Once upon a time, there was a princess who lived in a great big old castle. She was very beautiful, with long, flowy hair, and her teeth were really nice, too. Nice and straight.

The princess had everything she wanted. Whenever she lacked, she snapped her fingers and said, “Bring me…!” and then she would name the object of her desire and her servants would fall all over themselves to secure the object of her want. If her servants took too long fetching the object, however, the king would become annoyed and occasionally mention the possibility of removing their heads.

On the other side of the kingdom was a village where lived a peasant girl who was not imbued with such fortune. She was the youngest of a poor family. She worked part time at Dollar General.

The peasant girl had wiry hair, since she did not use expensive shampoos but the cheap stuff. Her teeth were not super-straight. Her clothes were rags.

So anyway, one day, the princess was riding

her horse through the woods. Her servants were following behind, but she was galloping so fast that her servants lost sight of her. Soon, the princess was lost in the woods.

Then the worst thing happened.

A band of thieves fell upon her. They took everything of value that she had. They stole her fine garments, all her jewelry, and even her horse. They left her lying in rags, in a ditch, with a few broken bones. And worse, her hair was all messed up.

That same afternoon, an old beggar woman walked the woodland byway. She saw the princess lying in the mud, but did not know she was a princess. She saw only the ragged robes, and the mud on her face.

“Please help me,” moaned the princess.

But the beggar woman continued walking onward. She cast not even a glance toward the princess.

“I’m too old…

A crowded airliner. We were somewhere above Virginia. I was sandwiched between two passengers like Prince Albert in a can.

It has been said, if you’re a bad person in this lifetime; if you treat your fellow man poorly; if you live by the code of violence; if you are cruel to elders and children and UPS men; when you die you will wake up in economy class, riding in the middle seat.

Which is where I was.

The guy on my right was tapping on a laptop. The guy on my other side was scrolling TikTok. I had no armrests to speak of.

Throughout the flight, I noticed TikTok Guy kept staring at Laptop Guy. Like he recognized the man. Finally, TikTok Guy leaned over my passenger body to speak to Laptop Guy.

“Excuse me,” said TikTok. “Are you who I think you are, sir?”

Laptop nodded. “I am.”

“Omigod,” said TikTok. “Can I get a picture with you?”

And here is where things got awkward.

Because there I was. Stuck between them. Like a man trapped in hell.

Or worse, the DMV.

There was no way to snap a selfie without also capturing the buck-toothed, redhead in the middle seat between them. And I wasn’t wearing any makeup.

I cleared my throat. “Maybe you should wait until we get off the plane to take pictures,” I suggested.

TikTok gestured to Laptop. “Do you KNOW who this is?”

“Yes. He is a man who will still be here when the plane lands.”

“This guy’s famous.”

Laptop shook my hand and recited his name. He was a young guy. Dressed nicely. Matinee-idol smile. I’d never heard of him, but that doesn’t mean anything. I live under a brick.

Laptop gave his signature to a few passengers nearby. Then Laptop Guy turned to me. “Would you like me to sign anything for you?”

I smiled. “I left my autograph book at…

Backstage at the Ryman Auditorium. I am a fish out of water. What am I doing here?

It is the Gatlin Brothers 70th anniversary concert, and every Nashville A-list celebrity you can think of is here. I am supposed to do a song with everyone at the end. Larry Gatlin told me to bring my banjo.

But I’m experiencing a bad case of “tiny banjo syndrome” right now. I don’t belong here. I don’t know how to act around famous people.

I just had a conversation with Bill Gaither, for example, in which the first words I muttered were, “Did you know that you’re Bill Gaither?”

The 89-year-old man whose name I have only seen in hymnals just smiled his perfect chompers at me and touched my shoulder. He said, “Thanks for clearing that up.”

For most of the night, I am backstage, waiting to go on. I watch most of the show with the Oak Ridge Boys. We all stand in the wings watching guys like Vince Gill sing. The Gatlin brothers never

sounded so tight.

Now and then, I look into the audience. I’m looking for my wife. I am pretty sure I see Amy Grant sitting a few seats away from my beloved.

And I feel like I am glowing. But I also feel out of place. Like the guy who fell into the beer keg and drowned, but had to crawl out twice to pee first.

At some point, I wander back into the men’s dressing room to watch the show on monitors. I am alone in the room with empty guitar cases, all bearing the inscriptions of names I’ve only ever heard on the radio.

And I am thinking about the little boy I used to be. The kid who dropped out of school after his dad died. The flunky who hung drywall. The fool who finally received his high-school equivalency at 30-something.

What am…

I receive a lot of mail in the form of emails, letters, private messages, texts, Morse code, etc. It is impossible to answer all these messages, so I compiled some commonly asked questions:

Q: Hi! I am an angry Baptist/Pentecostal/Presbyterian/Methodist/evangelical/fundamentalist/fringe-group-religious-person-with-rigid-object-stuck-in-well-known-orifice-of-my-body, and you need to know that you’re way off base with all your talk about lovey-dovey stuff. There’s only one way to heaven, pal, and if you don’t proclaim the message exactly as I say you should, both the Holy Word and my pastors say you are going to the non-heavenly place when you die.

