She sang before a small room in the back of an average American library. A 12-year-old blind girl. She’s cuter than a duck in a hat.

She stood before a microphone. She sang. Her eyes were closed because her eyelids don’t open. Her irises are dead, but her eyes used to be hazel.

She wore dental braces. She was clothed in a blue dress. Her hair was in braids. She’s a typical kid. Loves macaroni and cheese. Adores her iPhone. Appreciates any kind of humor that makes usage of the word “butt,” “booger,” or “fart.”

There were 120 of us piled up in the library. All Birminghamites. I was doing an informal book event. I made a speech. I wanted her to sing to my friends.

She did. I guided her to the mic. She sang the song of my grandparent’s generation. “Smile.” Written by Charlie Chaplin in 1936.

A song my grandmother used to hum throughout the Great Depression. A song with lyrics that remind listeners that life is still

worthwhile, if you smile. A song that’s gotten me through some hard times.

The sniffles started from the back of the room. They moved to the front. Soon, the accompanist was sniffing, too.

You watch a blind girl, a kid who has undergone some 50 million surgeries; a kid who was born to drug-addicted parents who left her in a crib for the first two years of her life so that her head was flattened; a kid who wasn’t touched; a kid who spent the first portion of her life withdrawing from crack in an NICU; and this kid tells you to smile although your “heart is breaking,” it does something to you.

An old man broke down and wept. And old woman had to be escorted out of the room. A young boy started crying so hard he had to be consoled.

The kid got a standing ovation.…

One year.

It’s been one year since it happened. Blessed are the victims of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, for they are with God.

Blessed are the Covenant School staff members, the traumatized, the wounded, for these shall be called Children of God.

Blessed are the three 9-year-olds, Hallie Scruggs, Evelyn Dieckhaus, and William Kinney, whose innocent bodies were demoralized in a senseless act of murder, for they are seated on the lap of the Almighty. Blessed are Cynthia Peak (61), Mike Hill (61), and Katherine Koonce (60), for their lives were beautiful.

Blessed are their loved ones, with broken hearts, with battered minds. Blessed are all Nashvillians who wept one year ago.

Blessed are the shell-shocked. Blessed are the confused. Blessed are the pissed-off. Blessed are the traumatized. Blessed are the people who still blame themselves, even though it’s not their fault. Blessed are the bystanders.

Blessed are the men and women in Nashville who can think of no other way to respond to this erratic tragedy than

to help others.

Blessed are the total strangers who showed up on the scene 365 days ago, just to cry. Blessed are those gathered outside Covenant School to hold candles, present bouquets, and memorialize the lost ones.

Blessed are the local media persons whose job was to stand in front of cameras and report, matter-of-factly, on the worst crime of humanity.

Blessed are all those with big hearts, who just wanted to help. Blessed are the givers. The doers. The feeders. The bakers. The babysitters. The shuttle drivers. In a world of people blinded by their own anger, bless you. A million times, bless you. You are not invisible.

Blessed are those who painstakingly tried to maintain peace, especially while everyone else in this world was fighting like rabid canines. As politicians held public urination contests, and random people on Facebook fought from 3,000 miles away. Blessed are the peacemakers.

“Hello, I am Deaf,” said the young woman. Her voice was loud. Her words were enunciated.

Her grandfather translated our conversation in sign language.

We were in the hotel lobby. Eating breakfast. Three strangers in the dining room, nursing plates of lukewarm eggs. Hotel breakfasts—even on good days—taste like reclaimed sewage.

The woman was mid-20s. She wore a pink dress and high-top basketball shoes. Brunette. Brown eyes. Her personal style is one her granddaddy calls “funky.”

The young woman was reading my lips, eyes focused on my mouth. I tried to talk slow, but she was having problems understanding. So her grandfather began signing.

“I can read lips,” the young woman finally explained. “But not yours. You have a beard, your mouth is hard to see with all that hair.”

I told her that next time we met, I would make sure to give the old Chia Pet a trim.

