Newspapers have a smell. If you’re lucky enough to find a physical 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…

The transmission of her car has given out. Every day, she hitches a ride to work because she is broke.

She works hard. Too hard. And when she’s not cooking in the kitchen of the medical rehab, delivering trays to patients, she’s a full-time single mother.

Sometimes, her kids visit her at work. They get thirty minutes for supper. Her breaks are never long enough.

The strain of day-to-day living is wearing her thin. She is overworked, underpaid, vehicle-less.

One day, she meets a patient. An old man.

In the three months he’s been in rehab, nobody has seen him move or speak. Most days, he faces the window with his jaw slung open. Empty eyes.

She’s delivering food to his room. Her emotions get the best of her. She collapses on a chair and has a meltdown.

She bawls because life is unfair. Because a busted car sits in her driveway and she can’t afford to have a mechanic look at it.

The old man stirs in his wheelchair.

His facial muscles move. And in a few moments, he looks like a man who’s

never suffered a traumatic brain injury.

He stares straight at her. His eyes sparkle.

And in a voice as clear as a bell he says, “God sees you.”

Then.

His face goes slack. His eyes become hollow. His mouth falls open, he begins to drool again.

All day, she thinks about him and his words. In fact, she thinks about it so much she can’t sleep.

The next day, she’s delivering food again. She speaks to him.

He doesn’t answer. He is completely unalert. So, she tells a few knock-knock jokes.

His face cracks a slight grin.

It moves her so much that she hugs him until she is crying into his chest. She tells more jokes.

She eventually gets a strained laugh out of him.

Then, he surprises her. He hugs her with rigid…

Birmingham. I met the old woman for coffee. She was small and slight, with a mane of white. She spoke with a thick Latin accent.

“I have a story for you,” she said.

I’m a sucker for a good story.

She worked three or four jobs. Sometimes more. She cleaned hotel rooms. She worked as a seamstress. She worked on construction crews. She was a dishwasher at a little restaurant. She was a house painter. The worst job she ever had, however, was working with a plumber. She dug ditches. Literally.

“I was not so very happy digging the ditches.”

No kidding.

Her lowest point came when her ‘83 Toyota gave out. It was the day of her son’s 12th birthday. She had been picking up extra gigs lately so she could afford a birthday present for her boy.

This meant she was working more hours. Which meant she was never home for more than 10 minutes at a time. She got used to sleeping in her car. “It was no so much fun.”

One

day, the woman was on her way to a cleaning gig. Her car sputtered and stopped on the side of the highway. It was rush hour. And her car was deader than disco. She sat in her front seat crying. This was in an age before cell phones.

The woman stepped out of her car and looked heavenward. “Don’t do this to me,” she said in Español, as cars whizzed past her by the dozen.

If you’ve ever had an automotive crisis, you know how many highway vehicles pass you by. Hundreds. Thousands even. Motorists will lock eyes with you from behind windshields, smile curtly, then fly by at 75 mph without even glancing back.

She was about to give up any prospect of help and start walking home when a truck pulled over.

Enter the mysterious stranger.

The driver was male. Bearded. Longish hair.…

The New York Times recently published an article stating that librarians are facing a “crisis of violence and abuse.” So I just thought you’d like to meet your local librarian. 

WENDY—I earned my masters in library science in 1970 and got my first job. There was a little girl who came to our branch every day at the same time. She would read exactly the same book, and she did this for months. She never checked the book out, she only read the same few pages every day. We all wondered what she was doing.

One day I asked her why she came in to read the same pages. She told me she was teaching herself how to read by memorizing pages of the book so she could recite them to herself for practice. I told her she could take the book with her and keep it with her all the time, but she said she’d rather memorize.

Then the girl recited the first chapter to me. I knew

I was dealing with a gifted child.

I was able to get her tested academically and she was accepted into a school for advanced students. I don’t know what happened to her, but I think about her all the time.

MISTY—My dad went to libraries all his life, he always kept a stack of books by his bed. He taught himself Spanish by reading a book from Stanislaus County Library, just so he could communicate with his Spanish-speaking coworkers and make friends with them.

When his friends asked how he learned Spanish they were all shocked when he told them the library. This brought him into all kinds of homes and situations, helping Spanish-speakers in need.

EMILIO—I was 19 years old and bought a 1969 MGB I wanted to restore, and I literally knew nothing about cars. My brother was a talented mechanic, he could bring any engine back to life,…

Someone emailed me and said I was an idiot. Which is true, but not for the reasons they cited.

