Becca and I walked inside Waffle House. The air was surgically cold. It smelled like cured pork. I have had a lifelong love affair with Waffle House. If you have to ask why, you might be from Iowa.

We selected a corner booth. Becca is 11. She is also blind. The waitress asked what we wanted to drink.

“Sweet tea,” said Becca.

“I’ll have the same.”

Becca and I talked about everything and nothing. Of life. Of love. Of boogers. You never know what an 11-year-old is going to talk about.

She had just gotten out of school. She was energetic and gabby. I learned about her friends, Paisley, and Brinley, and Nora, and Bryce, and so forth.

Also, I learned that, The Powers That Be do indeed manufacture fidget spinners that one can wear on one’s wrist. Spinners which not only spin, but also light up.

Becca had three such spinners in her purse.

Yes. A purse. Becca has recently started carrying a purse. She wears it across her torso. She looks very grown-up. It’s a large

purse. Floral print. Like the kind your mom used to carry.

My mother’s purse contained half the contents of the known solar system. She carried everything in there.

If you told Mama you were hungry, for example, she would give you something from her purse. A Kit Kat, or a sleeve of saltines, or a ketchup packet.

No matter what Mama gave you, it usually tasted like expired makeup and purse dirt. But you ate it, by dog, because there were starving people in China.

So anyway, Becca is probably my best friend. I don’t know how this happened. I didn’t know grown-ups could become best friends with children. But there you are.

I have discovered that I prefer Becca’s company. I made a promise to myself early on, that I would never speak to her like she was a child.

So…

Newspapers have a smell. If you’re lucky enough to find a newspaper in our digital world, you’ll notice the smell first. Fresh newsprint paper. SoySeal ink. Still warm. It’s a unique scent.

I grew up throwing newspapers. Not on a bicycle. My mother and I threw newspapers, riding in her beat up Nissan. We threw papers every day of the week. Weekends. Holidays. Rainy weather. Snow. Thanksgiving. Christmas Eve.

Our mornings went as such:

We awoke at 2:30 a.m. We arrived at West Marine at 3. Whereupon a delivery truck would pull up, carrying a pallet of the “Northwest Florida Daily News.” The pallet was about the size of an average Hardee’s.

Then, Mama and I would hole up in her car, wrapping newspapers while eating breakfast. Usually, Pop Tarts, or ham sandwiches.

Wrapping was the hardest part. You had to roll each paper into a tight tube. Then you shoved the paper into a tubular plastic sleeve which was about the same circumference as a No. 2 pencil.

Once a newspaper was wrapped, you

tossed it into the backseat, where your kid sister sat. She had pigtails. She was busily wrapping newspapers of her own.

Your hands would look like a coal miner’s.

There’s not much on the radio at 3 in the morning. But if you didn’t mind AM, you could listen to classic reruns of Paul Harvey. We were big Paul Harvey fans.

When we finished, the backseat was so weighted with newspapers, the rear axel sagged against the pavement, shooting sparks into the night at full speed.

My sister rode in back, buried in rolled-up newspapers. I rode up front, reciting the current list of subscribers.

And this is where the real work began. We all had roles. Mama was pilot. Kid Sister was munitions. I was tail gunner.

I would crank down the window and throw newspapers across Northwest Florida. We delivered several hundred billion…

We were newlyweds. Our apartment was cozy. Cozy in a nuclear-fallout sort of way.

We’re talking 600 square feet. Our bathroom was barely big enough to shower in without sustaining a subdural hematoma.

The tenants below us had a flea infestation. Which meant the whole building had fleas. Which meant that I was always pausing mid-conversation to scratch my scalp.

Our lives were otherwise pretty good. My wife taught preschool. Which is code for, “wiping tiny butts.” Ironically, when my wife first interviewed with the school, she flatly told the preschool director, “I’ll do anything but wipe butts.”

The director simply laughed. Within 24 hours on the job, my wife had already wiped eight.

Meantime, my job was working with a friend, hanging commercial gutter. I hated it.

I was the kind of guy you’d bring to a nice cocktail party, and whenever someone asked, “So, what do you do?” I’d answer, “My life is in the gutter.” Whereupon cocktail party guests would ask me to refill their drinks.

But we were happy. And that’s the

thing about newlyweds. They’re nonsensically happy. My wife and I were always exhausted, overworked, underpaid, and just generally pooped from trying to make ends meet. We lived on ramen noodles, or if we were feeling especially lavish, Stouffer's lasagna.

But we were happy.

On the night of my wife’s birthday, however, she wanted to go out to eat, and we couldn’t afford it. We had $27.39 in our bank account. It had been a hard month.

Heck, it had been a hard last few years.

At work that day, I was feeling terrible, thinking about how poor we were. I almost asked one of my friends whether I could borrow money for a nice birthday dinner, but I was not raised to ask for money.

The people I come from would rather live in a refrigerator carton than beg.

