This is his story.

Bryan was walking along the Arkansas highway shoulder with only the moon to guide him. He had a backpack slung over his shoulder. It was cold. Blisteringly cold.

He was a kid, 23 years young. This was not a friendly evening, weather-wise. Tonight it was colder than a brass toilet seat in Nova Scotia. And it was sleeting.

He had a long way to go before he hit the nearest town. He was wet. His feet hurt. His back hurt. His whole mind hurt.

His family was a downright mess, and his homelife was a wreck. He had decided, tonight on this walk, that he was going to end it all. He didn’t have the details worked out, but he’d made up his mind nonetheless.

A pickup truck practically materialized out of nowhere. The headlights were blinding. The vehicle pulled over, crunching on gravel.

Inside was an older woman. The heater was blaring.

“Get in,” said the lady.

And she didn’t say it as a question.

Bryan piled into the bench seat. The heat felt good on his wet body. They shook hands and swapped

names.

“Where you headin’?” she said.

Her hair was gray and messy, like it hadn’t been combed since the Crimean War. Her eyes were wild.

“Don’t know,” said Bryan. “I’ll go anywhere you’re going.”

She just looked at him.

“Are you an angel?” she said.

He laughed. “What?”

“Tell me the truth.”

He wasn’t sure if this old woman was pulling his leg.

“I’m no angel,” he said.

She stared at him like she was boring a hole through limestone.

“I can take you as far as Little Rock,” she said. “That’s where I’m going, I’m meeting my granddaughter tonight.”

“Little Rock would be great.”

In a few moments, they were careening down the highway. Bryan noticed the woman kept staring at him with an odd look on her face.

The…

DEAR SEAN:

I’m pregnant. My husband and I have been going back and forth on name options but have no ideas. So right now I have a baby without a name. I know this is a strange request, but can you give me some name suggestions? I don’t want one of those modern names.

Thanks,
NEW-MOM-IN-GRAND-RAPIDS

DEAR GRAND-RAPIDS:

The night I was born, my mother took me into her arms and decided that she was going to name me Elvis.

My aunt recalls: “Your mama loved Elvis. Plus, you were a Capricorn, you know. Elvis and Jesus were Capricorns.”

Case closed.

In the end, my mother gave me a Scot-Irish name. But over the years I’ve wondered about how differently my life would have played out if my mother would have gone with Elvis.

PATROLMAN: License and registration, please, sir?

ME: Here you are, officer.

HIM: Do you know how fast you were driving back there…. (looks at license) Elvis?

ME: Uh-huh-uh-huh

As a writer, when you start working on a novel, the first thing you think about

are the names of your characters. In fact, names are one of the most important parts of any story. Think about it. How many pieces of classic literature do you read where the hero was named Heman Pickles?

You do, however, have to be careful when you give opinions on names you like and dislike because feelings can get hurt very easily. My mother and aunt once got into a knock-down-drag-out argument after my aunt admitted that she never liked my mother’s name.

My mother was fuming. She stood from her chair and informed my aunt that she never liked my aunt’s name, either. Things got ugly. My mother said my aunt’s name reminded her of a barefoot and pregnant hick—my aunt at the time, was barefoot, also pregnant.

So then my aunt said my mother had a bad singing voice…

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. Life is not easy. And on many days, life just plain sucks.

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 is a happy place when good women die so young? How could any widower feel

warm and fuzzy about this world?

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. She’s already more woman than girl.

“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. He’s only a few steps away…

I have received a lot of questions lately. I decided to combine the most frequently asked questions and answer them in the Q-and-A format. Here we go.

Q: Why is your blog/column called “Sean of the South”?

A: When I started writing in earnest, my dear friend, Melissa Wheeler, named this column after one of my favorite songs, “Song of the South,” by the band Alabama. Which is the only song I know that contains flagrant lyrics about sweet potato pie. She is a very smart woman, and one of my dearest pals.

Q: What are some other names you tossed around?

A: Some runners-up were: “Sean of Green Gables,” “Little Orphan Seanie,” “Portrait of the Baptist as a Young Man,” and my personal favorite, “Sean With the Wind.”

Q: Do Southerners really say “bless your heart”?

A: Yes and no. For starters, everyone—and I mean every single person—in my family utters the phrase “bless your heart.” But nobody says this expression in the ridiculous way that faux-Southerners use it on Netflix.

