The first thing you should know about Joseph is that he isn’t an optimist. In fact, he has no faith in this world.

And he has even less faith in people.

Losing your wife will do that to you. She died and left him with three kids. A small girl. A boy. And a twelve-year-old girl.

So Joseph works hard for a meager living. Very hard. He barely makes enough. He comes home late each night, wearing muddy clothes. Sometimes he puts in overtime and sleeps in his truck.

Joseph’s eldest daughter is half mother and half child. At night, she tucks her siblings into bed. She cooks. She helps with laundry.

At night, Joseph is in bed, thinking of how bad life is. Not only does he miss his wife, he misses the man he was when she was alive. She was taken too early.

How could anyone think this world a happy place when good women die so young?

And the hits keep coming

One day, he’s at his job. He’s exhausted from two night shifts in a row.

He makes a catastrophic mistake while operating the bulldozer. It costs the company big money. They fire him.

Later in the afternoon, he's sitting on his steps, face in hands, crying. His oldest daughter finds him, she sits beside him. She drapes her arm around his shoulders.

“What’s wrong, daddy?” she asks.

He doesn’t want to tell her. He doesn’t want her growing up hating life as much as he does. She’s been through enough.

“Nothing,” Joseph says. “I’ll be alright.”

The next day, he wanders through town, looking for work. He visits local businesses—hat in hand. He's practically begging for a job.

A full week of job hunting, no luck. Joseph is at his bitter end. It doesn’t take much for a man to lose confidence in this world. A few punches, that's all.

One Sunday, he takes…

It’s overcast in Mississippi. I’m with my wife and my coonhound. We are on the wide porch of a vacation rental house.

This is the main road which cuts through town. There are sounds of kids laughing, playing. Easy traffic.

This is an old porch. The kind my father used to sit on. I can see him in my mind, shirtless, reading baseball box-scores. Or carving a pine stick.

My wife is asleep in a rocking chair. My dog snores beside me.

I see vehicles. Lots of them.

The first car is a police cruiser—blue lights flashing. Another cruiser follows. Then comes a slow-moving long black car—with curtains, and chrome fenders. It’s followed by the world’s longest line of cars. A million headlights.

The cars are flanked by a railroad crossing.

The train is running. The funeral procession comes to a halt at the flashing railroad-crossing lights.

There’s a man on the porch of the house next to me. He's within spitting distance from me.

“A funeral,” I hear him say to his wife.

They step off their porch together to stand in the

yard.

This is what we do.

A few other folks in nearby houses do the same. It seems like a good idea. My dog and I walk off our porch to stand by the mailbox.

Across the street, a woman in an apron holds hands with a little girl. An old man is in his driveway, holding a wrench. Watching. Kids stand beside bikes.

A few cars pull to the side of the road.

We've all stopped what we're doing.

And truth be told, I don’t even know why we do it. Of course it’s a gesture of respect. But why? Why respect a stranger we’ve never even met?

I guess it's just how we do things.

The string of cars is impressive. There are models of all kinds. Fords, Nissans, BMW’s, a few work trucks.…

It’s that wonderful time of year when dog owners all across this nation pause and ask themselves, “Why am I sleeping on my own God forsaken sofa?”

Take me, for instance. This morning, I woke up on a couch with a stiff back and a TV remote lodged in a delicate region.

This is unfair. I'm a grown man. I shouldn’t be sleeping on a sofa when I have an expensive bed.

A bed which my coonhound, Ellie Mae, stole from me.

I remember the day I bought my bed at a mattress designer store. A salesman with a skinny mustache, who kept using the words “in-CREDIBLY affordable memory-foam” every few sentences, sold it to me.

We agreed on an incredibly affordable mattress-mortgage with zero down and one hundred forty-three percent interest; he delivered twelve hundred pounds of memory-foam to my doorstep.

But it was worth it. The mattress pamphlets explained that this product would eliminate back pain and leave me looking like the leading man from a Just For Men Shampoo commercial.

But when

the bed entered my home, I never got to use it. Ellie Mae leapt onto the mattress, walked in circles for eight minutes, collapsed, and has not moved in a decade.

This makes restorative sleep impossible. Because sleeping beside a restless coonhound is like sharing a sleeping bag with three Harlem Globetrotters.

When Ellie Mae hits deep sleep, she begins whimpering, twitching, flailing, and snoring. And there goes the night.

When you consider these facts together, a very frustrating question comes to my mind, as I’m sure it does to most non-dog owners: “What are three Harlem Globetrotters doing in a sleeping bag?”

Anyway, when a dog overtakes your mattress, it's for life. There’s nothing you can do about it.