“How can you believe in angels and still consider yourself a smart person?” the letter began.

Oh, I haven’t always believed in angels. And truthfully, I wish I didn’t believe. It would be easier.

It all started in third grade. My teacher, Mrs. Shield, told a story of her own.

She was a little girl. She fell through a second-story window. She was bruised and battered. The paramedics said she would die.

But a man came to her. A man who only she could see. He said she would be in the hospital for a while, but she would be all right, if she could just hold on. She eventually taught third grade.

Yes, Mrs. Shield was as crazy as a sprayed roach. But I believed her. And I still do.

There is another guy I know. He talks about being in the hospital, after an accident. The doctors said he

was going to die, too. He was in his bed in a coma.

A nurse came into his room. She was a large woman with ebony skin and white scrubs. She leaned over his bed, held him tightly, and sang to him. She sang, “God is going to deliver you.”

When he woke up, nobody believed him. It was a hallucination, they said. He asked medical staffers who the woman was. They said no employees fit her description.

I know a guy from Alaska. He wrote to me and said that his son suffered brain stem damage after a hunting accident. The kid was going to die. No doubt about it.

When his son was unconscious, a strange woman found him and kissed his face and said he would not die, for he still had work to do on earth.

Today, that kid is 46 years old and…

It’s the New Year and, judging by people’s resolutions, they think they’re supposed to be doing all sorts of impressive things like losing weight, saving more money, training for marathons, etc. 

Well, I’m making some changes this year, too. Only I’m making little changes. Big changes never last for me. It’s little ones that stick. So I’m going to start by making my bed every morning.

When I was a kid, my mother believed, firmly, that making the bed set a positive tone for each day. I firmly believed that. So each morning I let my mother make my bed.

But now that I’m older, I’ve decided to make our bed every morning.

Another change I’m making: I’m going to play with my phone less. Phones are time-suckers. So I’m not going to play on my phone. Instead, I’m going to spend quality time playing on my wife’s phone.

I’m going to eat more bacon. Life is too short to deprive oneself of bacon. A woman named Susannah Mushatt Jones of Brooklyn, New York, lived until age 116. She

was skinny and healthy and she ate a serving of bacon every day. But frankly, I don’t want to live to 116, so I will also eat queso dip to offset things.

I’m going to give to homeless people more often. Every time I drive past a homeless guy I think to myself, “He’s just looking for drugs.” But my conscience knows better. And addicts need lunch too.

I’m going to run some 5Ks or 10Ks, for good causes. I’m going to do this because I enjoy running, because I like meeting people, and above all, because there is often free beer at the finish line.

I’m going to have more fun, and not apologize for it. More fishing trips. More camping trips. And I’m finally going to get around to making that honey-do list. In fact, I’m going to write…

I brought in the new year with a blind dog. She was seated beside me, wagging her butt. I think she could feel the energy in the air.  

Everyone else in my house was asleep because they are—in the literary sense—massive party poopers. Thus, I was alone in the den except for Marigold, the blind coonhound. 

Marigold had one eye removed. The other eye is dead. She lives in darkness. She moves by rote. When I turned on the TV, I could see her stepping carefully through the room, looking for me. Using her nose to feel the edge of the wall.

“Here I am,” I said. 

I’m used to alerting Marigold to where I am. We’re all used to acting as her Seeing Eye Humans.

Marigold crawled upon the sofa beside me as I watched the TV-people with weird hairdos perform a countdown.

Times Square was littered with thousands of giddy people who you could have blindfolded with strips of dental floss.

And when the ball dropped, everyone on the screen cheered. My

phone started blowing up with texts from loved ones. 

But in that moment, it was just me and Mary. 

“Happy New Year,” I whispered her. 

Her tail began smacking the sofa, making a gentle “Thwat!” noise. 

Then, she used her nose to trace the contours of my face. 

Marigold will use her muzzle to feel the shape of your mouth, to see what your lips are doing. At first we didn’t know why she did this. Then we realized that Marigold was feeling our faces to see whether we were smiling. 

The way we figured this out was, whenever she felt us smiling, her tail would wag. Whereas, if our mouths were slack, if we were not smiling, she would not move her tail. 

“I’m smiling, Mary,” I said to her. 

She moved her nose to feel my tightened cheek muscles, just to…