She was born Deaf. Her biological mother was didn’t want her, so the girl was given away to one of her aunts. But her aunt didn’t

want her either. Her aunt was more concerned sustaining a lifelong pain-pill buzz.

So her aunt just left her in the crib all day, until the infant girl almost starved. A neighbor found the baby when they heard her screaming. A baby has to be crying pretty loud for neighbors to hear.

Someone rescued her. Within months, she was adopted by an older couple in their 60s. And this is where Grandaddy takes over telling the story.

“It was my wife,” said the old man. “She was the one who heard about her first. There was no way my wife wasn’t bringing this baby home.”

The young woman blushes when the story is told. She calls the old man “Grandpa,” and her adoptive mother used to be called “Grandma.” Grandma is deceased now.

I asked why she calls her parents by these names instead…

The email came this morning from an 72-year-old reader named Gerald. Gerald is a Baptist minister from Arkansas.

“Dear Sean,” his letter began. “...Sometimes you write good articles but I am so disgusted when you write flippantly about alcohol and beer, Scripture says ‘Be not drunk with wine wherein is excess but be filled to excess with the Spirit…’”

This is exactly the kind of positivity I needed today. Thank you for the kind words, Gerald. But you forgot to comment on my cheap haircut and my weak jawline.

Anyway, today I decided to write a special column for Gerald. This story was emailed to me recently by a reader named Lucía.

Our story begins in Utah, where a young woman named Melanie was living in an abusive relationship. She was 26.

Since abuse only works in isolation, Melanie’s boyfriend kept her away from friends and family. Privacy is paramount for abuse to succeed.

Melanie was pregnant. She went to a doctor’s appointment and found out she was 20 weeks pregnant. And it all

sunk in.

“I’m bringing a baby into this world,” she was thinking. “Is this the life I want for my baby?”

So late one night, she steals her boyfriend’s car. It’s a Toyota. A crappy one. She aims the car Southeast. And she just drives. No destination in mind.

Melanie has a little money, but not much. She sleeps at rest areas in the backseat. She bathes in truckstop bathrooms. She survives on Uncle Ben’s and lunchmeat.

She lands at a halfway house in Colorado. In a few months she has her baby. When her baby is born, she is surrounded by halfway-house volunteers. Each of them, women. Each has been in an abusive relationship before.

She lives at the halfway house. She decides to go back to school. She enrolls in a community college. Melanie undergoes remedial education, then receives a two-year degree. Whereupon she…

The following story was mailed to me by a woman named Carole. The letter was written in pencil.

Carole’s mother was young. Twenty-two years old. She was married and pregnant with her second child. The year was 1945.

The War was freshly over. The Depression was still a recent memory. Carole’s mother wanted to buy her husband a gift for his birthday. He was turning 25.

Her husband had just gotten back from Europe. He had helped liberate the French. Viva la France.

He was battleworn. He was scarred all over. He wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the shrapnel, it was that he’d seen too much.

He got a job working as a janitor for a public school. It wasn’t a great job, but it put food on their table and diapers on their baby.

It was going to be a sparse birthday. The young mother only had $9. She was a homemaker who kept her loose change in a tin biscuit box. She saved up quarters and dimes and nickels in the box.

Only silver. No pennies.

One day, the mother was out shopping for her husband. She was going to buy him a pipe or a bottle of whiskey or something like that. But she met a man on the street.

The man was selling pencils. He had one leg. He was partly blind. He was singing songs to passersby. He was covered in rags. He, too, had been in the War. And he had the injuries to prove it.

She watched him grovel to pedestrians. And she watched people ignore the man. Something moved her. Something compelled the young mother to give him the box of money. It was only $9. But in 1945, 9 bucks was a lot of bread.

He cried when she gave it to him.

“I can’t take this,” he said.

“I want you to have it.”

“Why are you carrying around a…

I don’t know why anyone would impersonate me. I’m not worth impersonating. I talk funny. I have horse teeth. I am pale. Redheaded. And I have unnaturally long legs, so that my wife says I look like a man riding a chicken.