Last night, I tried to scoot my dog’s ninety-pound body from my spot. After trying for ten minutes, I only managed to nudge her two…

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 fought in Korea, and 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. “It’s a bitch getting old, buddy.”

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

He’s sipping coffee.

“First cup’a Joe I had in a week,” he tells me. “Fella gave me a quarter, 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. He asked the cashier if it were possible to brew a fresh pot. She told him to get lost.

So, he’s drinking dregs—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.

His bloody toes poke through the

fronts. His middle toenail is missing.

Buck explains, “God say, ‘Don't worry what you’ll eat drink or wear.’ That's hard sometimes. Specially when you ain’t eaten.”

I walk inside the gas station on a mission. I ask the aforementioned cashier to brew a fresh pot of coffee—for me.

She smiles and says, “Sure, sweetie.”

Ain't she nice.

I buy a hot cup, an armful of snacks, and a pack of Swisher Unsweetened Mini-Cigars. I give them to Buck, and I tuck a bill into his hand. I wish I had something bigger, but I don't.

Buck starts crying.

And the truth is, I’m embarrassed to even be telling you this. Because this story isn’t about me—it’s about Buck.

“Did you know that I see God in you?” Buck tells me through glazed…

Colatta is her name. She and I are in the elevator together. She is pushing a large cart of cleaning supplies and mini shampoos.

Colatta is short, black, cheery. She’s wearing scrubs. She is pure Alabama. She has an accent that won’t quit, and wears a War Eagle headband.

“Went to Auburn,” she says. “Wanted to be a vet, but didn’t even come close to finishing ‘cause I had my son.

"Man, I thought my life was over, it was just beginning.”

Her boyfriend didn’t stick around during pregnancy. She was forced to work. Her job was in a hotel laundromat. She was promoted to a maid last year.

“Have a good day,” she says to me, rolling her cart down a corridor.

“You, too,” I say.

“Me?” She laughs. “Already HAVING me a good day. I’m so blessed it ain’t funny.”

Colatta. I love that name.

Later that day, I drive two hours east. I stop at a cafe inside a gas station. It’s a hole-in-the-wall.

After eating, I pay at the register. The cashier is older, very skinny. She places a handheld vibrating box

to her throat to speak. Her voice is robotic.

She hands me a receipt. Then, she presses the device to her neck again and says: “Have a good day. Enjoy this nice weather.”

There is a gnarled scar beneath her jaw.

And she's wishing ME a nice day.

7:09 P.M.—I’ve driven all day. I’m eating in a locals-only beer joint. People in this room are looking at me funny. I’m an out-of-towner and they smell it.

There’s an old man with a service dog—a brown Lab named Hershey.

The man wears a ball cap with a battleship on it. He shows me a tattoo on his forearm which reads: “Albert, Daniel, Adam.”

“My three brothers,” he says. “Killed in Europe. I was too young for the Big War, they sent me to Korea.”

That’s…

A church fellowship hall in Chumuckla. There’s a serious church buffet happening. Kindhearted women with white hair keep the line moving with serving spoons.

You can’t visit a place like this without seeing white-haired women with serving spoons.

The chicken is exquisite. The fried catfish was caught in the Escambia River. Fried okra, cornbread, biscuits, macaroni and cheese. Ham hocks—seasoned with a few butter beans.

It’s my second time through the food line. The white-hairs ask how we liked our food.

The phrase of the night is one you’ll hear all over the Great American South:

“We enjoyed it.”

It's the unofficial motto of Lower Alabama and the Panhandle.

My wife and I sit on folding chairs. I am wearing seersucker.

It’s funny how life repeats itself. As a boy, my mother would’ve forced me into seersucker and penny loafers for a NASCAR rally. Today, I’m wearing such things of my own volition.

The room is alive with voices—talking and laughing. And, of course, there’s singing. You can’t visit a place like this without singing.

The man playing piano is blind. His eyelids are closed. He plays

old favorites. “Sweet Sweet Spirit,” and “Give Thanks,” and “I’ll Fly Away.”

His hands feel the keys for the next chords. He’s playing through the musical score of my childhood.

He has a nice voice, but he isn't trying to impress listeners. That’s not how we Baptists do. If you’re looking for impressive vocal gymnastics, visit the Assembly of God up the road.

We're singing:

“When the shadows of this life have gone,
“I’ll fly away...”

People hum with mouthfuls of peach cobbler. Even kids who aren’t old enough to ride the Teacups at Disney World sing. Some folks are even brave enough to clap.

You cannot visit a place like this and not clap to “I’ll Fly Away.”

At the end of the night, people hug necks. They talk about what…