Thank you. That is the​ purpose of this column. I want to say “thanks.” I don't know you, but I believe in the good you do.

In public, I used to see you sometimes and think to myself: "I wish someone would thank them." But I never do because if I did, you’d think I was a complete nut job.

Maybe I am a nut job. But I’m allowed to be that way. After all, I am a columnist—sort of—and that means my proverbial box is missing a few crayons.

Long ago, I used to deliver newspapers with my mother. We used to deliver to a fella who would answer the door in pajamas. He had messy hair and a bushy white beard. He always gave me a five-dollar tip.

He was generous. If he wasn’t home one day, he would pay me ten bucks the next day. He was a columnist, my mother told me. And that’s why he was such a weirdo in weird pajamas. Even his house smelled weird.

I suppose I

ought to thank him while I am at it.

Also, thanks to the man I saw in the gas station who bought a lottery scratch-off ticket. Who won thirty bucks, then turned around and gave the cash to a woman behind him in line. What a guy.

The woman thanked him in a language that sounded like Russian. The man thanked her back using fluent hand gestures.

Thank you, Cindy—the woman who translated one of my speeches in American Sign Language for the front row​. She told me I talked very fast and now she has problems with her rotator cuff.

She also taught me how to cuss in sign language.

Thank you to the seventy-year-old man who went back to school to get his GED. And his forty-six-year-old daughter, who tutored him.

And you. You deserve thanks, but you don't always get it. In…

Christmas Eve. Southeastern Kansas. The middle of nowhere.

Kansas is one of those places that gets a bad rap. People speak of Kansas like it’s Death Valley, or the hindparts of Mars.

People say stuff like, “Yeah, I drove through Kansas once, I was bored spitless for six hours.”

But that’s only because they aren’t seeing the Sunflower State the right way. The Thirty-Fourth State can bewitch you if you open yourself to its quiet beauty.

First you have the sunsets. Kansan sunsets are neon red and gold, vivid enough to put Claude Monet to shame. The sundowns are an ecological phenomenon, caused by red dust in the atmosphere which has traveled all the way from the Sahara to suspend itself above Bourbon and Neosho County.

Also, you have sublime flatness. Millions of Americans visit the Gulf of Mexico each year to stare at prairie-flat blueness. Kansans have a gulf of their own.

Currently, the state has 15.8 million acres of virgin prairie. You can stand at certain places in this state and,

literally, be hundreds of miles from the nearest Super Target.

In the wintertime, however, Kansas has earth-stopping blizzards. This is the geographical center of the nation. They get all the weather you didn’t want.

Tornadoes. Fatal summers. Snowstorms harsh enough to make Scandinavia look like a weekend in Honolulu.

It was during one such snowstorm, on Christmas Eve, that Marie was at home. She was a young mother, with two children. They lived in a 40-foot single wide, perched on 200 acres of family land.

The blizzard of aught-nine was apocryphal. Many evangelicals believed this was the literal end of the world and were sincerely repenting of their evil ways, committing themselves to prayer, fasting, and self flagellation. Meanwhile, the German Catholics decided to take up vodka as hobby.

To say the storm was “bad” is like saying invasive dental surgery is “kinda fun.” In some places…

Granddaddy placed me on his knee, he fuzzed my hair and smoked his Bing Crosby pipe. The world smelled like Prince Albert in a can.

“The year was 1862,” Granddaddy began his story. “The day was Christmas. The place was eastern Virginia.”

East Virginia. God’s country. Where the Rappahannock River traverses the Blue Ridge Mountains, then dumps itself into the Chesapeake like a pitcher of ice tea. The War was on. The landscape was torn up from war.

“And it was so cold,” said Granddaddy.

Paralyzingly cold. The winter of 1862 was brutal. You could break a tooth eating a bowl of soup.

Eighteen-year-old privates were sleeping on barren earth, huddled together like puppies beneath woolen blankets. Grown men—military men—spooned together, just to survive.

But this cold snap was nothing compared to the hunger. Some soldiers were so hungry they were eating their tobacco. There are stories about soldiers eating their own shoe leather.

Christmas morning came with fresh misery. A wet snow had fallen overnight. Gaggles of army boys awoke with frostbitten noses and frozen

earlobes. Others were coughing themselves to death.

The opposing armies were camped on opposite sides of the river. Gray coats on one side. Blues on the other. Before evening, these countrymen would probably be killing each other. “It was a hell of a time to be a soldier.”

I interrupted my Baptist grandfather. “Grandaddy, you can’t say ‘hell.’”

My grandfather, the grizzled veteran who spent his youth dodging shells in Anzio, Italy, said, “Son, there is no other word for war but hell.”

That morning, a few young soldiers were on patrol near the banks of the Rappahannock. They stopped patrolling when they saw the enemy on the other side of the river, also patrolling.

Both groups halted.

Soldiers on both sides of the river were skin and bones, with sunken eyes and the pallor of cadavers.

It was a stare down between adversaries.…

It was dark when we pulled up in the wilds of Locust Fork, Alabama. A big group of us. The small house stood in the country. I think the cows were watching us.

