I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you. That’s it.

You don’t get thanked nearly enough for all you do. And I’m here to correct that. Even if only for a few moments. I hope you know how grateful we all are.

And by “we all,” I mean us. The whole human race. So thank you. We appreciate you.

Thank you to the old man in Walmart who was in the self-checkout lane when he paid for a young Latina woman’s groceries after her card was rejected.

Thank you to the teenage boy who bounced his screaming baby sister on his hip while paramedics loaded his mother into an ambulance on the interstate. I passed the accident on the way home. It was awful. Police cars everywhere.

Thank you to the officer who took the crying baby into his arms and held her against his chest while the teenage boy crawled into the ambulance with his mother.

Thank you to the elderly man who helped change a flat tire for six older men stranded on I-285 outside Atlanta.

The man who changed the tire never knew he was helping a carload of six former inmates who recently moved into transitional halfway housing; who, even though they are now sober, law-abiding citizens, are unemployed, and largely unimportant to those around them.

Thank you, whoever you are, for faking like you’re in a good mood for your kids, even though your heart is broken.

Thank you for caregiving for your husband/wife/mom/dad/son/daughter/relative/stranger.

God bless all who change the diapers of adult patients in nursing homes, and do it in such a way that there is no loss of dignity for either party.

Thank you for supporting your local musicians. Thanks for ordering an extra beer and placing an extra tip in the jar before requesting “Freebird” as a joke because you think you are being original.

Thank you for tipping your waitress.…

Yeah, I miss hurricane season.

I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. Ever since I left my Florida hometown and moved to Birmingham, I’ve found myself thinking about hurricane season, which runs from June to the following June.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t miss the actual hurricanes. But I grew up in the Panhandle and I miss seeing neighbors hook arms during times of trouble.

There is nothing as unifying as a hurricane. Despite the destruction that hurricanes bring, hurricanes also bring families and entire regions together. I don’t know how they do it. But it’s true.

I’m not saying these storms aren’t terrifying, horrific, calamitous weather events so catastrophic they traumatize everyone in their paths. They are.

But somehow everyone sucks it up and says collectively, “We’re gonna get through this together.”

And we did. We always did.

Hurricane Michael’s epicenter made landfall 33 miles from my doorstep. After the storm, my wife and I helped with some relief work. And do you know what we saw?

We saw entire towns feeding each other, clothing one another. People cut

their neighbor’s hair and paid each other’s bills. People watched each other’s kids, roofed each other’s homes, rebuilt each other’s lives. It was like a giant Love-a-Palooza.

Outsiders might look at such a scenario and say to themselves, “How awful, these towns are falling apart.” But the outsiders would be wrong. These towns were only getting stronger.

After a bad storm, it’s you and your little town against the whole world. There are no divisions. No nitpicking. No griping. Only people shouldering each other through one of the worst experiences they’ll ever have. Teenagers paint graffiti hearts on the sides of destroyed buildings, spelling words like PANHANDLE STRONG, or WE ARE ONE, or GOD BLESS US.

During my youth, our whole calendar year was built upon the possible occurrence of devastating tropical storms.

Hurricanes made their way into our…

He was born the same year Ty Cobb retired. The same era The Bambino was selling Old Gold cigarettes in the back pages of “The Saturday Evening Post.”

It was a period in American history when cowboy movies were silent, radios were loud, and Charles Lindebergh was still considered to be a little off.

The boy was born to Carl and Geneva, two average North Carolinians in an average house in an average town. They lived modest lives. They lived beneath the water tower, for crying out loud.

He was their only child. He got all their attention.

“I loved my father,” he once said. “He lived to be eighty. He smoked cigarettes every minute of his life.”

His father had a notoriously wet sense of humor. He was the kind of guy who tended to be popular in places like barbershops, feed stores and any place where old geezers play checkers.

Years later, when the boy started performing his one-man comic routine before Rotary Clubs, civic leagues, and Elks Lodges, the

boy admitted that his brand of hayseed humor came from simply impersonating his old man.

His mother, Geneva, was known by her friends to be sugar sweet. She was born just over the North Carolina state line in Old Virginny.

To get to her hometown you’d have to hop on the Blue Ridge Parkway and head north from the Carolinas. After about an hour you’d arrive in the meadows of Patrick County.

If you veer onto County Highway 602 and follow it into the sticks, eventually you will find the remnants of a tiny mountain hamlet so remote they have to mail-order sunshine from the Montgomery Ward catalog.

It is here where an ancient general store/post office still stands. It has white clapboards and a rusty Gulf Oil sign out front. The structure was built in 1892, and still does business today.

You can still go inside and…

I started to write a column but deleted it. In fact, I’ve tried writing this a hundred times, but I keep erasing it. I start crying too hard.

