The first time I ever had one of Wilma Dean Jacobs’ cakes, I was a boy. I was redheaded. I was chubby. I was a connoisseur of refined sugar products.

In our town, there was only one place that sold Miss Dean’s seven-layer cakes. It was the little gas-station convenience store up the street from my house. The Happy Store.

I think it was a Chevron.

It would go like this: Your mother would send you to the Happy Store before special family occasions, such as birthdays, baby christenings, parole-release dates.

You’d ride your bike to the Happy Store, you’d walk inside. The bell would ding over your head.

And the first person you saw would be Miss Carla Waters, standing behind the cash register.

Miss Carla was about yea-high. Eighty pounds, soaking wet. Silver hair. A voice like a tuba. She was an older woman who smoked Camels. She always had one hanging from the corner of her mouth. Her husband worked up at the landfill.

The Happy Store had a small wire-metal rack of Dean’s Cakes.

There would be at least 10 or 12 cakes. Mostly carmel. Plastic cake domes. Small, unassuming, stick’em labels on the fronts.

The cakes were like eating a cake made by your grandmother. Sort of.

Namely, because everyone knew who Miss Dean was. She was Miss Dean, from Andalusia, just up the road.

People YOU knew actually knew HER. Your cousins knew her. Your mom’s friends knew her. You dated a girl whose mother went to grammar school with Miss Dean.

That’s who she was.

And although you never knew her, you knew her caramel cake. Everyone did.

Miss Dean’s seven-layer caramel cake had a familiar flavor. The kind of flavor that reminded you of something special. Something nostalgic. Her caramel cake tasted exactly like cherubs singing Handel.

You can still remember exiting the Happy Store, gingerly placing the prized cake on your…

Just before midnight. Somewhere on the Texas prairie. A 20-year-old named Mark was driving on a two-lane highway on his way home.

You have to be careful when driving on an empty prairie. It’s easy to develop “prairie foot.” On a flat landscape, without landmarks, your foot tends to get heavy on the gas pedal. It’s not hard to travel upwards of 200 miles per hour by accident.

Mark saw flashing hazards ahead. A broken down truck with a horse trailer attached. He pumped his brakes and pulled over. And in the rural tradition of all who wear roper boots, he was ready to help.

“Need a hand?”

A young woman slid from beneath the truck chassis. She had grease smudges on her face. She was holding a scissor jack. And she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

Mark felt his breath get stuck in his throat.

She smiled. “Sorry. No speak’a the Inglés too good.”

Her truck had a flat tire. In her passenger seat was a silent elderly woman. The girl had been under

the vehicle looking for the jackpoint on the old Silverado, which can be dangerous business for the uninitiated.

“Allow me,” Mark said, already on the pavement.

It turned out to be a bigger problem than he’d expected. Her spare tire was shot, worn to the canvas. There was no way she was getting home on that thing.

Mark attached the horse trailer to his own truck and told her he’d take them home. But where did she live? Her jumbled English made it impossible to understand her directions.

So the girl drew him a map. And since there was no paper in Mark’s truck to write upon, she used a Sharpie to draw the route on Mark’s hand.

He presented her his hand, which was trembling when she wrote upon it.

It was 2 A.M. when he reached her aunt’s house. He…

Dearest Becca, I’m praying.

Surgeons are going to cut off your ear tomorrow. They found cancer in your ear, and they’re going to cut it off.

Sadly, I won’t be in town because I’ll be in Ohio, performing my one-man trainwreck on Lake Erie.

But oh, I wish I were here.

If I were in town, Becca, I’d be there in the hospital with you. Sitting beside you. Holding your hand. Because you’re my best buddy.

I don’t know how a middle-aged fool became best buds with a 12-year-old girl, but there you are.

I’d be hanging in the hospital room alongside your parents, eating vending machine food, playing card games with your dad, horsing around with your family. Trying to keep everyone in a positive mood.

Regretfully, I’ll be in a rental car. On my way to Seventeenth State. But I want you to know, you’ll be on my mind the whole time.

You claim you’re “not scared” about the surgery. And I totally believe you. Because even though you’re only 12, you’ve had lots of surgeries before. Fifty or sixty, I

think. More than anyone I know.

You were born to a mother with substance abuse problems. You were in foster care until your parents adopted you. Your life has been lived out in hospitals.

One surgery took away your lymph nodes. Another took away your ability to hear clearly in one ear. Another surgical operation removed your vision.

There have been too many operations to count. So this is nothing. I get it.

Even so, I know the procedure is weighing on you. I know you’re worried this won’t be the last operation. I know you’re worried they might have to do more treatments, or whatever it takes to remove the cancer.

You wear a brave face. You smile a lot. But I know you’re thinking about it.

I know this because when we talk, you give…

I’m in an airport. My wife and I are camped out at airline concourse B with other stranded airline passengers.

We were all booted off our flight because the plane was overbooked. I believe I was booted off, however, because I was the only passenger openly carrying a banjo.

Thankfully, the airline offered us cash to get off the flight. Whereas passengers ahead of us were just told to get off.

Even so, I’m sure the airline has a really good reason for overbooking their own flight. I’m sure their intentions were honorable.

The airline was probably trying to earn money so they could donate excess cash to cancer research, or eradicating starvation, or rehabilitating endangered purple frogs.

Or maybe the overbooking was purely an accident. Maybe the airline, although having been leaders in the airline industry since 1925, still hasn’t figured out the tricky business of calculating passenger-to-cargo-weight ratios.

To be fair, it’s very difficult to predict how many passengers will actually be on your plane even though each passenger has paid a small

fortune for their ticket several months in advance, and each passenger has checked in via computer, phone app, and agent-operated kiosk, multiple times, before physically arriving at the effectual airline gate.