Sadly, Hollywood script writers

have butchered our cherished colloquialism, and now it’s become a painful cliché.

The modern-day Bless Your Heart joke started during the infancy of the Internet, when chain-email forwards were mankind’s only form of digital entertainment.

Back then, whenever your inbox received a chain-email, this message often came from an elderly relative who sent thousands of email forwards each day to innocent family members.

Many of these messages were political, others were urban legends, some emails encouraged readers to send their insulin money to Oral Roberts Ministries Inc.

But whenever these emails were humorous, you would stop what you were doing, gather the whole fam around the PC, and read the email aloud.

Q: Are you going somewhere with this?

A: Yes. One of the popular comical email forwards from the 1990s was the Bless Your Heart email, which suggested that “bless your heart” was…

One of the sharpest memories you have is of your daddy.

You’re maybe 9. In his truck. Saturday night. The “Grand Ole Opry” is on the radio. Daddy’s driving past the ugly side of town.

It pains him to see this place. He’s emotional. Maybe a little drunk. He points out the house he grew up in as Minnie Pearl is on 650 WSM.

Daddy is telling you something. Something you’ve always remembered: “Poverty’s all about isolation,” he says. “Being poor is just another way of saying you’re lonely.”

You’ve thought about this. Over the years, you’ve come to the conclusion that Daddy was right.

When you’re isolated, you’re lonely. When you’re lonely, you have no network. No network; no opportunities. No opportunities equals no job. When you have no job, you have no money. When you have no money, you have a problem.

In the end, it comes down to people. If you have no people, you got nothing.

But then you already know this. Because you grew up poor. After your father took his own life, you had

no support system.

Mama’s family was split. Daddy’s family was even worse. Your boyhood friends quit calling. You quit going to Little League. Quit Boy Scouts. Dropped out of school.

A lot of people in those days didn’t know what to think about suicide, so they tried not to think about it at all.

But none of that matters now. What matters is that you grew up and something changed. Somehow you went to college. Somehow you became a writer and performer.

And much to your surprise, you started meeting new people. Lots of people. Good people.

Suddenly, you were meeting new friends at every event. You were still living in a 28-foot trailer, mind you. But you weren’t isolated anymore.

There was the little girl with spina bifida, who came to your first ever performance. She bought one of…

You might not know this, but a few days ago was a national holiday. A day when our nation traditionally puts aside our differences, stands together in solidarity and brotherhood, from sea to oil-slicked sea, and we celebrate our most cherished national pastime.

Pound cake.

That’s right. It was National Pound Cake Day.

Frankly, I did not know it was National Pound Cake Day until a reader named Phyllis Ratliff, of Oneonta, Alabama, brought this to my attention. Phyllis reminded me that today is a critical day in our native heritage.

“We must ask ourselves,” writes Phyllis, “how many pound cakes sacrificed their lives defending our privilege to celebrate this day?”

Phyllis is absolutely right. Pound cake is an expressly American dish, right up there with Velveeta, and Budweiser. And yet nobody in the news media is even talking about this issue.

One columnist demands to know why.

Contrary to popular notions, apple pie is not our flagship American dish. Forget apple pie.

Apple pie originated in England during the 14th century, shortly

after the birth of Cher. Back then, English peasants were so poor that most historians believe the first apple pies were made with apples harvested from the stalls of nearby horse pens.

Pound cake, on the other hand, is an American cake. It originated right here in the North American colonies. The first mention of pound cake comes to us in a cookbook entitled “American Cookery,” published in 1796 (HarperCollins).

So this morning, I, for one, am choosing to celebrate this holiday by eating a wedge of pound cake that is roughly the same thickness as the unabridged edition of “Gone With the Wind.”

Pound cake is in my DNA. I have been eating pound cake since I was six minutes old, which was all my grandmother’s doing.

In the hospital delivery room, shortly after my birth, my Granny and her church-lady friends showed up with baked…

The supermarket checkout line. She was white-haired and frail. She looked like a church lady to me.

Her buggy was filled to capacity so that it looked like she was pushing a coal barge up the Mississippi. The first item she placed onto the conveyor belt was an extra-large case of Coors.

“That’s a lot of beer,” said I.

She smiled. “On sale.”

“Are you the one who drinks it?”

She nodded. “Two beers a day keeps the doctor away.”

“I don’t think that’s how the saying goes.”

“Yeah, well, I hate apples.”

