though you are 56 years old and have already raised three children.

You donated blood.

You donated a stack of Louis L’Amour books to our local library. For which I can’t thank you enough.

And those are just the apparent things you did. What about the itty-bitty everyday things you do? Things nobody sees?

Like when you held the door for the gal walking into the Dollar General.

Or when you handed a few bucks to the guy outside Walmart who held a handwritten sign reading: “Hungry.”

Or how about each time you put on your scrubs to work a double shift in the emergency department? You administer IV fluids, take patient samples, and supervise a junior staff of…

A hospital waiting room. My wife sits to my right, waiting on a routine visit. Nothing major. Run-of-the-mill stuff. Welcome to the land of medical care. There will be a co-pay.

And at the moment my wife is hypnotized by the corner television—which is tuned to a home improvement show.

The TV host, a hip guy in a tool-belt, is about to create vaulted ceilings in an average residential bathroom using only his ingenuity, a sledgehammer, and an off-camera 260-man contractor crew. My wife asks if I think our bathroom needs vaulted ceilings.

I do not.

To my left I see a couple, mid-30s. He looks like he works hard for a living—scuffed jeans and boots, weathered skin. The woman beside him, a strawberry blonde, bites her fingernails.

“It's cold in here,” she's saying.

“Yep,” he answers with a blank face.

She pets his hand then holds it. And while he stares straight ahead, she measures her tiny hand against his big one. One of Monet’s water lilies hangs behind them.

“Are you scared?” she asks.

He shrugs,

eyes on the television.

On TV they're now using subway tiles for a kitchen backsplash instead of, I don’t know, non-subway tiles. The TV host is quite excited about this. These subway tiles are apparently a big deal to TV Guy. I get the feeling TV Guy wakes up in the morning and showers with his tool belt on.

My wife taps my shoulder. “I want one of those backsplashes."

I smile.

The woman in the waiting room leans her head on the man's shoulder. He's gazing at the television, deep in thought. Maybe he wants a subway-tile backsplash, too.

The woman says, “I've been praying that the doctor can cut it all out while he's in there, I mean, every last bit.”

“Yeah,” says the unblinking man, letting out a sigh. He's in no mood to chat about whatever cutting he…

DEAR SEAN:

I taught English for 21 years and I often read grammatical mistakes in your writing. This makes me cringe. May I suggest that you refrain from calling yourself a columnist (as you often do) until you get your grammar in order?

I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but you’re not a columnist. True newspaper columnists like Ann Landers and Erma Bombeck were in command of the English language. Your command is questionable.

Thanks,
GET-AN-EDITOR

DEAR MRS. SUNSHINE:

You’re more fun than a trip to the dentist. Which is exactly where I was when I read your gracious email. I was sitting in the dentist’s chair while Doctor Tim Nettles of Columbiana, Alabama, was peering into my oral cavity and admiring several decades of Folgers stains.

During this vulnerable moment, my phone vibrated in my pocket with your uplifting email. What a blessing. You sound like someone I could really be friends with.

But hey, you’re entitled to your opinions. This is America. And like my grandfather always said:

“Our opinions are like shiny award plaques hanging

in used car dealerships that nobody gives a flying flip about.”

You would have liked Granddaddy. He would have made you cringe, too. He butchered English like it was a dollar-store minute steak. The man worked in sentence fragments the way some work in oils or clay.

“Sir?” a waitress might say to Granddaddy. “Would you like a refill on your iced tea?”

He would extend his cup and grunt: “Much ‘blige t’ya.”

The waitress would commence pouring, whereupon Granddaddy would nod and say, “‘Preciate ch’all.”

Before walking away, the waitress, who also spoke fluent Fragment-ese, would give the universal response. “Ah-ite.”

You would have been in linguistic heaven.

So you’re absolutely right about me fouling up the English language. And I for one ‘preciate cha. Thank you for taking the time to help me understand just what a star pupil…

Last week. I saw a young mother in the supermarket parking lot. Her kids were fussing. She had a toddler in a stroller who was howling.

Her attention was on the screaming baby, so she didn’t notice her fugitive shopping buggy rolling downhill.

