We leave our inn at daybreak. Our innkeeper is awake and already at the front door, wearing a robe, waiting to say goodbye to us. Like a mom seeing her kids off to school.

She gives us a heartfelt and emotional goodbye in French, with double kisses and everything.

“Dieu sout avec toi,” she says.

I don’t speak French, so I answer, “Ten four.”

Which she evidently doesn’t understand. And there’s no way to explain such a philosophical concept as “ten four,” so I give her a hug instead. The French, I am pleased to learn, are huggers.

And we’re off.

Jamie and I are wearing heavy packs. But not as heavy as some pilgrims. Some hikers have fallen victim to overkill packing. They are wearing packs the size of Hondas. But they will learn. Just like we all will. That on the Camino, as in life, it is not how much you carry that matters, but how much you are able to leave behind.

There are a handful of other pilgrims leaving San-Jean-Pie-du-Port

at the same time we are, making their exodus on foot. You can pick us “peregrinos” out of the crowd because of the enormous backpacks we carry.

Soon we are all on a highway which winds through impossibly green hills. A thick fog drapes itself over the earth. Sheep everywhere. Some of which stand directly in the road and poop.

But this is all part of the experience. The fog, the livestock, the poop. Just like life.

When you close your eyes, all you hear are the patter of your own footsteps. Occasionally you will pass other pilgrims. They all have reasons for walking.

Soon we are all climbing steep mountain highways. And it’s all starting to sink in. This is not a “vacation.” This is not supposed to be “fun” in the traditional sense. There are no tour guides. No tour groups. No itinerary. No…

3:03 a.m.—I’m awake before my wife. Actually, I’m awake before the rest of France. Jet lag has me screwed up. It’s 3 in the morning here but 8 p.m. in Alabama.

Thus, I am locked away in our inn’s bathroom, door closed, sitting on a latrine, playing my fiddle, with a brass mute affixed to the instrument’s bridge.

4:10 a.m.—Jamie is still sleeping. I’m still fiddling.

5:37 a.m.—I am now sitting in the inn’s garden, fiddling. Sleeping Beauty still hasn’t budged.

There is an older woman in the cottage next door, listening to me play through an open window as she works in her kitchen. She pauses to lean out the window and give light applause when I finish playing “Over the Waves.” I’m not sure whether she is applauding because she liked the song or because I am no longer playing.

6:24 a.m.—I am watching a calico cat creep along terracotta rooftops in the dark distance. He carefully leaps from one roofline to the next. I think he hears my fiddle and is looking for his

wounded sibling.

7:28 a.m.—The sun rises in San-Jean-Pie-de-Port, slowly ascending behind the small French hamlet, nestled in the Pyrenees. Silver mist clings to the mountainsides like a damp dishrag. Distant sheep graze on swatches of green farmland quilting the rocky hillsides. It is my great hope that my wife wakes up someday soon.

8:32 a.m.—Jamie is awake. We eat a breakfast of muesli, which is cereal. Our innkeeper tells us muesli will help us go to the bathroom. The French woman doesn’t speak English, so instead of saying “bathroom,” she uses hand gestures to pantomime “severe gastrointestinal distress.” Then she laughs. The French are wonderful.

10:00 am—We are at the supermarket, buying food for our upcoming walk. There is evidently no peanut butter in this store, or in all of France.

They sell items I've never heard of. Tiny octopuses in a jar.…

Tomorrow morning, my wife will become pilgrims.

We will walk the breadth of Spain, upwards of 500 miles, over Pyrenees Mountains, on foot, to visit the remains of the apostle James.

I’ve never been a pilgrim before. I’ve never thought of myself as a pilgrim. What even IS a pilgrim?

Contrary to American thought, a pilgrim is not someone who wears a hat shaped like a traffic cone. A pilgrim is someone who journeys for spiritual reasons. Someone who wanders through a foreign land, looking to be changed.

That’s me, I guess. I’m seeking. Although I’m not sure what for.

Maybe I’m seeking to be something different. A stronger version of myself. A healed version.

I’ve been trying to heal ever since I was 11. I grew up under the weight of suicide, domestic abuse, and gun violence. My dad’s last night was spent in a homicidal rage wherein he tried to kill his family.