Nevertheless, there are Sean Dietrich impersonators on social media. More impersonators than I ever believed. A whole army of them, actually. Can you imagine a whole army of me? I can’t. It would be like a whole bunch of malnourished men riding poultry, shouting, “Charge!”

But the phonies keep coming. These impersonators are pretending to be me, messaging people, even going so far as to share status updates.

These impersonators, however, aren’t exactly nuclear scientists. Case in point: I have been contacted by my OWN impersonator. Which was chilling, inasmuch as the person claiming to be not only used my personal voice, but he also used bad grammar.

“Hi ther,” the message began. “How is you’re day to be going?”

Jesus wept.

So there I was, private messaging someone in Mozambique, claiming to

be me, and I had this weird feeling I was on an episode of “Twilight Zone.”

“Your are such a very handsome women,” the impersonator began.

“Women is plural,” I write back.

“Whoops,” the impersonator replies. “I meant to say you are such a big handsome woman.”

These impersonators were very friendly, at least at first. They were polite. Courteous. And they expressed a strong desire to have an intimate relationship with me wherein we might lean on each other, support one another, and hopefully, exchange financial information.

Which is why I want to state, upfront: I will NEVER ask for your credit card information via private message. I will always do it in person.

I usually report these impersonators to the social-media powers that be, but the fakes just keep coming. Every time I report one phony account, 10 more crop up to take…

Strafford, New Hampshire. Jake McAlpin accidentally threw away his adult daughter’s favorite stuffed animal, “Cupcake.”

Cupcake is a big, fluffy, stuffed dog that Jake’s daughter Charlotte received for Christmas when she was 4.

Cupcake has always been special to his daughter. But Jake is a dad, and dads don’t always know the importance of stuffed animals.

One day, Jake was doing some spring cleaning. Choices were made. Later, his daughter noticed something was missing after the recent deep clean.

Jake asked his daughter, “What are you looking for?” She said, “Cupcake,” her stuffed animal. And somewhere in the back of his Dad Brain, Jake thought, wait a minute, “Is that the stuffed animal I just took to the dump?”

So Jake’s wife put out a post on Facebook asking if anyone could open the city dump for them to look for the animal.

The post was seen by a member of Strafford’s local government. The official sent a screenshot of what was on Facebook and asked a colleague with keys to the dump if they could go find

Cupcake.

Municipal waste removal experts dug through an Appalchian Mountain range of trash, wading through refuse until their backs were sore.

That’s what they’re called, “waste removal experts.” Anyone who shovels crapola for a living is one such expert.

They found Cupcake.

“Made us feel pretty good,” said Dan Conway, lead waste removal specialist of Strafford Recycling Center. “No one wants to be without their stuffy.”

Here’s another. Kia Rousseve is a 28-year-old bus driver from New Orleans. A few days ago, Kia was about to make her fifth stop when she noticed the schoolbus starting to lose power.

“The bus started acting crazy,” she told reporters, “started jerking, and going real real slow.”

She pulled the bus over. An onlooker told Kia there were flames coming from the bus chassis.

Kia removed Kindergarten through 8th-grade students from the bus moments before…

We first met at a Little Free Library. About a mile from my house. I was walking through the ancient neighborhoods of Birmingham. I was with my dog, carrying a little plastic baggy of poop.

The antique houses caught the light from the setting sun. There was the sound of a leaf blower in the distance. Kids on bikes.

Birmingham is a classically beautiful city. Seeing it at eye level is the only way to appreciate it.

She was a little older woman, digging through the public bookcase. Ninety pounds, max. Mid-80s. She was wearing a sweatshirt that read “I’m a side chick—mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, dressing, candied yams, cranberry sauce.”

She held a Dorothy Garlock book in her hand. I was waiting my turn behind her.

I love Little Free Libraries. I’m a big reader. Little Free Libraries are one of the most beautiful inventions mankind ever created except for, of course, beer.

“Have you ever read Dorothy Garlock?” the woman asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“It’s woman crap, but it’s good,” she said.

