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.…