Dear Texas, I am driving through your state today, and I just wanted to say that I am a big fan. I’ve always loved your heart. Your mind. Your hands. And above all, your Willie.

Also, your food. Your brisket. Your beanless chili. Your batter fried steaks. Your jalapeños and chiltepíns.

Your Kolaches.

I love your unabashed sense of regional pride. And I love how you manage this while also defying stereotypes that are so wrongly cast upon you.

I have never been able to successfully generalize Texans. I have sipped Shiner Bock with Sephardic Jews who judge chili cookoffs. I have visited the Sri Meenakshi Devasthanam temple, guided by a Hindu cowboy. I have attended Pentecostal potlucks held by non-English-speaking Guatemalans.

This is why I love your culture. It’s wholly and completely your own.

Your Lapland Cajun humor. Your Mexican pathos. Your African-American grit and perseverance. Your Great Plains cheerfulness. Your German work ethic. Your Scot-born stubbornness. Your Irish tolerance for distilled corn liquor.

Your Cherokee, Comanche, Apache soul, Caddo, Choctaw, Karankawa, Ysleta del

Sur Pueblo, Alabama-Coushatta, and Kickapoo.

You are “Austin Weird.” You are acres of lonesome prairie. You are the majestic Hill Country. You are miles of Monahans sand dunes, without a gas station in sight, testing the weary road-tripper who really needs to pee.

You are 80 mph wind gusts in Amarillo. You are Bob Wills. Blind Lemon Jefferson. Stevie, Strait, and Selena.

You are arresting vistas, beautiful rios, and a pristine Gulf Coast. You gave the world the towering Guadalupes, the mighty Chisos, the soaring Franklins, the magnificent Davises, and most of all, you gave us H-E-B.

You are the “Cradle of Liberty” in San Antone. You are “America’s Stockyard” in Fort Worth. You are a Yellow Rose. A bluebonnet. The Piney Woods, the Palo Duro Jacob’s Well, and Doctor Pepper.

When I began writing, as a young man, I was sometimes given the job…

Texas. The Hill Country. The local Walmart has a poster on the wall. It hangs near the entrance of the store. The poster is faded and aged, containing many three-by-five photos, housed in clear plastic sleeves, all in rows, on display for the world to see.

The poster calls itself the “Wall of Honor,” even though you’d have to go out of your way to actually notice the poster. Let alone honor it.

The modest snapshots of military veterans peer down at us busy shoppers as we all hurry past, moving so importantly, each carrying our plastic bags of mass-produced, homogenized consumer crapola.

On my way out, I see the poster and something makes me stop and take a closer look. I am standing before the Wall of Honor. And I’m struck by how many World War II-vets are on this wall.

Their generation is disappearing steadily, we lose a few dozen of them every day. You don’t see their pictures much anymore.

And yet as I write this, February

is almost here. Singapore fell in February of ‘42. The Germans surrendered in Stalingrad in February of ‘43. Dresden was bombed in February of ‘45. Iwo Jima was that same February.

I wonder if school kids still read about Iwo Jima.

My father was a World War II fanatic. An amateur scholar of the War. He was always reading about battles, studying conflicts, and learning about the aircraft. He read Ernie Pyle aloud to me. He adored Bill Maudlin.

My father painstakingly built tiny World War II airplane models, and model tanks, then gifted them to all my little friends, making sure each of us boys knew about the heroes who sacrificed their lives so that we could have the freedom to be in Cub Scouts and eat Spaghetti-Os and play with our Stretch Armstrong dolls in peace.

Those World War-II vets were his heroes. When he was growing up,…

The sun is shining in Austin, Texas. The hotel dining room is full of young people for breakfast. They are all tourists. I can tell this because they are wearing T-shirts that say things like: “Austin is Special.”

There is one young woman in the dining room, however, who stands out from the crowd.

She is maybe early 20s. She is wearing an oxygen cannula attached to a tube coming from a fanny pack. She is sitting alone at a table, eating breakfast by herself.

The young people in the dining area surround her, but I don’t think she is one of them. She sits on the periphery, engaged only in her simple but serene act of eating.