Either way, my fellow booted-off passengers are not happy because many don’t feel they were treated fairly. Some were given money to evacuate. Some were given vouchers. Some were given the shaft.

Aggravated passengers are calling family members, venting to loved ones on phones, talking loudly about what, precisely, they wish would happen to wealthy airline executives as the executives eat their Cornish hens at supper tonight.

In the interest of anonymity, I won’t tell you which airline left us stranded, because I don’t think Delta Airlines would want that.

But anyway, here we are. Stuck in an airport. Again. Second time this month.

My instruments are scattered around us. One fiddle. One banjo.…

I knew something was wrong when we walked into our hotel room. Namely, because our toilet had blinking lights.

I called the front desk.

“Hello. There’s something wrong with my toilet.”

“What’s wrong, sir?”

“There are lights on it.”

“No, sir. It’s an AI toilet.”

“Come again?”

“It’s the toilet of the future.”

“I want a present-day toilet.”

She laughed. “Sorry. None of our rooms have the old, outdated toilets, sir.”

I don’t like where this country is heading.

My wife and I just stood there, looking at the robotic john. The receptacle looks like nothing you’ve ever seen. It is sleek, it plugs into a standard 15-amp outlet, and it is designed to resemble a giant marital aid.

“You gonfirst,” I said to my wife.

“I’m not sitting on that thing,” she said. “It might bite me.”

The Toto WASHLET is the world’s first artificially intelligent toilet featuring (I’m not making this up) intelligent high-pressure bidet, automatic lid, self-cleaning wand, heated seat, LED lights, and—remember I am still not making this up—electric AIR-IN WONDER-WAVE rectal cavity blow dryer.

I visited Toto’s website and looked up

the WASHLET. On the frontpage of the website is an attractive brunette wearing tight shorts, hanging out in a bathroom. She is wearing a wistful smile, sort of like Vanna White. Except, she is smiling at a toilet.

Here is what the website said:

“Today, millions of people across North America have shifted their daily ritual from wiping to washing with WASHLET. Far superior to the paper alternative, consumers now experience a new kind of clean…”

This is exactly the problem with America. When did our “daily ritual” suddenly need a “shift”? Moreover, when did Americans find themselves needing a toilet “paper alternative”? The Mobile Press-Register always worked just fine for my granddaddy.

The first flushing toilet was designed by Sir John Harrington in 1596, and for the last 400-odd years, that’s the toilet…

I have here a letter from 19-year-old Erin, who lives in Bristol, Virginia.

“Dear Sean,” she begins, “I want to be happy, but I’m not…

“My family is stressing me out, big-time. Especially my mom. My therapist actually recommended that I write to you, seeing if you have any insightful thoughts about happiness.”

Hi, Erin. My first insightful thought is: Fire your therapist. If he or she is recommending that you reach out to me, your life is in serious trouble.

If you want to see pure happiness, however, you should visit the guest laundry facility at my hotel. Which is where I am right now.

It’s a room about the size of a residential bathroom. I am trapped in this room with an all-boy soccer team.

There must be 841 little boys crammed in this space. They are loud. They are unbelievably happy. Testosterone waves are crashing against the walls, compromising the structural integrity of the Hampton Inn & Suites.

I have no idea what a soccer team is doing in the middle of North

Carolina. But then, I don’t know anything about soccer.

Namely, because we did not have soccer when I was a kid. During childhood, we only had two choices athletics-wise: (1) baseball, and (2) First Methodist choir.

Naturally, we boys gravitated toward baseball. Although some of us—and I’m not naming names—participated in baseball AND choir because Anna Peterson sang soprano and we thought she was hotter than an oven mitt.

I loved baseball. Baseball made me happy. I played first base. I wasn’t great, but I wasn’t bad, either.

I don’t mean to toot my own kazoo, but I set a few Little League records. For example: I still hold the record, for example, for eating an entire birthday cake in under two minutes.

But that’s the kind of everyday happiness we experienced as kids. Just like the soccer players in this laundry room, who…

I found a brown paper bag full of tomatoes on my doorstep, along with homemade tomato chutney. I don’t know where the stuff came from, but the tomatoes were homegrown.

If there is a pleasure more marvelous than homegrown tomatoes, it’s probably illegal. And I don’t want to know about it since I come from Baptists who don’t do illegal things because it could lead to a life of secular music.

But I was reared on homegrown tomatoes. And there will be tomatoes at my funeral. I’m serious. Funeral guests will be encouraged to place tomato products into my casket.

Any tomato product will do, as long as it’s not tomato aspic. I would rather have a colonoscopy in a Third-World nation than eat tomato aspic.

When I was a kid, there was a woman in our church named Lida Ann who always made tomato aspic. She peppered her aspic with mature green olives, capers, and little gray canned shrimp. She placed her dish on the buffet table and it looked like a giant, R-rated donut.

My mother would force me to eat it because, “Lida Ann is a sweet old woman, and she went to all that trouble.”

“I don’t care if she’s Forty-Mule-Team Borax,” I would say, “I don’t wanna eat it.”

Then my mother would pinch me until I cried. So I would shuffle toward the potluck line, use a butter knife, and smear the tomato-flavored hell onto a cracker.

Miss Lida Ann would kiss my cheek and say, “Why don’t you take the rest home, since you’re the only one who eats it.”

Miss Lida Ann would wrap it in aluminum foil and send it with me. And for the rest of the week, my mother would leave it on the counter. The stuff was so bad that all the flies pitched in to get the screen door fixed.

My mother was an avid tomato gardener.…