Initially, I was going to write about the pediatrician, Roy Guerrero, who was born and raised in Uvalde, Texas. He attended Robb Elementary.

He was at lunch when the shooting happened. He rushed over to Uvalde Memorial Hospital in the aftermath of one of America’s most heartrending tragedies.

“It was a complete madhouse—what you see in disaster movies,” he said. “Doctors and nurses in every single room, people running around like maniacs, kids in the hallway bleeding and screaming, surgeons working on kids.”

In the hall he met a fourth-grade patient he’d been treating since infancy. The child saw the whole thing happen. She saw her teacher die. She told Guerrero she had rubbed blood on herself and played dead.

That’s as far as I got when I started weeping.

I couldn’t write anything more. This has never happened to me before. I’ve written about mass shootings

before, but this one has been different.

So I took a break. I packed my laptop and drove to a public park, and tried to get my head right. Sunlight, that’s what I needed. I needed to get out of my stuffy office.

I sat on a bench. The park was busy. The exercise track was loaded with fitness enthusiasts wearing Lycra so tight you could count their ribs. The playground was overrun with children.

I saw a kid playing Superman, running around, playacting like he was flying, he used a red towel as a cape.

I opened my laptop and tried to write another column.

This time I was going to write about paramedics in Uvalde. I interviewed one of the EMTs by phone a few days ago. He had driven 85 miles to be on the scene that day. He asked if I…

Memorial Day is the unofficial start to summer, and summer was in full bloom in America. The nation experienced mostly beautiful weather.

The Midwest had highs in the 80s, The Southeast experienced temps even higher. Temperatures in the Florida panhandle exceeded approximately 173 degrees.

But it’s important to remember that it wasn’t a great Memorial Day weekend for everyone.

Yesterday in Saint Louis, for example, a man named Phillip was playing baseball with his kids while his wife, Lindsey, was making potato salad inside. The day was going swimmingly.

“Guys in my family have always played baseball on Memorial Day weekend,” Philip wrote to me this morning in an email. “It’s a longstanding tradition for us.”

Phillip was pitching. His 11-year-old son, Austin, was at the plate. Phillip delivered an easy pitch underhand. His son swung the bat like the baseball had personally insulted his mother. The bat connected.

PING!

The good news is that Phillip’s son hit a line drive. The bad news is: it was a line drive which struck a part of

Phillip’s anatomy most often associated with procreation.

The ball nailed Phillip. He howled in pain. He went down under the power. His kids all gathered around him and asked if he was okay. All Phillip could utter was, “Go get your mom, please.”

It bears mentioning, Phillip’s son was using an aluminum bat not a wooden bat. Which might not sound like an important detail to this story except that the exit velocity of a ball hit by an aluminum bat is a LOT higher than that of one hit by a wooden bat.

A ball hit by a wooden bat has an average velocity of 60 to 80 mph. Whereas a ball hit by an aluminum bat is capable of breaking the sonic barrier.

Phillip’s wife approached her husband and asked her children what had happened.

Her 4-year-old son remarked, “Austin hit daddy in…

In Washington D.C., near the intersection of 22nd Street NW and Constitution Avenue NW, just north of the Lincoln Memorial, stands a wall of black granite. It’s huge.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial consists of 140 stone panels, polished to a high finish, sunken into the earth. The panels create a massive wall that is 493 feet and 6 inches long, about the size of a skyscraper laid on its side.

You expect the wall to be big, but you’re not prepared for how big it really is. This thing is ginormous.

I was in D.C. a few months ago. The granite gleamed in the morning sun, I stood before the never-ending wall of stone, sipping a bottle of water, taking it all in. The Washington Monument was on one side, Honest Abe was on my other.

There was an old man and his grandson roaming the wall, reading the names reverently. The old man had a wild white beard, he wore an army cap.

“Look, Grandpa,” said the kid, “is this one my uncle’s name?”

“Lower

your voice,” said Granddaddy.

“But… Why are we whispering?

“Respect,” the old man said.

There was indeed a very respectful mood at the Vietnam memorial, which surprised me. I’ve been to U.S. war memorials before. And at most National Park Service war memorials the mood is nonchalant, happy even. Because most memorials commemorate wars that happened so long ago that nobody can remember them.

At the Gettysburg Memorial, for example, I saw hundreds of families pushing strollers, laughing, posing with performers in Civil War costumes, snapping selfies. At Arlington National Cemetery, I saw school kids playing tag among gravestones.

But people were silent here.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not like other American memorials. Here, I saw old men touching the wall, heads bowed. There were people taking photos of names. There were families telling old stories. I saw a few people weeping.

There…