On his final night, my father was holding my

sister and I hostage. My mother escaped and ran for help. The sheriff deputies bursted into our home with riot guns. Dad was arrested. That was the last time I ever saw him. He was dead the next day, shortly after being released on bail.

But my reason for a pilgrimage is more than that. I was raised in fundamentalist household. We were a cult, really. The cult of Puritanical American Evangelicalism, which is a shallow religion.

We were not taught to look for healing. We were taught bullet points. I come from people who told you, upfront, that God loved you no matter who you were and then gave you a long list of exceptions.

Mainly, I was taught that beer was evil, to shun rock ‘n’ roll, and heedeth not the wicked ways of “I Dream of Jeannie.”

But the older I get, the more…

There were ghosts everywhere. That’s what I kept thinking, while standing on Shiloh battlefield. Ghosts.

You could feel them. You could almost hear their fraternal laughter. You could smell their gunpowder.

A ghost is merely a soul who doesn’t want to be forgotten. Beneath our feet, at Shiloh National Military Park; beneath 163 years of gravel and grit, were tens of thousands of forgotten souls.

They were long forgotten boys in uniforms. Men who had families. Who never saw their wives again. Who nevermore kissed their mothers again, or shook hands with their old men, or bounced babies on their laps.

They were just children, really. Boys who once engaged in a great civil war, testing whether their nation, or any nation conceived and so dedicated, could long endure. Fighting for something they believed in.

My friend Bobby and I were playing music for a funeral directly on the battlefield. The funeral was held for the former National Park superintendent, Woody Harrell.

Woody was

the man who made the Shiloh park great. A man who dedicated his life to preserving the sacred ground of the oft forgotten. A man who was recognized on the floor of the U.S. senate for his work here.

There were park rangers galore, attending the service. It looked like a ranger convention. Stetsons everywhere.

I met one ranger who looked like Teddy Roosevelt. He wore a table-flat brimmed hat and green suit, pressed sharply enough to slice tomatoes.

“McDougall’s brigade would have been fighting on this spot where we stand,” he said. “Would’ve been one heck of a fight on this ground.”

We weren’t all that far from Bloody Pond. A country pond where dying and wounded soldiers sought water during the battle. Wounded men would’ve crawled on their bellies toward the water.

The pond became the hub of death. The remains of young men…

I am walking my blind dog in a public park. We are on one of those community tracks.

People exercise everywhere. Joggers. Walkers. Cyclists. One woman is power walking, wearing earbuds, having a violently animated phone conversation with an invisible person.

My dog, Marigold, and I have been walking a lot lately. It’s not easy, walking. We have very few “good walks” inasmuch as walking in a straight line is impossible when you can’t see. So mainly, we walk in zig-zags until both of us are dizzy and frustrated and one of us needs to sit down on a bench and use expletives.

When I near the tennis courts, I meet a woman with a little girl. They are on a bench, too. The girl sees my dog and she is ecstatic.

“Look at the pretty dog!” the kid says.

So I introduce the child to Marigold. Immediately the child senses there is something different about this animal.

“What’s wrong with her?” the kid asks.

“She is blind,” I say.

The child squats until she is eye level with

Marigold. “How did this happen?”

I’m not sure what I should say here. So I keep it brief.

“Someone wasn’t nice to her,” I say.

The kid is on the verge of tears. “What do you mean?”

This is where things get tricky. I don’t know how much of Marigold’s biography I should reveal. Because the truth is, Marigold was struck with a heavy object by a man in Mississippi who thought she made a poor hunting hound.

“She was abused,” I say.

The little girl’s face breaks open. The girl presses her nose against Marigold’s dead eyes. She feels the dog’s fractured skull with her hands.

“Oh, sweet baby,” the child says.

That’s when I notice the mottled scars on the child’s neck. They look like major burns. I say nothing about this, but the wounds are…

You’re a farmer in the middle ages. We’re talking 1000 A.D.-ish. Actually, they don’t call you a farmer but a “yeoman,” which is an antiquated way of saying, “you shovel excrement for a living.”

Maybe you live in Scotland. Maybe France. England, Portugal, Africa, wherever. Either way, your life is unfulfilling.

Sure, you have a great family. You have great friends. You are even allowed to drink beer for breakfast because this is what everyone does during the middle ages, even clergy and toddlers. So that’s pretty great.

Even so, underneath it all, there is something going on inside you. You can’t explain what you’re experiencing.