I did. So I jogged after it and caught the cart before it smacked the door of a very white, very shiny, very BMW.

She gave me a quick smile and a frantic “Ohmygodthankyousomuch.”

The baby screamed another chorus of misery.

Then the mother buckled her three kids into an economy car—a vehicle with rust around the wheel-wells. When she did, she spilled her purse. It was one of those big beach-bag deals.

God love her.

She threw her head into her hands while her stuff went flying everywhere. She stayed like that a little while. I don’t know whether she was crying, but she certainly deserved to.

A few random strangers and I helped gather her things in the parking lot. I chased a runaway lipstick tube and mid journey, I was

immediately lost in a time warp.

Because, you see, long ago I knew a woman like her. A single woman, a widow, who raised two kids on a shoestring, and struggled for every buffalo nickel.

The same woman who taught me to spell my name. To tie my shoes. And how to yes-ma’am and yes-sir my elders. A woman I called Mama.

I will never forget when Mama met a young Latina woman at her Wednesday Bible study when I was a child.

The Spanish-speaking woman was single, she had a partially deaf son, she lived in a dilapidated apartment, she worked many jobs. The woman had no car, and you won’t get far in a world of interstates and overpasses without tires. Nobody knew this better than Mama.

So Mama made friends with the woman. She carried the young woman to and from…

He sat alone in a breakfast joint. He was old, wearing wrinkled clothes, with white stubble on his chin, like he forgot to shave. He was doing a crossword puzzle.

When I am old, I will forget to shave and do crosswords.

He wore a Navy ball cap with scrambled-egg embellishments on the bill, his reading glasses on his nose.

Buck Owens was overhead singing “Together Again.”

I pulled up a stool beside him. Socially distanced, of course. We micro-smiled at each other. The waitress handed me a menu, I gave it back and replied, “Three eggs, sunny, and bacon, please.”

The old guy and I exchanged another formal grin. Minutes went by. He broke the ice first. “Where’s home, fella?”

When I am old, I will call strangers fella.

I jerked a thumb behind me. “About three hours that way. You?”

He laughed. “Nineteen hours in the other direction. On vacation with my kids in Crawfordville this week.” He looked at me over his readers. “Had to get outta the condo, my granddaughters were driving me insane.”

The waitress refilled his mug. The man

used six packets of sugar in his coffee.

I will someday use six packets of sugar.

The inscription on his ballcap caught my eyes, it read: “Navy Chaplain Corps.”

I pointed to his hat. “Bet I can guess what you did for a living.”

The man smiled. “Yep. I’m an inactive chaplain—there’s no such thing as a retired chaplain.”

“So, how’d you get into the business of saving Navy souls?”

He laughed again. “Well, I didn’t save’em. I just listened to a lot of’em talk.”

Silence.

He added, “My daddy was a preacher. But that ain’t what made me wanna be a Holy Joe.”

“What did?”

“Oh, lotta things.” He looked at me with eyes of slate blue, the color of dungarees. “You ever hear of the SS Dorchester?”

I shook my head. “Was that…

Sundown. I’m on vacation, sitting on the beach. I’m wearing a red Hawaiian shirt, swim trunks, a Resistol summerwear cattleman’s hat, and I’m reading Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express.”

I’m carefully keeping my electrolytes and B vitamins balanced with a healthful tonic that comes in longneck bottles.

In the middle distance, I’m watching a mother teach her son to swim.

“Don’t let me go, Mom!” the kid shouts, and his voice ricochets off the smooth water. He’s maybe 6 years old.

“I won’t let you go,” his mother says.

“Please! Don’t let go.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise?”

“Keep kicking your legs, honey, I’ve got you.”

The colors of the sun paint a Monet on the Gulf’s glasslike surface. The kid’s father is also watching the ordeal. The dad is half in the water, knee-deep, videoing the whole thing on his phone.

“Wave to the camera!” shouts Dad.

And in this moment I am eternally grateful that I was born before the Age of Phone Video. I wouldn’t have wanted my chubby childhood on film.