Meantime, her contemporaries play on their phones, clutching their devices tightly, hunched at the necks, faces lit with the phosphorous blue analgesic glow of their personal handheld opiate delivery apparatus. Nobody makes a sound.

But the girl is dining in a kind of tech-free reverie. She wears a half smile on her face. As though she doesn’t want to

miss one moment of this beautiful morning.

She looks out the window at Austin. A warmth emanates from her. It’s not a blinding glow, like a bonfire. But a Chinese lantern-like light, warm and soft.

I notice the purple track marks on her pale forearms. There are white bandages on her legs. She is slight. So small a breeze might knock her over. Her hair is midnight, pulled into a ponytail. I see a scar on her neck from where a PICC line once had a place in her life.

“Are you having a good morning?” I ask.

“I am,” she says with a smile.

She seems out of breath when she speaks. Like maybe there is some congestion in her chest. “How about you?”

“Ditto,” I say.

Another smile.

She goes back to eating.

The others in the lobby don’t even seem…

Today is National Puzzle Day. So, I bought a jigsaw puzzle at the grocery store. The box features an ornate cathedral with red roses and blossoming foliage. The cathedral is in Germany. The puzzle cost $9 bucks. I almost choked on my gum.

My mother and I used to do jigsaw puzzles. Big puzzles. We did them together. I was no good at jigsaws, but she was an expert.

Long ago, puzzles cost 75 cents, and provided hours of distraction. We needed distractions back then. We welcomed anything that took our minds off my father’s untimely death, and the gloom that came thereafter.

My mother looked for distractions that made us laugh, things that made us smile, games, puzzles, crafts, or road trips.

Once, she took us to Branson. She took me to see a Dolly Parton impersonator. The show was spectacular. After the performance, the woman in the blond wig hugged me so tight she nearly suffocated me with her enormous attributes.

When my mother saw me swallowed by the

buxom woman, she shrieked and started praying in tongues. She yanked me by my earlobe, drug me away, and played Pat Boone tapes all the way home. And I have been a lifelong Dolly Parton fan ever since.

Anyway, my mother loved doing things with her hands. She made large quilts from old T-shirts, she gardened, she did puzzle books, anagrams, crosswords, cryptograms, she knitted, crocheted, and painted.

She played cards with me, sometimes checkers, and she was a Scrabble fanatic. But jigsaw puzzles. Those were our thing.

My mother started each puzzle by saying the same thing:

“We gotta find the corners first, that’s how you do it.”

The idea was that once you found the corners, the rest of the puzzle would come together. Thus, we would sift through 2,500 pieces, looking for four corners. Once we found them, we’d dig for the edges.

We’d place…

The names have been omitted to protect the guilty. But the story is true.

The young man was quiet. He was a lowly fry-cook, salting endless baskets of French fries. Flipping acres of patties. Dropping pre-fried, shrink-wrapped, chemical-preservative-injected chicken breasts into nuclear silos of boiling synthetic lard.

He was always drinking chocolate milk. That was his thing. He was always holding a carton. Breakfast, lunch, and snack breaks.

The kid was nice-looking, but messy. His hair was overgrown, but not stylishly so. More like he’d waited too long between haircuts. His clothes were wrinkled. His shoes, past their prime.

His shift manager finally got curious about him. One day, she started asking questions. What was his story? What about his family? What was his favorite baseball team? That kind of stuff.

But the kid was a clam. He sat in her office, sipping his milk, looking at his lap.

Then came the day he called in sick. It was the first day he’d missed work. He never called in sick. At first it was

no big deal. But then he missed 16 days of work, and the manager got worried.

One weekend, she decided to drop his paycheck off in person—since automatic deposits hadn’t been invented yet. It was the perfect excuse to visit him.

The first thing that struck her was the poverty of his neighborhood. The homes were falling apart. Most had dual axels. Deceased appliances littered each yard. Obligatory blue tarps, atop nearly every roof.

His kid sister answered the door. Kid Sister said Brother was busy taking care of Mama. Then, Sister ran off to fetch him.

The manager peeked into the house. The place was a wreck. There were missing floorboards. The kitchen looked like the aftermath of an Asian land war. Somehow, the manager experienced a deep knowing, in the recess of her spirit: This boy was his mother’s caregiver.

“What’s wrong with your…

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…