The woman weighed the book in

her hand. “Are you looking for something to read?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you take this? You’ll like it.”

“I don’t want to steal your book.”

“It’s okay. I know where you live. And I know jujitsu.”

I took the book. It was a fantastic read. Historical fiction. Set in olden times. With just the right amount of sap. I fell in love with the author because she, too, was an old woman.

Dorothy Garlock was born in 1919, in Texas. Garlock worked for 14 years as a bookkeeper and columnist for a local newspaper before retiring at age 49. To fill her time, Dorothy started writing stories. And that’s when her writing career took off. In her golden years she authored over 50 historical fiction books. She died at 98. She was still writing.

I returned the book to the…

The letter came from a woman who I will call Myra. Although that is not her name, her real name is Judith.

She was not happy. And by “not happy,” I mean she compared me to the Antichrist.

She emailed a letter which began: “...I can’t believe you’re encouraging children to watch ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ who promotes a lifestyle of blatant sexual sin… Focus on the Family and the American Family Association say SpongeBob SquarePants is dangerous to our nation’s children...”

The emailer is referring to a recent column wherein I wrote about an 8-year-old who named an injured bird after SpongeBob SquarePants. I apparently made a mistake.

So let me start by saying I am not, to my knowledge, the Antichrist. In fact, I even asked my wife about this.

“Am I the Antichrist?” I asked my wife.

She said, “Did you fold the laundry like I asked?”

“No.”

“Then yes.”

I do, however, admit to liking SpongeBob. I would not go so far as to say that I “encourage” people to watch the show. Not in the

same way I would encourage people to watch, say, “Baywatch.”

But then I was raised by staunch Baptists. There were a lot of TV programs outlawed among my people.

Among them: “Three’s Company,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “The Simpsons,” “Sesame Street,” Nair commercials, paint drying, and any TV program not entitled “The Lawrence Welk Show.”

But SpongeBob was expressly forbidden. Probably because SpongeBob would always say, “tatar sauce!” Which he often uses as an expletive, instead of saying, for example, “oh, hell!”

Still, SpongeBob happens to be special to my family. I speak here of the first three seasons, which are a masterclass in the art of storytelling.

My history with SpongeBob begins in my teenage years. I had a little sister who loved SpongeBob. I would come home after work, tired and filthy—I worked full-time…

Kansas. Eight-year-old Marcus was playing outside when he heard the thud.

At the time, Marcus was playing Cops and Robbers with his friend Daniel. Marcus was the cop. Daniel was—once again—stuck with the unsavory role of Robber.

“I’d like to be a cop, just once,” Daniel told reporters. And by “reporters,” I am speaking of me.

Their game was interrupted when they heard a loud noise from an upstairs window of Marcus’s house. It sounded “sort of like a drum, but not all the way.”

The boys investigated.

It was a bird. They found it lying in the grass. The bird had apparently flown into the window of Marcus’s home, injuring itself, and lay fluttering its wings. In shock.

Marcus crouched low to look at the bird.

“It was hurt real bad,” Marcus told journalists.

“Don’t touch it,” said Daniel. “It’s very dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” said Marcus.

“Yes. A bird carries diseases,” said Daniel.

Then Daniel recounted to his friend a true story that, allegedly, happened to a friend of a friend, who heard, through reliable sources, about a man whose cousin,

evidently, once touched a wild bird and was thereupon stricken with an incurable disease and was later buried in the cemetery of, what can only be described as, a leper colony.

Bravely, Marcus ignored his friend’s strong warning and lifted the bird into his hands. The boys placed the bird into a shoebox, lined with a dishrag.

“Mom!” Marcus ran through the house shouting. “We found a bird!”

Marcus’s mother could tell the bird was wounded. So they took the bird to a wildlife rehabilitation center.

By then, Marcus and Daniel had already named the bird Bob, after their hero and longtime mentor SpongeBob SquarePants. Which is a television show ranking higher than any other children’s show in the world.

A program so popular that in 2011 an actual species of fungus was named “spongiforma squarepantsii,” after being discovered…