So that night, I got…

“I used to be a beauty queen,” said the waitress.

We were in Southern Mississippi. The waitress was older. Maybe in her 70s. Which is getting younger every year.

The woman brought my breakfast and my coffee. The food was hot. The coffee was the temperature of three-day-old bathwater.

“A beauty queen?” I said.

“Yeah,” the waitress said. “Won a local beauty contest when I was 24, I thought I was going to die of shock. Hadn’t never won nothing in my whole life.”

She had no confidence as a young woman. She grew up on a farm with six brothers. The only girl in a family of nine.

“My brothers were always trying to steal my food.”

She learned to work hard, how to bale hay, and how to handle large animals. You can always tell someone who has handled large animals. They don’t make sudden movements.

As a girl, she never thought she was pretty. She grew up in overalls and bare feet. Her mother cut her hair, and her daddy said she’d make a fine farmer’s wife.

“Then my aunt Jeannie came along,” she said. “My aunt said I should enter this beauty contest. And I was like, ‘What? Me? I’m ugly.’”

But her aunt insisted.

Her aunt took her into town to get her hair did. The older ladies in the salon wore helmet hair and pink nylon capes. They swarmed her like bees.

“They put so much hairspray on me I think I was an environmental hazard.”

The ladies did her makeup. They plucked her eyebrows. They did her eyelashes. They applied powder, rouge, and a gallon of base.

“I didn’t even recognize myself.”

The contest was a foreign experience. She felt like a fish out of the pond.

“My aunt told me to walk like Marilyn Monroe, and to speak on the microphone like Queen Elizabeth.”

The young woman won the contest. It was…

“Welcome to Moe’s!” the man sang to us.

He was pushing a mop, wiping down tables at Moe’s Southwest Grill in Daphne, Alabama.

We walked into the restaurant and were greeted by an older man in a faded cap and a T-shirt which read HERE FOR THE QUESO.

He was singing his greeting along to the melody of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

“Welcome to da Moe’s….
“Welcome to da Moe’s….”

We had been on the road for a week. We were tired, depleted, suffering the adverse effects of road-trip calorie deficit. What we needed were fats and carbs. What we needed were intravenous burritos.

“We gonna take care of yooooooooou at da Moe’s!” sang the man with the mop. “Oh yeeeeeah!”

His name was Roger. He was smiling, singing his greeting to all who entered.

He used different melodies for each welcome. He borrowed his melodies from Aretha Franklin, James Taylor, Boy George, and Prince. But the gist was always the same:

Welcome to da Moe’s.

Most customers smiled when the vocalist gave the salutation. And, amazingly, almost everyone would sing back.

Many impromptu

performers would warble:

“Thank you!” Or: “Okaaaay now!” You could tell these customers weren’t exactly trained singers inasmuch as many sounded like English Springer spaniels with sinus infections.

“Welcome to da Moe’s!” Roger sand to a college kid.

“Thank you!” the kid replied in the style of Elvis Presley.

“Welcome to da Moe’s!” Roger sang to an elderly woman.

She began to blush. Finally, the woman caved and sang her reply in the tremulous alto voice of a front-row Baptist. “Thannnnk yooooou!”

“I been working at da Moe’s for 13 years,” he said. “Every day I try to cheer people up. You know how it is, people have bad days sometimes. We all have’em. But when you sing, it give you reason to forget your bad day.”

Roger used to be a janitor at Daphne Middle…

I prayed for you tonight. Before bed. I’m serious.

I don’t get down on my knees or do anything crazy like that. I don’t kneel. Namely, because if I knelt I wouldn’t be getting up again without the assistance of EMTs.

So you might be wondering what I prayed for. Well, that’s easy. I prayed for you to laugh. That’s how I start every prayer for you.

I can’t know what you’re going through right now, nor how badly you hurt. But I know one thing: there is no better feeling than laughter.

I prayed this for Dan and his wife, Freida, who have practically been living at the oncologist’s office recently. I pray this for my cousin Cosby, and for my cousin Bentley, to laugh so hard they spill their beers.

I prayed for the family of the guy down the street—the ambulance was at their house today, and everyone was in the yard weeping as a covered gurney was wheeled away.

Also, I pray tomorrow will be better than today.

I don’t care if

today was a decent day, I pray tomorrow is off the chain. I pray that you have a brief moment of awareness tomorrow, as you eat your PBJ, or your Swiss Cake rolls, wherein you say to yourself, “Man, this is a pretty good day.”

I pray this for my friend Loe, who just lost her nephew. And for Regina, whose grandson has been fighting for his life. I pray this for Mark, whose dad is now on hospice care. For Laney (6 years old) whose dog died. And for Jon (15) who has his very first date with his very first female on Friday.

And normalcy. That’s a big one. I also pray for you to have some normalcy.

There is no sensation more wonderful than feeling normal. Normal enough to read a book, or watch reruns, or to eat Captain Crunch for…

Pineview Street. A nondescript house. Off-white. One story. Nothing fancy. Nice neighborhood. Manicured lawns.