Centuries later, psychologists will invent clinical names for your feelings. They’ll call it a major “climacteric,” or the “need for self-actualization,” or God forbid, a “midlife crisis.”

But in the middle ages there are no psychological doctors. There are only doctors whose entire medical practice consists of drilling holes into people’s skulls in hopes of curing a runny nose.

Still, you

can’t explain this pulling sensation inside. It’s tugging you somewhere. But where? You keep wondering whether you were made for more than just paying bills. Weren’t you were made to be more than just a serf?

And isn’t life about more than just pleasure and fun? Having fun is great. But fun doesn’t exactly make your cup runneth all over the placeth.

You have a few options for spiritual guidance. You could visit your local monastery, but the monks will just instruct you to say 25 Hail Marys and call it a day. Likewise, you could visit the doctor, who just bought a new cordless drill.

Then, one day you hear about this place in northwestern Spain, hundreds of miles from your home. It’s a cathedral, built upon the grave an apostle.

People from all over the world are traveling to this sacred…

I haven’t always been a morning person. God knows. When I was a young man I was anti-morning-people. Morning people were insane. My mother was a morning person.

As a boy, I’d awake to find my mother already in the living room, snuggled beneath a lamp, where she’d been reading for hours. The cat in her lap would just stare at me with moral disapproval.

“There will come a day,” Mama would say, “when you won’t sleep as good as you do now.”

My mother evidently put a curse on me. Because I get up early now. I didn’t CHOOSE to begin rising at 4 a.m. every morning. I have no reason to awake early. I am not a farmer. But my brain decided, years ago, that no matter what time I go to bed, I’ll be up with the chickens.

At first I resisted early rising. I did NOT want to be the kind of dork who got up at 4 a.m. to water ferns and take

inventory of his commemorative Dale Earnhardt stamp collection. But there you are.

Thus, each morning, my wife arises at 8:30 a.m. to find me on the porch, tapping away on a laptop. The cat on my lap just stares at her.

Also, I’m not sure when I started cooking, but I do that now, too. Lately, I’ve become the interim cook in our household. I’m not a great cook, mind you. My specialty dish is something my wife calls “chicken sushi.”

But I’ve found myself enjoying the culinary side of life. I read cookbooks for fun. I watch cooking shows and use words like “al dente” with a straight face.

Last night for supper, I made chicken and dumplings. A few nights before, scalloped potato casserole and banana cream pie.

My wife—God love her—who actually KNOWS how to cook, is gracious with my gastronomical…

Wake up early. Saturday morning. Leap out of bed. Oh, the bliss.

You sprint to the television set, racing your sister.

Last one’s a rotten egg.

You are still wearing Superman pajamas. Beneath your Man-of-Steel PJs, you’re wearing Batman skivvies, which is a slight conflict of interest, but you make it work.

You slap the power button on TV. The old Zenith console warms up. The television is cased in a faux wooden cabinet, with warped oak-grain veneer from a bygone Dr. Pepper someone once placed atop the television, even though this someone’s mother told them to NEVER set ANYTHING atop the TV, not that we’re naming names here.

So anyway, you’d sit on the floor, before the old tube, criss-crossed, which we used to call sitting “Indian style.” (No hate mail!)

Cartoons blared. It was undefiled rapture. Until your mom yelled from the other room, “Don’t sit so close to the TV or you’ll hurt your eyes!”

But you HAD to sit close.

They were playing all the greats today. Bugs, Daffy, Elmer, Porky, Marvin the Martian.

Yosemite Sam growled, “Say your prayers, varmint!” Speedy Gonzales would be chirping, “Ándale, ándale!” Wile E. Coyote and the bird were hard after it.

Then came Yogi and Boo Boo, “Smarter than the average bear.” George, Jane, Judy, and Elroy. Fred, Barney, Wilma, Betty, and Mister Slate.

After cartoons, you’d eat a wholesome breakfast of Rice Krispies. Rice Krispies had the same dietary value of No. 4 Styrofoam packing pellets. But it was okay. Your mom increased the nutritive value by topping your cereal with liberal spoonfuls of refined white sugar.

Next, it was time to go outside and play.

Mainly, we played Army Man. We used imitation firearms, pump rifle BB guns, and Andy’s dad even had a real bayonet from World War I.

We used these items…