Charlotte is a student at West Virginia University. The 19-year-old emailed me asking for relationship advice concerning her ex-boyfriend, John, who once hurt her very badly.

Tragically, I don’t give advice. But I can tell you a story, Charlotte.

Our story is about Eleanor the raccoon. Eleanor was a very nice raccoon. Everyone loved Eleanor because she was polite and had good manners.

Eleanor always washed her hands before she ate. Eleanor always said “please” and “thank you.” And she always said “excuse me” after she belched, even if nobody was around.

One night, Eleanor was digging through the trash, hunting for Cheetos. She loved Cheetos. And you could always find Cheetos in the trash bins of Mountain Brook, where humans ate many, many Cheetos but never admitted this to their Fourtune-500 friends.

Just as Eleanor was about to give up looking for Cheetos, she FOUND SOME! A bag of Cheetos, half empty—or half full, depending on your personal world philosophy.

Eleanor snatched the bag into her little hands and almost started singing; she was

so happy. She scurried into the forest.

On her way home, as Eleanor was about to cross the creek when she realized she had a problem. Crossing the stream with the Cheetos would be difficult. She would have to hold the bag above the water as she swam.

Fortunately, raccoons are strong, competent swimmers, and Eleanor was basically the Michael Phelps of the raccoon world. So she sealed the bag tightly, then held it high above her head and was very glad she had applied deodorant this morning.

Just before Eleanor stepped into the water, she heard a voice.

It was Larry, the snake. Larry was lying beside the stream, gazing wistfully across. And he was weeping.

“What’s wrong?” said Eleanor.

“I need to cross the stream,” said Larry, “but I can’t swim well because I am a copperhead, and the current is too strong…

My wife and I are eating at a Chinese restaurant. We’ve been driving for hours through South Carolina. We pulled over to refuel and address pressing bladder issues.

And we found this place.

The waitress asked what we wanted. We ordered a seaweed salad. This particular salad was colored Disney-World green and tasted like eating bait.

My wife took a bite and said, “Remember when we first got married?”

“I do,” I said.

“Remember when we used to get takeout from that Chinese place over by the Kmart?”

“Yes.”

“Remember how we’d always get the seaweed salad?”

“I do.”

She took a bite. Green earthworms hung from the corners of her mouth. And I couldn’t help but remember those younger kids who used to eat Chinese food a lot.

Me with my long hair. Her with her bangs. We were poor. We had one window unit A/C in our apartment, which only worked on days of the week beginning with L. The world still had Kmarts back then.

The Chinese restaurant in our hometown was cheap. Duct tape on the

cushions. There weren’t many places to go for dates. So that’s where we went.

The food at the old Chinese restaurant was stellar. And food has always been so important to the woman I married. Some people eat to live. Jamie lives to eat.

I met Jamie after she graduated culinary school. She wore chef’s whites for a living. She bossed people around in a kitchen while stirring steel pots, angrily shouting French words, using strange phrases like, “This béarnaise has broken, dangit!”

To call her job a high-stress job would be like calling a Carnival cruise ship a “dinghy.”

Food service is one of the hardest jobs known to man. Being a female chef is even harder. You constantly have male staffers with “tiny spoon syndrome,” trying to prove how macho they are. Some guys don’t like having a…

South Carolina. The distant backroads. Deep forest. Lots of Spanish moss. I am stuck behind an asthmatic pickup.

The truck is a ‘78 Ford. F-100. Two-tone. Brown and vanilla. Five liter engine. Probably a three-speed manual. I know this because my old man drove the same truck.

The Ford travels 29 mph. The driver’s arm hangs out the window. And I’m transfixed by his license plate.

Namely, because the South Carolina license tag has the state motto imprinted on it. The motto is located at the top, in white text. Just beside the $640 registration sticker.

“While I breathe, I hope,” says the adage.

I’ve never known a more beautiful state motto. Especially when you consider some of the other state mottos.

Such as North Carolina’s motto: “Esse quam videri,” which means, literally, “To be, rather than to seem.” Um. What?

California’s motto is one word: “Eureka!” Idaho’s is, “Let it be perpetual.” Florida’s state motto is: “Ask about our grandkids.”

But I like the South Carolina slogan. Those words speak to me. Namely, because a few

years ago, the doctor thought I had cancer. I went through miniseries of misery, only to find out that I’m okay.

Still, those years of wondering were double, double toil and trouble. And all the cancer veterans I’ve talked to say the same thing: “It’s not cancer that kills you, it’s the worry that goes with it.”

Well, that was years ago. And what a difficult time that was for me. During that one year, I lost six friends to the C-word. And one to suicide. At times, I thought I was about to have a nervous breakdown.

But that bad experience is in my rear view mirror now. And in many ways, I’m not even the same guy I was. I eat healthier—mostly. I exercise more. And ever since walking through Spain, I pray all the time. I pray even when I’m…

The little boy was with his mom, sitting in a truckstop diner. The boy was bald, wearing a loose T-shirt. A large bandage showed from beneath his collar.