On the back of the house is a newly built wheelchair ramp. I knocked on the door. The caregiver answered.

Inside, the first thing you saw was medical stuff. Prescription bottles. Walkers. Plywood duct-taped over the carpet, so wheelchairs could move freely. A hospital bed sat in the den.

“You have visitors,” the caregiver announced.

The old man was sitting in his wheelchair. Facing the picture window. He turned and smiled.

White hair. Robin’s-egg blue eyes. He’d lost weight since I last saw him. But the smile was still there.

He was born in 1936, reared in Monroe County, Alabama. And John Finklea still has the voice of a preacher. It’s all about inflection.

“How’s my buddy?” he said, pumping my hand.

He’s old school. The kind of preacher who preached six or seven revivals in a week, then mowed the church lawn on Saturday night.

He’s baptized throngs in Brewton, Alabama. And buried half the residents in Union Cemetery.

Recently, he had a bad fall. It caused a brain

bleed. He’s doing better now, but one of his legs is paralyzed. And he’s relearning how to walk.

There are stories about him. Lots of them.

“Brother John hung out with the drunks,” one local woman told me. “He wasn’t like any preacher we’d ever known. He’d go fishing with’em, hunt with’em, laugh with’em. He’d do everything but drink and cuss.”

He sat in deer stands, shoulder-to-shoulder with rowdy individuals, cheaters, and men with untoward reputations. And he never thumped a Bible at them.

“He was just their friend.”

But when the lives of his friends fell apart; when the proverbial fertilizer hit the fan, who do you think they called first?

“I remember one time,” said a local man, “Brother John baptized a man in town who had been bad on drugs. There were some…

Take the interstate exit and follow the pavement to the rural route. Go past the fields of autumnal cotton, past the lopsided trailer homes sitting in fields of blond stubble, past the abandoned filling station, and soon you will find the little town.

You’ll see the hi-welcome-to-our-city-sign, covered with smatterings of tin badges for the Lion’s Club, Kiwanis, Rotary, and the all-you-can-eat catfish joint. You’ll see the feed and seed, the vacant downtown storefronts Walmart killed, and finally you’ll see the little white dog trot house.

Well, at least it used to be white. Today it’s more mildew colored.

In the overgrown yard are the remains of ancient outdoor Playskool toys that predate the Carter administration, and the bones of a rusted swing set that went to be with Jesus a long time ago.

Elderly Martha was standing on her porch waiting for me when I pulled up. Martha is not her real name, but it will have to do.

She speaks with an accent that’s thicker than pancake batter. She raised her family here.

She retired here.

“I used to work at mill,” she told me. “I was the nurse lady who bandaged people who got hurt.”

She poured two mugs of coffee. Weak coffee. The brew was the color of iced tea. It was the kind of coffee many old-timers often drink. I once asked an elderly guy why old people made their coffee so weak. The returning answer was: “So we can drink it all day long.”

Case closed.

The woman sat at her kitchen table, staring into her mug of brown water, and told the inexperienced writer across from her the story that brought him here.

Her story took place in the winter. She remembers it vividly. The tree branches were naked, the sun was setting. She was leaving the mill after a very long workday.

“My mama lived with us at the time,” she said.…

Cracker Barrel. Somewhere in Louisiana. It was late. Approaching closing time. Cracker Barrel officially closes at 9 p.m. But it wasn’t 9 yet.

So they let us in.

They were apparently short staffed. The employees were in the weeds. They had a bunch of grumpy customers, most of whom kept demanding more ranch.

Nevertheless, the waitresses treated each person in the dining room like they were one of the Kennedys.

My wife and I had been on the road since 5 a.m. We’d crossed three state-lines, and survived on gas-station fare. Earlier that day, in Mississippi, I ate a gas-station hotdog that will remain in my lower intestinal tract for the following 62 years.

I was road weary. Starting to see double. I had done a performance in Florida that morning, and we were on our way to Texas where I would make a speech for a roomful of people who sold tires.

The waitress came to our table. I ordered the catfish. Cracker Barrel’s catfish is heaven. The most underrated dish on the

menu. You get two cornmeal crusted U.S. farm-raised filets, three hushpuppies, tartar, and a King James Bible.

I was busy eating cornbread when I noticed the guy sitting next to our table.

He wasn’t elderly, but he moved like an old man. Careful and slow. He was wearing a chewed-up ballcap. His face was unshaven. His plaid had holes in it. His shoes were Velcro.

He could have been 60. Could have been 80. Hard to tell. Each time he took a bite, he shook so badly that food fell off his fork. He wore a bib of many colors.

A stroke maybe? Multiple sclerosis? Perhaps Parkinson’s. Every time he tried to eat, it wasn’t working out. He wasn’t getting any food into his mouth.

There was a young woman sitting nearby. With her friends. She was maybe 16.

She was a typical teen of our…