A: Thanks for your comment. I’ll see you there.

Q: This world is a mess, why don’t you ever address the political upheavals of our society? It seems irresponsible to not cultivate awareness especially in light of what’s going on in the news. You’re a coward. Why are you pretending that humanity is one great big happy family, and everything is hunky dory? This isn’t helping our country.

A: I think someone needs a nap.

Q: No, I’m serious. Don’t gloss over the question with your glib, sophomoric attempt

at ill-timed humor. Don’t you see what’s going on on this country?

A: This country needs more love. Not more opinions from keyboard warriors.

Q: Hi. I just want to know: Is Sean Dietrich a real person, or just a secret team of a bunch of wannabe writers pretending to be one guy?

A: We aren’t wannabes. We’re never-weres. Big difference.

Q: Ginger or Mary Ann?

A: Lucille Ball.

Q: Come on. That’s not fair. Please comment on this age-old debate.

A: It’s not a debate. Not really. Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on “Gilligan’s Island,” former Miss Nevada 1960, received more fan mail than Tina Louise (Ginger) and nearly every other actor at CBS Studios combined.

Even after Wells’ heyday she still received some 5,000 fan letters per week from hormone crazed post-pubescent boys,…

There I am, watching him. He sits on the steps of the Shell Station. A backpack beside him. His skin is rawhide. His beard is white.

His name is Buck. He’s from North Carolina. He says he completed two tours in Vietnam.

He’s not here begging, he’s resting his feet.

“My old feet hurt more’n they used to,” says Buck. “Hard getting old, buddy.”

There is a half-smoked cigar next to him. He dug this used cigar from an ashtray. It still has life in it, he says.

He’s sipping coffee.

“First cup’a joe I had in a week. Fella gave me a quarter a few minutes ago. Piled my coins together to buy me a cup.”

A quarter.

When Buck went inside to buy it, there were only cold dregs left in the pot. He asked the cashier if it were possible to brew a fresh pot. She told him to get lost.

“But I’m paying for it,” he insisted.

She escorted him to the door.

So, he’s drinking dregs for which he paid full price—for which he is grateful.

There are holes in his shoes. He

found these sneakers in a sporting-good-store dumpster. Buck estimates he’s put nearly eight hundred miles on them. Who knows if he’s exaggerating or not. Buck has a flare for the dramatic.

Still, his bloody toes poke through the fronts. His middle toenail is missing.

Buck explains, “God says, ‘Don’t worry what you’ll eat, drink, or wear.’ And I believe it. But it’s hard sometimes. ‘Specially when you ain’t eaten and you don’t have [cussword] to wear.”

So I walk inside the gas station on a mission. I ask the aforementioned cashier to brew a fresh pot of coffee—I tell her it’s for me. I am very polite about it.

She smiles and says, “Sure, sweetie.”

Ain’t she sweet.

I buy a hot cup, an armful of snacks, and a pack of Swisher…

I’d say the biggest problem facing this country is typos. Typos are cropping up everywhere. In advertisements, in emails, and even within the very words your reading now.

The main reason for this is your phone, which thinks it’s smarter than you. Your phone will automatically correct your text without your consent.

As a writer, typos deeply affect my life. Whenever an error is found in this column, I usually learn about it in the form of irate emails, direct messages, and ransom notes.

I received one such email this morning, which read, verbatim: “...It’s unprofessional for your article’s title to contain such a glaring typo. Franky, I cannot believe this happened.”

I can only assume that I am “Franky.” Which means this emailer was name-calling. Which, honestly, is something I will not Stan for.

Americans make billions of typos every minute. And that’s not an exaggeration. On average, Americans send 250 million texts per hour. Over 60 percent of our texts contain serious topography eros.

You can also find major-league typos in most printed material that

is around you.

One such typo I will never forget occurred when a public library advertised a summer reading program. The billboard used the library’s catchy slogan, which read: “This summer, it’s time to go pubic.”

Talk about a nightmare for pubic relations.

Another consequential typo happened within a eulogy my cousin wrote. This was published in the printed order-of-service handout. The eulogy began: “Charles will always remain my deadest friend.”

Do you want to know why there are so many typos in written content these days? Do you want to KNOW why typos are occurring in major published works more than ever before in history?

Autocorrect, baby.

See, long ago if you wrote something, say, on a typewriter, whenever you made a mistake you were usually aware of it. You’d just correct the mistake later.

But then, autocorrect came along, instantly altering…

Approximately 5,000 US movie theaters have closed in the last five years. Which is about 1,000 theater closures per year. More theaters are predicted to close.

People just aren’t going to the movies anymore.

“The biggest competitor we have is not Netflix…” says the CEO of AMC Theaters. “It’s the couch. People have simply decided they don’t want to leave their homes as much as they used to.”