I don’t need visual documentation of my fledgling moments. Such

as the second-grade Christmas pageant when I dropped a frankincense box off the gymnasium stage and nearly gave Mrs. Simms a subdural hematoma.

Besides, I don’t look good on camera. If someone would have videoed my first swim lesson, I’ll tell you what they would have witnessed: incoordination.

The guy who first attempted to teach me to swim was named Rodney. Rodney was a lifeguard at our public pool. He had army tattoos and a deep affection for unfiltered Camels.

The main thing I remember about Rodney was that he drove a 1970 Dodge Charger (B-body) with a 440 Six Pack Hemi hood cutout and a pistol-grip shifter. Not that this matters.

When it came to swimming, Rodney’s philosophy was pretty laid back. He would throw us kids in the shallow end like bowling balls…

“First you gotta peel the eggs,” says the old woman as she peels hard boiled eggs over a sink. “This is the hardest part. You gotta have good fingernails.”

We are having a video call. The white-haired woman is standing in her kitchen. When she finishes peeling, she fires up an Oster electric mixer that whirs like a son of a gun.

“I use an electric mixer to whip my egg filling ‘cause my hands get tired stirring.” She laughs. “My deviled eggs are so good.”

Good. The goodness of mankind is a hotly contested idea in today’s tense world. Historically, this is nothing new. People have scoffed at the idea that mankind is intrinsically good since Eve took up dressmaking. Many believe there is no inherent goodness in human nature.

And then there are people like Miss Reba, with her deviled eggs.

Reba is 83 and a committed deviled-egg artist. The woman has been cooking for funerals, weddings, and local clambakes for 60-some-odd years. And she’s still chugging.

“The secret to good deviled eggs,” says Miss Reba,

addressing the phone camera, “is there ain’t no secret.”

This makes her giggle again. Then Reba takes a sip of a potent clear drink her daughter, Annie, mixed in honor of our phone call.

I ask the old woman, “What’s in the glass?”

Reba takes a sip. “Ovaltine.”

Miss Reba’s deviled eggs are famous in four counties. This particular batch is for the family of a 17-year-old girl who died in a car wreck. These eggs are for the funeral.

Sometimes Reba has been known to travel up to six hours to deliver her deviled eggs.

I asked why Reba does this. Why prepare food for random people, then go to the trouble of hand delivering it?

“Because I need them to see my face. Need them to know someone’s praying for’em. Deviled eggs are my excuse for dropping by.”

Miss Reba…

An old Florida village. Not the touristy kind with swimsuit shops and scooter rentals. This is a place where the local high-school colors are probably camo and orange.

We are vacationing nearby this week. I am in search of tuna dip.

I pull into a random seafood market. The place isn’t fancy. This is rural Florida, where all seafood markets are required by state law to look like rundown miniature correctional facilities.

In the sandy parking area an old man and a kid leap out of a dusty Suburban then walk inside. The old man wears an Atlanta Braves ballcap. His grandson, maybe 9 years old, wears a Freddie Freeman jersey.

Inside the market, the old man never speaks. He communicates via sign language with the boy. I don’t speak sign language, but I speak fluent Kid. And I see a lot of love on that little freckled face.

When the employee at the counter is ready to take their order, the old man gestures to the kid who serves as our translator this afternoon.

The kid

points and speaks to the guy at the counter. “We want three pounds of those.”

The seafood market employee is a man with a shaved head, lots of inkwork, and an unlit cigarette wedged in his lips. We must have caught him just before a smoke break.

The inactive cigarette bounces when he talks. “Three pounds of shrimp? Anything else, boss?”

The kid checks with Granddaddy for instructions. The old man looks over the motherlode of seafood displayed on ice. Choices, choices. He signs to Junior.

Junior translates. “Yeah. What’re those things?”

“These? Grouper cheeks. Good eating. Want some?”

The kid signs to the old man who nods.

“Yes, please.”

The kid never stops signing, even when speaking to the cashier. It’s called being polite to Grandad.

“Sure thing, bossman.” The guy behind the counter is trying to act nonchalant about this exchange,…