A throng of us fell out of our vehicles like clowns riding in circus cars. We had guitars, banjos, accordions. It was cold, we were wearing jackets and goofy smiles.

“Shouldn’t we knock on the door first?” someone said.

“No, you don’t knock on the door.”

“But how will they hear us if we don’t tell them we’re here?”

“We have to sing loud and wait for them to offer us figgy pudding and stuff.”

“This house is built like Fort Knox. They’ll never hear us outside.”

Thus, we all stared at the cold, masonry exterior looking back at us. We sang as loud as we could.

For song lyrics, some of us carried paper books. Others just made them up. We sang the main carols. “Silent Night,” “The First Noel,”

“Bohemian Rhapsody.”

We waited for someone inside to notice us, lingering outdoors, wearing our funny hats, wassailing our butts off. But nobody did at first.

Someone among us pointed out the obvious. “We are, literally, singing to a wall.”

Then we saw a young woman come to the door. She was slender and small. College age. Her hair is the color of fire. She has a tiny feeding tube affixed beneath her nose. Her steps were cautious, but we were all so proud she was walking again. There are a lot of people who have been praying for Morgan Love.

Morgan has been through hell. She’s been in and out of hospitals for most of this year. Recently, she just arrived home from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Her stomach and intestines haven’t been working right. But through it all, the young woman has remained a…

I remember the day we got married. I was a bundle of nerves. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I just drove around town in my car.

I ended up eating a huge lunch at a barbecue joint because I was so nervous. I didn’t know what else to do with my time, so I ate a big barbecue sandwich. Then I ate one more. Then I ate a third sandwich.

I remember the way I felt when I arrived at the church. Like I was going to puke. Either from the 27 pounds of pulled pork I had just eaten, or from the anxiety. Or both.

I was trembling. I remember feeling so stupid. I can’t explain it. Like a kid playing dress-up. Like I wasn’t fully an adult. Like I had no right to be here.

I threw the truck into park, stared at the church, and wondered whether I should turn around and drive away. I could just aim my truck for Canada,

and nobody would ever find me.

The parking lot was filling with cars. People were walking into the church. And I was caught in a daze, just watching them.

I remember finally walking into the groom’s dressing room. Like a zombie. My uncle was standing there. The same uncle who hasn’t smiled since the Woodrow Wilson administration. He was just looking at me with his trademarked scowl.

He said, “Where were you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you getting cold feet?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

I nodded. “Sort of.”

I got dressed. It was my first time ever wearing a tux. I felt ridiculous in it. The necktie made me look like Winston Churchill after a very bad night.

I walked into the sanctuary. The pews were full with three quarters of Brewton, Alabama. I could hardly breathe. Everyone was looking at me.…

The lunch lady noticed him, sitting in the corner. He always ate by himself in the cafeteria. He never interacted with the other students. There were holes in his shoes.

The older woman approached his table. She knew her presence embarrassed him. She knew he didn’t want the attention.

But hey, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

He was skinny. And in bad need of a haircut. The boy had body odor, too.

“Is this seat taken?” she asked.

He just looked at her.

“Well?” she said. “Is it?”

Without asking, she took a seat. She ate her own lunch beside him. It is a little known fact that lunch ladies actually eat lunch too.

It didn’t take long before she became his friend. They sat together every lunch period. The other kids poked fun at him for eating lunch with an elderly woman. But then, his fellow students could often behave like turds.

She learned a lot about him

that year. She learned that he lived in a broken home. His dad left when he was a baby. His mother had bad habits that occasionally landed her in legal custody. Oftentimes he didn’t have enough food at home.

“What did you have for supper last night?” the lunch lady once asked him.

“I didn’t,” he replied.

That year, on Christmas Eve, the lunch lady had an idea. She got the others in the school kitchen involved. Then she got her church friends involved. It was a covert operation. Hush hush.

One night, under the cover of darkness, a group of older women—dressed in dark colors—crept up to the boy’s home. On his doorstep, they placed a battalion of foil-covered casseroles, with Post-It-note cooking instructions attached. There were sacks of homemade Christmas candy. Peppermint bark, Christmas-tree cookies, gingerbread, salted nut-butter cups, taffy. There were groceries.…

The hospital room was decorated for Christmas. The young man was sitting in his bed, wired up to a horde of machines. The kid was watching something on the television mounted on the wall. Barely able to keep his eyes open. He was 8.

“Are you in any pain,” the nurse asked.

The little boy was weak. His neck was gaunt. His head was covered in bandages. Beneath his cap was a large crescent-moon scar on his scalp, from where doctors had operated on his brain.

“I’m not in pain,” the kid said drowsily.

He was watching some Christmas movie in black and white. His mother remembers this specifically.

His mother was right beside him, reading a book. She was a single mother. She worked full-time as a night waitress, and she worked on a landscaping crew in the daylight hours.

She didn’t notice, but she fell asleep. Because when she awoke, there were medical staffers gathered around her son’s bed. The heart monitor

was as flat as a prairie highway.

