A crowded restaurant-slash-bar. There is a band in the corner, playing music loud enough to threaten dental work.

An older man is on the bench beside me, waiting. The hostess tells us it will be a 40-minute wait for a table. Then she hands us both beepers.

The older man is quiet. Watching the frenetic insanity of modern life move about.

The patrons are mostly young. It’s a bar. So people are happy. They’re doing what happy people from their generation do. They take selfies for no apparent reason. They snap photos of their food when it arrives. They rapidly thumb away on their screens, largely ignoring the people in their party.

The older man is just taking it all in.

There is a family of three on our bench, also waiting for a table. Mom is talking loudly into a phone via Bluetooth. Dad is fiddling with a smartwatch, maybe playing a game? The kid is wearing massive, padded headphones that swallow his head, listening to tunes, blissing out.

Nearby, a group of young women

in heels is huddled together, staring at someone’s phone, laughing at a video, but not conversing. Their phone volume is cranked so high you can almost hear it above the band.

Which is really saying something inasmuch as the band is playing “Truck Yeah” by Tim McGraw. And if this isn’t the worst pop-country song ever written I’ll kiss a grown man’s astrological sign.

The older man finally flashes me a smile. We notice each other amidst the madness. Two humans. Stuck in chaos.

He is missing a few teeth. His nose looks like it’s been broken a few times.

We introduce ourselves. His name is Joseph. He has an iron handshake. His skin is weathered, like he’s been outside a lot. There are tattoos on his forearms and hands.

Joseph says he’s meeting his daughter here. But he feels weird being out…

The 20-year-old girl is sleeping when we enter her hospital room. But her mom tells us to come in anyway.

I’m carrying my fiddle case. My friend Bobby is carrying his banjo.

The patient is sleeping on her side. We see her violent red ponytail spilling down her shoulders. There are cords and tubes exiting her body from all angles.

The girl’s kid sisters rush toward us to give quiet hugs. Then, Bobby and I hug her mother.

The young patient hears all this commotion. Hark. Fair Juliet awakes.

She opens her eyes. She sees me. She smiles. The 20-year-old girl sits up in bed and, without saying anything, opens her arms for me to embrace her.

There are green Band-Aids on her inner forearms, from where nurses have endlessly searched for new veins. And she has lost weight since I last saw her, which was only a few weeks ago. She is a tiny sparrow.

We embrace. I am careful not to squeeze too

hard. I can feel her ribcage beneath my arms.

“You’re here,” Morgan says in a half whisper.

“How’re you doing?” I say.

As soon as the words exit my mouth, I wish I could take them back. What a pig-ignorant question to ask to someone who just spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve in the ICU. How are you doing? What an bonehead.

Morgan smiles and answers, “I am doing great!”

I’ve never heard say things weren’t great. Not once.

She’s paralyzed on her left side. She uses a leg brace to walk. She is nearly blind. She lives on a form of life support called total parenteral nutrition (TPN), which is a feeding tube that supplies nutrition directly through her bloodstream, mounted in a backpack, which she wears all day, every day.

Currently, however, she has a blood infection. The infection…

The old timers in my childhood used a word I never understood. The word was “Providence.” The old timers couldn’t give me an exact definition of this word. Probably because it had more than two syllables.

To be fair, Providence truly is a difficult word to define. Even now, when researching this column I couldn’t find a concrete definition.

One dictionary called the word “archaic.” Which is true. Today the term is so outdated that, if you’re a younger reader, I’ve probably already lost you.

So I’ll explain Providence by telling you how the word was invoked by the rural people of my youth.

Okay. Let’s say there was no rain, the world was dry, farmers were losing money. It wasn’t “bad luck.” It was Providence. And when the rain finally began to fall; also Providence.

When two people fell in love? Providence. If someone got cancer and died, people prayed for the family to receive solace in Providence.

Job promotion? Providence. Finding $20 in your coat pocket? Big-time Providence. The electricity goes

off? Divine Providence.

My people, you see, did not believe in good luck, coincidences, or even flashy miracles. There were no mistakes. There were no accidents. It was all Providence.

To my people, life was a trapeze act. Mankind was always swinging recklessly from trapezes, back and forth. Sometimes man fell, sometimes he didn’t. Either way, there was a divine reason for everything—good and bad. You weren’t supposed to know the reason. That’s Providence.

The thing is, nothing makes sense in life. Not a single thing. I’ve been trying to figure the world out since I was a kid but I’ve never been able to.

I went through a period of sad living, when I believed this universe was against me. I lost faith in everything: in people, in goodness, in miracles. For a while I quit believing in God. I told him…

There were 26 of them, altogether. High-school kids. Not one cellphone among them. Neither were there TVs, airpods, gaming devices, or tablets. No tech at all.

It was a party. An apartment downtown. The kids gathered here sometimes. To blow off steam. To socialize in-person. They heard their ancestors used to do this. Their ancestors called it “hanging out.”

What a weird term.

Some teens were cooking in the kitchen, using cookbooks made of actual paper. They were books manufactured before the paper bans of ‘84.

Most kids had never seen a paper book before. They had only heard of them. Other kids were lounging in various nooks and corners, drawing, writing, or making art on their black-market notepads.

Light music came from a record player someone scored in an antique store. The music was Louis Armstrong. They had never heard anything like it. In fact, they had never met anyone who could actually play an instrument. Today, most kids interested

in music used AI-composition software. Although in the mall there was a humanoid bot who could play violin.

So they were breaking the law. Gathering here. Being without phones. Going phoneless was a crime in their society. A misdemeanor.

Mandatory phone laws had been established long before they were born. The laws were intended for safety. “Real-name registration,” “ID-linked SIM cards,” and “biometric data” had only been concepts 50 years ago, but now they were a global thing.

Even so. It’s a well-known fact that teens rebel.

Teens must rebel. It’s their DNA. Teens have been rebelling ever since two teens named Adam and Eve got the ball rolling.

These particular teens called themselves the “Luddites.” A name they found an antique history book. The first Luddites, they read, were rebels from old England, textile workers and craftspeople, at the dawn of the Industrial Age.

The original Luddites…