Her voice had the same timbre as a tuba. She wore a pink silk jacket draped over her shoulders, buttoned at the top, á la 1952. She wore green polyester slacks such as I haven’t seen since Florence Henderson was on primetime. You could have smelled her floral scent from across the county lines. Ea du old lady.

“Get over here and help me,” she said to me, as she struggled to unload her buggy.

She didn’t say please. She didn’t say, “Young man, would you be so kind…?” She told me to “get

over here.”

So I helped her.

“You’re a nice guy,” said the woman, watching me labor beneath the weight of her 1,439-pound bag of Pedigree dog food.

“Tell that to my wife,” I said.

“So you’re married?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I was married once.”

“Is that right.”

“Yep. I was happily married for ten years. Ten outta fifty-three ain’t bad.”

Then the woman cackled and told the bag boy to fetch her a carton of cigarettes. Marlboros. Menthols.

After which she dug into her purse and removed a stack of coupons roughly the size of a Tolstoy novel and gave it to the cashier.

The cashier girl accepted the coupons hesitantly and flashed me a look indicating that she was not enthusiastic about her career path right now.

“What was his name?”…

Cracker Barrel, 8:17 P.M.—it's busy tonight. There’s a boy in a wheelchair at the table beside me. His father is spoon feeding him cooked apples and fried chicken.

When the boy's sister says something funny, the boy claps and laughs.

His father wipes his face with a rag and says, “You’re my special boy.” Then, he kisses his forehead.

A nearby girl wanders toward the boy. She is four, maybe. Her hair is in locks. She stares at him with her hand in her mouth.

“Is he okay?” she asks.

The boy leans and gives a big “HELLO!”

There are apple bits on his chin.

The girl gives a smile brighter than a Christmas tree. “HI THERE!” she says in return. Then, she skips off.

Three tables from the boy is an old man. He is wearing a ball cap, Velcro shoes. He’s sitting at a two-top. He orders chicken-fried steak and potatoes. He has no cellphone to occupy his attention. No reading material. He sits.

He and I share a waitress. Her name is Blanche—it’s embroidered on her

apron. Whenever he speaks to her, he holds her hand. Something you don't see much.

He has a voice that sounds beautifully genteel. It's a wonder he's all alone.

Behind him is a table of Mexican workers—men, women, and kids. At least I think they’re Mexican. Every word they say is tagged with a diminutive “ito” or “ita.” They sit covered in paint and grit. They speak rapid Spanish. Lots of laughing.

One Mexican boy crawls into his mother's lap. She strokes his silk hair with her paint-spotted hand, saying, “Cariño mio,” over and over.

And though I don't know much Spanish, I imagine this, more or less, means: “You're my special boy.”

To their left: a teenage couple. He weighs a buck ten, she is a foot taller than him. They hold hands when they walk out. They kiss. They…

It was late. I had just finished performing my one-man spasm in Tupelo, Mississippi. We were tired. My wife and I had a long drive ahead.

But there was one stop I had to make.

The GPS was confused. Siri led us on a raccoon chase. We were going in circles. At one point, we realized we had passed the same Dollar Tree four times.

But eventually, we pulled into 306 Elvis Presley Drive.

The narrow house, the place of Elvis Aaron Presley’s birth, was as big as a minute. About the same size as the junk house my daddy grew up in. A shotgun house. White clapboards. Gray porch. Porch swing. Screen door.

I had my guitar in the van. So I sat on the porch swing and tuned it. The balmy Mississippi air will detune a guitar in only seconds.

I sang “Peace in the Valley.” Same tune we sang at my old man’s funeral. I still remember watching my daddy’s ironworker friends cover their weathered faces and sniff their noses.

My father was

an Elvis fanatic. There were only three performers he nearly idolized. Hank Senior, Ray Charles, and Elvis. One of those three was always playing in his garage workshop, over the tweed speakers of a Philco radio.

“If you were a kid in the fifties,” Daddy once said, “you loved Elvis. He was in our drinking water.”

And love Elvis he did. He could sing all the hits. Every lyric. Every inflection.

I have vague memories of driving in Daddy’s F-100, with my bare feet on his dashboard, with Elvis playing. Only, I could hardly hear Elvis over Daddy’s singing.

I don’t have many memories of making Daddy proud. Save, for one.

It was a Fourth of July picnic. I was 9. There was a plywood stage. There was a gospel quartet. There was a band.

The event planners asked me to sing an Elvis…