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…

In the summer of 2099, researchers developed a new groundbreaking drug. When ingested this new medication impaired one’s ability to judge others.

The medication affected the prefrontal cortex and had no side effects. Nobody really knew how it worked—even scientists didn’t fully understand it. But it worked.

They named it “Iudicio Vacuus.” Once you ingested the little pink pill, you lost the urge to qualify anything as good or bad, right or wrong, positive or negative.

Even a user’s ability to judge life events as good or bad was temporarily suspended. No longer was there such a thing as good fortune or bad fortune. No longer was life unfair. There was no “fair.” Things just were. Life just happened.

At first people were afraid to take it. They were afraid this drug would numb them. Politicians, media outlets and preachers warned against it. But as it turned out, refraining from judgement gave users a certain “high.” And remaining non-biased was severely addictive.

And then everything changed.

The media outlets were the first to be affected. Namely,

because journalists were clearly addicted to the substance. And thus, they stopped offering opinions and just reported stories.

Soon, journalists lost interest in maintaining careers with media organizations and began resigning, opting for more meaningful work such as, for example, shoveling excrement.

Finally, all news organizations went belly up. Namely, because nobody was viewership tanked. The public didn’t seem to need to be told what to think anymore. Media outlets simply couldn’t sustain public interest unless they could compel people to choose sides.

The next changes to occur took place on the war front.

It all began when a soldier who was addicted to the drug had the unexplained desire to meet his enemy. He removed his anti-ballistic gear and walked right into the battle zone, waving a white flag.

His fellow soldiers tried to stop him. “You’ll be shot!” they all shouted.

But…

The email came in this morning. “Sean,” the message began. “You are a social media attention whore….”

Great way to start the day.

“...You’re like all other attention seekers,” the writer went on, “constantly looking for likes and engagement… I’ve been a professional writer for 29 years, and it’s people like you who corrupt the profession. …I think you know what I’m talking about.”

The last sentence ends in a preposition.

A few hours later, a book review on a major bookseller website.

“...[Dietrich’s] book was a laborious and difficult read... I found [the author’s] tone glib and disrespectful. This author might indeed have something to say, but he’s too immature to say it.”

You’re only young once. But you can be immature forever.

Then there was the letter to the editor of one of the newspapers for which I write.

“...I am a former reader of Sean. I was disgusted with his treatment of religion in his recent column… I take offense at the tasteless jokes about Baptists.”

Why should you take two Baptists fishing? Because if you take just one,

he’ll drink all your beer.

And here’s another little gem from another newspaper that carries my shoddy work:

“...I found Sean’s article in [name of paper] especially upsetting, especially the jokes about the Baptist tradition. I have been a Baptist all my life. I am 77 years old, and found his humor belittling.”

As it happens, I have been a Baptist all my life, too. I come from a Baptist town. Even our atheists were Baptist, because it was a Baptist god they didn’t believe in.

One of my childhood friends, for example, is a Baptist preacher. I recently told him about some negative mail I received.

He replied: “Don’t worry about it. Everyone has haters. Muslims don’t recognize the sovereign state of Israel. Jews don’t recognize Jesus as God’s son. And Baptists don’t recognize each other at…

It’s raining hard. Thundering loudly. Like the world is falling apart. And yet there is a mockingbird outside my window.

The bird is unfazed by the downpour.

Funny. I’ve never seen a bird in the rain before. Admittedly, I don’t know anything about birds. But I thought most birds, except waterfowl, found shelter during rainstorms.

I move closer to get a better look. The bird’s feathers are grayish, with snow-white patches on its wings and tail.

The bird is getting hammered by the rain. But if you can believe it, the mockingbird is fluttering its wings and singing. Singing in the rain.

So I listen.

The birdsong is beautiful. I can tell the bird is aware of me because it keeps flicking its head in my direction. But the mockingbird doesn’t seem bothered by me or the thunder shower.

I cannot help but marvel at how this creature is so outwardly unafraid.

It wasn’t that long ago that mockingbirds were endangered in America. When America was young, Americans were obsessed with capturing things and killing them. We

nearly wiped out entire species such as passenger pigeons, mountain lions, bison, etc.

And we were about to do the same to mockingbirds. Namely, because they were trendy pets to have.

Thomas Jefferson had a mockingbird named “Dick.” Dick was famous for being one of President Jefferson’s closest friends. Dick lived in the White House. Jefferson rehearsed speeches by reading aloud to Dick, who sat on his desk. Sometimes, Dick would sing Jefferson to sleep, perched atop his shoulder.

But mostly, mockingbirds were owned by rich people. In the 1800s, a mockingbird was a real novelty. You kept the bird in a cage. You gave it just enough food to survive. You taught the bird new songs to whistle, and it would mimic you.