They rushed her son away.

“What’s happening to my son!” she screamed.

“Ma’am,” said one staffer. “Try to calm down.”

She called her son’s name. But her boy was already being whisked down the hall by a team of scrubs and lab coats.

She found herself in a waiting room. No family to support her. No parents. No husband. No nothing. She felt as alone as anyone had ever felt. And she needed a cigarette.

That’s when she noticed a guy walking into the waiting room. Jeans and a light jacket. He sat beside her. He started talking with her. A nice guy. Cheerful and easy going. He asked about her son. And she talked to him. She opened up to him. She let him hear it all. She told him everything until she started crying. She…

Winter. The year is 1949. The war has been over for a while, but it’s still fresh on everyone’s minds. Which is why people are having babies like crazy. War does that to people.

This new generation of babies will be known as the Baby Boomers, and each day they are being born by the truckload. These children will grow up one day and change the world by inventing revolutionary things such as DNA fingerprinting, the World Wide Web, the portable dialysis machine, and Donny Osmond.

But not all babies are lucky enough to be born into good lives. By which I mean that some babies have fathers who don’t want them. One woman—I will call her Macy—was pregnant with a baby like that.

So Macy’s mother did what lots of small-town mothers did in those days, she sent Macy away. Macy was supposed to go live with her aunt in Illinois, but it didn’t work out. So Macy tried Kansas City. That didn’t work either. And this brings us to the

beginning of our story.

Macy was alone. And penniless. Without a friend in the world. If we were to describe her situation with the blunt terms that my grandfather might have used: “Macy didn’t have a pot to [ugly word] in, or a [ugly word] window to throw it out of.”

She used her last few bucks to buy a bus ticket to Omaha, because she believed that this was a place where she could make a better life. Maybe nobody would ask questions about illegitimate babies in Omaha. Maybe nobody would bat an eye if she told them she was a widow.

So her bus was purring along when some very crummy weather hit. The weather went from snowstorm to deathstorm in only a few hours. History would later remember this weather system as one of the century’s worst blizzards to hit the Plains.

The bus rolled…

I am not sure whether you understand English, but I’d like to think you do.

I’d like to think that you know exactly what I’m saying to you. I’d like to think I speak fluent dog.

Heaven knows, I speak to you non-stop. Because you’re blind. Because you need me to keep talking. When I talk to you, you don’t feel so disconnected. That way you’re always part of what’s going on.

So I’ve been talking a lot since I brought you home. I say anything and everything to you, so you feel involved.

I tell you when I’m going to the bathroom. When I read a book, I read aloud. When we go for walks, I describe what I’m seeing. I talk to you about the green crabgrass, the particular shade of blue in the sky.

Yeah, I know it’s silly. You probably can’t understand me. Although sometimes I’m not sure.

Sometimes I think you actually know what I’m saying. Because there are occasions when I tell you how much I love you. And when you hear this, you sort of

lean into me like you know precisely what “I love you” means.

Other times, when I tell you “It’s going to be okay,” after something frightens you, you tuck your head into my chest because I think that, on some level, you know. You know what I mean.

I can only imagine how scared you get when a loud sound occurs nearby. I can only guess at how disoriented you feel when you stumble off the curb.

I owe you an apology. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to teach a blind dog. I am learning as I go. I have so much more to learn. I’m reading books. I’m watching videos. I’m trying. I promise you, I am. But I am an inadequate trainer.

Any troublesome issues lie within me, not you. You’re doing perfectly. You have…

It’s weird. Standing on this stage. In this arena. I’m looking at a thousand faces. Many of them are about to be college graduates. And they’re all looking back at me so hopefully, so full of wonder, so wide-eyed and eager, as if to say, “I hope this idiot’s speech isn’t too long.”

Right now, I am making a commencement speech at Northwest Florida State College. I am wearing a suit. Also deodorant. Everyone is sitting in the basketball arena, clad in big robes and flat hats, staring directly at me. I believe many of the graduates are also wearing deodorant.

Most of the graduates are young. Their parents are present, quietly reading through their programs as I speak. Scanning the alphabetical list of graduates' names printed on the program. I can see many parents are just now realizing how many graduate names are on the program today. If, by chance, someone’s last name is, for example, “Williams,” or “Zimmerman,” these people will be stuck in

this arena until the installation of the next pope.

Funny thing. This basketball arena wasn’t here when I attended the school, long ago, shortly after the end of the Spanish-American War. Back before most of these graduates were born.

Northwest Florida State wasn’t even called that. We were Okaloosa-Walton Community College back then. We were just a couple outdated brick buildings, some double-wide trailers, and a drinking fountain that didn’t work.

I attended this school as an adult. On a whim, I walked into Admissions Building C, and I told the ladies behind the desk that I wanted to go to college. I told them I was a middle-school dropout. I told them I had quit school in the seventh grade after my father died.

I told them we were poor folks. My mother lived in a FEMA trailer. I drove a vehicle that predated the Carter Administration.…