Before the boy sat a massive meal. Bacon. Eggs. Huge glass of chocolate milk. Stack of pancakes bigger than a midsize SUV.

“It feels so weird, my stitches itch,” the boy said.

“Eat your pancakes,” said Mom.

Mom looked tired. Her hair looked like she had slept on it. Her clothes, crumpled.

“How many days was I in the hospital?” the boy asked.

The mother sighed. “Twenty-six. Now eat your pancakes.”

Everyone in the little restaurant was staring at mother and son. Especially the trucker in the booth behind them, who couldn’t help but eavesdrop.

Mother and son ate in silence for a while. The boy was inhaling his food while Mom nursed a mug in both hands, staring wistfully out the window.

“Did they cut all the cancer out?” the boy asked.

Mother was crying now. “Eat your pancakes.”

She tried to hide her face but was unsuccessful. Sometimes there is nowhere to hide

one’s face.

The boy just watched his mother weep. “I’m worried about you, Mom.”

Mom laughed through snot and tears. “You’re worried about ME?”

He nodded.

Things went silent for a while.

That’s when something happened. The trucker from the nearby booth rose to his feet. He approached their table. He was every American truck driver you’ve ever seen. Powerfully built, slightly round in the middle, a ring of keys on his belt, and scuffed boots.

The man stood before their table, wearing a meek expression, hat in hand. The man said he couldn’t help but overhear their conversation. And, well, the man was wondering, would it be okay if he prayed for the boy, ma’am?

Truthfully, Mom was a little weirded out by this request. After all, people HAD been praying for the boy back home.…

My mother always told me to smile. Especially when I didn’t want to. She often told me to smile when I was sad, when trying on school clothes, or whenever I was forced to eat beef liver at gunpoint.

“Smile,” she’d say.

A mother knows how her child is feeling by looking at their face. Are you in pain? Upset? Angry because your Little League team lost opening game? Your mom knows. Because your face tells the story.

So smile.

Often, my mother would follow up this gentle command with: “You have a lot to be thankful for, young man.”

Turns out, you have 43 muscles in your face. Your face contains more muscles than any other body part. The only anatomical region coming close to having this many muscles is your back, which has 40 muscles, excluding your butt muscles which are the heaviest in the body.

(FACT: Two average adult buttcheeks, skin and muscle combined, weigh 33 pounds.)

Why is your face so muscled? Because. Your face was not just

made for photographs. Your face is a precise signaling system.

You can communicate entire paragraphs with only your face. It’s how you were designed. Don’t believe me? Try getting lost in a foreign country without cell service or a functioning GPS. By the end of the day your face will be tired.

As it happens, the default mode of your face, according to research, is smiling. Recent studies discovered that we are born smiling. Doctors used 3D ultrasound technology to find that developing babies smile in the womb.

Once born, babies continue to smile. Even when crying, they are flexing their smile muscles. And babies keep smiling throughout childhood. A child smiles, on average, 400 times per day. Whereas the average adult smiles less than 20.

Something else researchers discovered is that a smile is catching. It’s called the “yawn effect.” Just seeing someone else smile stimulates your…

A small town. The kind of beautiful American hamlet where all that’s missing is the Norman Rockwell signature. There was a party happening on Main Street. Lots of people.

I followed the sound of distant music and many voices and realized I was wearing pajamas.

I shuffled into town barefoot, with sleep crusted eyes. People were everywhere. I saw women positioning casseroles on card tables. Children playing tag. Old men in aprons were deep frying fish.

A band was playing music near the hardware store. People were dancing. And upon each front porch, attached to every home, were crowds of people, mingling, laughing, drinking lemonade and sugary tea.

Everyone was there. All my loved ones. All those who died. Friends whose lives ended young. Relatives, who were called away too early. They were all right here, holding paper plates, laughing with each other.

Also, I saw multitudes of unfamiliar children, dancing while the musicians played “Hokey Pokey.” I asked an old woman who all these children were. “Those are babies who died in

the womb,” the woman said.

We were interrupted when a large pack of dogs came running through the town, careening up Main Street, greeting people. Among them, I saw my own former dogs.

Lady, the cocker spaniel who died in my arms. Joe, who was killed in a hit and run. And Ellie Mae, the bloodhound who died in a cold, sterile veterinary office.

In a nearby backyard, I watched old friends play baseball. The pitcher was my cousin, Cosby. My friend Lynn was playing shortstop.

Then a familiar woman stepped up to the plate, holding a bat. She was a teenager, long and beautiful, with raven hair. She looked so familiar, but I couldn’t place this young woman.

And that’s when it hit me. It was my grandmother.

Later, I was hungry. So I waited in line at one of the food tables, holding a paper…