Then you could show off your mockingbird to your Wednesday bridge group. The bird wouldn’t last long in captivity,…

It’s just a road. That’s really all it is. It’s a 798 kilometer footpath, winding from France to Spain.

The road is littered with hostels, inns, stone churches, and about 7 billion tourist shops selling all manner of effluvia, such as seashell-shaped toilet-paper holders.

But in the end, the Camino de Santiago is just a road. That’s all it can ever be.

The difference is, of course, when you’re on this road, you’re actually THERE.

Which is rare. To be present. To be here. Now. There are so many times in life when I’m not actually here. Oh sure, I’m here physically. Yes. But I’m not fully in this current moment.

And even though this present moment is all I have, I often waste it, thinking about past or future moments, and totally miss what’s in front of me.

But out there, on this footpath, for some reason you give yourself permission to be in The Moment. And because of this, time moves differently. A day feels like a week. A week becomes a nanosecond.

And then, there

are the people.

You meet people out there. They come from all over the world. From every faith. From every thought-system. People you might otherwise never be friends with.

On this highway, I walked alongside Mennonites, shared supper with Sufi Muslims, broke bread with Korean Buddhist monks, prayed Protestant prayers alongside a Hindu family, as we all visited an ancient Catholic shrine.

Once, I split a bottle of wine with an elderly Episcopal priest. We were in a hostel. That evening, a group of college kids from Texas, from a prominent Baptist college, were—for lack of a better term—Bible thumping.

The students were trying to argue with the minister about the nature of heaven and hell and the nature of God. They were using the anvil-like tones of the Modern American Evangelical who just wants to pick a fight.

The elderly priest…

“What scares you most?” was the question asked to members of Mrs. Devonshire’s fourth-grade class.

The little hands went up.

“AI scares me,” said one boy.

Mrs. Devonshire was perplexed. “But you’re only nine years old.”

“I’m afraid technology is going to make me obsolete. My brother uses ChatGPT to do his homework. His professors use it, too. So why even go to college if everyone is cheating? Why should employers hire graduates when they can hire GPT?”

Mrs. Devonshire was taken off-guard. “What about snakes and spiders? Is anyone afraid of those?”

Another hand rose. It was a little girl sitting in a position which we used to call “Indian style” before that was incorrect and now nobody knows what the heck to call it.

“I’m afraid of culture wars,” replied the girl. “It’s getting where you can’t say anything without offending someone. Everyone is analyzing everything about everyone else. From the brand of coffee you buy to the restaurant you choose. For example, the Cracker

Barrel logo—”

“STOP!” said Mrs. Devonshire who had already broken into a nervous sweat. “We’re not going to discuss Cracker Barrel. I might get fired.”

Another hand went up. “I’m afraid my attention span is being ruined by overuse of technology. By the time I’m an adult I won’t be able to pay attention for more than three seconds without checking my phone.”

“Sorry,” said the teacher, putting her phone in her pocket. “What did you just say, sweetie? I was replying to a text.”

“I’m afraid of Cancel Culture,” said another. “Fear of being cancelled is leading to self-censorship and killing free speech. Online mobs flood comment sections and reach a verdict before the accused even has a chance to respond. Seventy-three percent of social media users have changed their online behavior due to this fear.”

In the back of the class,…

The old preacher sipped his thermos of coffee, holding a fishing rod in the other hand. He asked what I wanted most in this life.

I stared at the lake surface and told him I wanted peace. I was young, I came from a broken home. Peace was all I wanted.

“What does peace look like to you?” the clergyman asked, casting his line.

I shrugged. “Someday,” I said. “I’d like to live on Lake Martin.”

He laughed. “You think this lake is peaceful, do you?”

Then he told me a story.

A hundred years ago, the powers that were gathered around a big boardroom table. Executives in three-piece linen suits, smoking great Havannas as long as your thigh, cheerfully commiserating about how hard it was to find good help these days.

A chairman banged a gavel. In a booming voice he said, “Come to order!”

The men sat straight and paid attention.

Then, the chairman explained that the Alabama Power company would construct a

dam. They would flood the Tallapoosa River valley, and use the river to generate power.

“Brilliant idea, old chap!” replied one supporter.

“Dam brilliant, old man!” said another.

Then they all patted each other on the back and went back to talking about their yachts.

The Cherokee Bluffs Dam would be 168 feet high, 2,000 feet long, with three Francis turbines, churning out electricity by the kilowatt hour, transforming the Twenty-Second State forever.

But there was a problem. There were towns in the valley. There was Benson, Irwinton, Kowaliga, Church Hill, and the lovely town of Susannah.

One board member waved his cigar and chuckled. “Don’t worry about the towns, gentlemen! We’ll just buy them out!”

“But these are farmers, sir,” explained another. “Farmers can’t be bought.”

The board members laughed so hard they choked on their smoke. This is America. Everything…