I personally mourn the loss of movie theaters. There was a time when the average American teenager attended a few movies per week. I was one such teen.

The movie theater was where your whole life happened. The theater was where you socialized. The theater was where you hung out. The theater was sacred.

In those days, however, the theater wasn’t a temple of silence, but a loud, sticky-floored cathedral where we threw Milk Duds at our friends. And, most importantly, the theater was where you got to first base with Rachel Billings.

I remember sitting through a feature film with Rachel Billings beside me.

I pretended to yawn, casually draping my left arm over her shoulder, only to discover that Rachel had always considered us “just friends.”

Sadly, those days are gone. Today there are millions of teenagers who have never even visited a theater. There are even more teens who have never even heard of Rachel Billings.

Today we have streaming services. Today we have trillions of shows being produced every hour by Hollywood.

And yet, here’s the funny thing: Current stats show that most young people are unable to even watch a single movie all the way through.

In a recent study, 60 percent of teens admitted to playing on their phones while watching movies, usually losing interest within the first 10 minutes. The average digital attention span for teens has dropped to roughly 4.2 seconds.

Other things we are losing:

Sedans. This year, Chevrolet will cease production of…

Here is the news that didn’t make the front page this week, but should have:

—Researchers have grown tiny organs from stem cells, then used these cells to test a new form of therapy for regenerating injured spinal cords. The cells were then treated with a new therapy, called “dancing molecules.” Amazingly, it worked. The therapy successfully reversed paralysis in an animal study.

This was a major breakthrough, and perhaps a big step toward healing spinal cord injuries

—In China, scientists discovered a groundbreaking technique for mass-producing cancer-fighting cells.

Researchers figured out how to engineer these powerful cells from cord blood and are now able to generate a massive output of cells specifically designed to hunt and destroy cancer.

—Polar bears in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago are getting fat. This is a good thing. Because being fatter means healthier. At least for polar bears.

Currently, polar bears are fatter than they have been in the last 30 years. In a recent study, 770 polar bears were in better condition and had higher

fat reserves than in the 1990s. In other good news, I also have higher fat reserves than I did in the ‘90s.

—Steven Maa lost his dog, Rocky. This happened in Summit County, Colorado, when Steven went skiing. He dropped his dog off with a pet sitter, but the dog broke out of his harness, escaped, and ran away.

Steven and his girlfriend looked for Rocky for hours before finally giving up. They called Summit Lost Pet Rescue for help.

The nonprofit’s volunteer team jumped into action. The team searched for Rocky using high-tech rescue techniques including wildlife cameras, a scent station, and whistling really loud. Rocky remained lost in subzero temperatures, in the extreme wilderness, for 43 days.

Last week, rescuers found Rocky sleeping in one of their traps. Rocky had gone from 50 pounds to 28 pounds.

“Amazingly he’s going to make a full recovery,” one rescuer…

JOHN—My angel story takes place when my wife was dying, and I watched everything go downhill in a matter of months. And every night, I would hear a voice tell me “You can get through this, John.”

On the night she died, I heard that voice again. And this time it was my wife’s voice saying, “John, I’m okay. Don’t quit believing.”

LYNN—When I was a young woman someone tried to attack me during a home invasion, but the man was never able to touch me. I screamed for help and something prevented the man’s hands from physically touching me, like he was paralyzed. I know it was an angel that saved me.

BARBARA—A few weeks after my husband’s death, in a fitful sleep state, I heard my husband’s words spoken gently: “Honey, remember Psalm 30:11.” Then the voice went away.

The first thing the next morning, I looked up the verse. I found these words:

“Thou has turned for me my mourning into dancing; thou has put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness.”

KATHY—It was 1977 and we had traveled from Alabama to North Dakota for my grandparents’ 50th anniversary. I had twin girls—a daughter, a son, and another son on the way.

On the day we were loading the car, after the reunion, my sister asked one of the twins (Angie) to tell us about a dream she had.

Angie said, “Angels from heaven came down and brought me to heaven and I saw Jesus.”

I worried about it all the way home and for quite a while after that. But the memory of my daughter’s dream eventually faded.

Flash forward to 1978, the girls were almost 7 years old. It was a sunny day, unseasonably warm, and the girls went to play outside with friends.

Suddenly, I had an overwhelming need to look out the window. It was as though the world was standing still.…

Yeah, I believe in angels. I haven’t always. And sometimes I wish I didn’t believe. It would be easier not to.

It all started in third grade. My teacher read to the class from a book. A mass-market paperback. A book about angels. They were stories of impossible rescues, and unlikely redemptions. Then, she 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 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 grew up to teach third grade.

Yes, my teacher was as crazy as a sprayed roach. But I believed her story. And I still do.

There is another friend I have. 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 towering woman. Motherly. White hair. Glowing skin. 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.

A guy from Alaska 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, there in the woods. She kissed his face and said he would not die, for he still had important things to do on Earth.

Today, that kid is 46 years old and he works as a volunteer with a…