The sun went down. The colors on the Gulf of Mexico were nothing short of dramatic. Orange, purple, gold, electric red. All three women were watching the sun from the shore’s edge. But I was watching them.
The waiter said, “No sir, I didn’t forget your bill, there is no bill, someone paid for your pizza.”
Recently, I went to the gas station to get a newspaper, coffee, and lottery ticket. My bloodhound, Thelma Lou—poster child for moderate hyperactivity disorder—usually goes with me.
The way our morning routine usually works is simple: I buy a newspaper, maybe some powdered donuts; she steals my donuts, and eats my newspaper.
But on this morning, when I walked into the gas station, something was wrong. Before I even got to the donuts, I could tell the air was tense.
The scene was this:
The cashier behind the counter was frazzled. She obviously did not know how to use the computerized cash register.
A customer at the counter was aggravated with her. There were five customers in line. They were all displaying universal gestures of annoyance.
Clearing throats. Folding arms. Tapping feet. The woman in front of me glanced at her watch. One man sighed hard enough to knock over a circus tent.
“Not-niceness.” That’s what we’re dealing with here. And it’s running rampant in today’s world.
The customers were
growing not-nicer by the minute. Finally, a man slammed his change on the counter. Another man mumbled a cuss word before storming out.
One woman shook her head and said, “Learn how to do your JOB, sweetie.”
When I got to the cashier she was too overwhelmed to say anything. Who can blame her? It’s not every day five customers behave like walking-talking jack mules.
She was a woman who looked older than she was. Her hair was blonde. She had tattoos on her arms, and on her hands.
“People can certainly be mean,” I remarked.
“Yeah,” she said. Then, she sort of broke down. She placed her head in her hands.
“I just CAN’T figure out this computer,” she said. “I ain’t stupid, I know how to do stuff, but this thing’s acting weird.”
So, I made conversation.…
Then I got some literary advice from my late father—I don’t know how he knew to tell me this. He told me to simply run my mouth, and write it down.
The clouds in the distance look like something from a storybook illustration. I am looking at them long and hard. Thinking. I don’t know what I’m thinking about. Everything, I guess.
When I was a kid, I had this idea that I would grow up to be a writer. I was terrible at it. Mostly, because good writers are expected to use similes. But I was as bad at similes as a goat trying to recite Shakespeare.
See? Case in point.
Then I got some literary advice from my late father—I don’t know how he knew to tell me this. He told me to simply run my mouth, then write it down.
Then he added, “Not everything you write has to be perfect, just heartfelt.”
I am a talker. I have always been good at running my mouth. The teachers in school would place me at the front of the classroom so they could keep an eye on me. Because my mouth never stopped.
I could make conversation with almost anything, including paper-mâché, and certain
varieties of soybeans.
And there was always so much to talk about. The weather, for instance. Also, ham! OH MAN! I love ham! And what about tomatoes? Do you know how GREAT tomatoes are!?
I would run my mouth so much that my teacher seriously considered taking up heavy drinking for a new hobby.
Both my parents were talkative, too. My father spoke loud and fast. My mother could talk the paint off a Volkswagen.
I was more talkative than all my friends combined. This bothered some of my pals because when I told stories, I never paused to take a breath. And my stories could go on forever. And ever.
For example: Let’s say that I was telling a story about something that had happened when I was riding my bike past the retired Methodist minister’s house, Brother Tony, who was a good guy,…
This is all a beach vacation is. You carry enough raw materials to the beach to construct a patio, then you lug it all back
CAPE SAN BLAS—It’s nighttime. I am walking the beach. I am lost. Bad lost. All the beachfront bungalows look the same in the dark. I have no idea which one is our vacation rental cottage.
I am tired. Depleted. I’ve been walking for a long, long time. Almost ten minutes now. I will probably die on this beach. They will find me curled up dead, clutching my last will and testament, which will be written on a Piggly Wiggly receipt that was in my pocket.
It’s been a busy day. We spent the whole day on the beach doing family-style beach things like hauling beach equipment to the beach then setting it up. Then, once we finally got our equipment situated, we took a deep breath and spent the rest of the day hauling it back to the house.
This is all a beach vacation is. You carry enough raw materials to the beach to construct a patio, then you lug it all back. If you
finish your vacation without needing spinal fusion surgery, you did it wrong.
That’s life. Vacations come and go, but you can’t put a price on chronic joint pain.
I have a lot of memories here. Long ago, I was a redheaded kid without much going on in the looks department. I met this girl at church. I liked her and she seemed to like me.
She invited me on her annual family vacation to Cape San Blas. I agreed to join them because this girl was very cool.
A few weeks later, I met them here on the Cape—which is a promontory headland that extends into a body of water. In this case, the Gulf of Mexico. I was so nervous I could hardly think straight.
When I pulled into the cottage driveway, the girl came traipsing down the steps to meet me. She was wearing a…
I stood before each painting and stared for a long, long time. Long enough to watch mildew grow. I even cried at a few paintings. I don’t have many heroes, but Norman is one of them.
When I was a kid, I came across boxes of “The Saturday Evening Post” at a flea market. Hundreds of issues. Each one had a Norman Rockwell illustration gracing the cover.
I clipped all the covers from the magazines and pasted them to my bedroom walls until no wall showed behind them. It took me an entire afternoon to completely wallpaper my bedroom in Norman Rockwell.
When my mother saw this, she almost had a nervous breakdown because, in her own words: “It looks like a French bordello in here.”
I had no idea what bordellos were, but if my mother was right about what they looked like, I hoped to visit one someday.
My father came to my room. I was sure he was going to get upset because I’d ruined the walls. Instead, he admired each illustration like a man attending an art exhibit.
As it happens, I have only been to one art exhibit in my life. It was a Norman Rockwell show
at the Birmingham Museum of Art, years ago. To be honest, I don’t know how I heard about the show. I am not exactly the kind of guy who keeps his finger on the pulse of the art world while sipping from a bottle of expensive vintage Château Lafite.
Actually, I don’t know much about art. And when it comes to wine, the only time I’ve ever tasted an expensive label was when my band played at a bar in Orange Beach.
After hours, the bartender said, “I gotta get rid of some opened wine or it’ll go bad, y’all want some?”
The wine was one hundred years old and cost several hundred bucks per bottle.
My fiddle player, Dewey, spit out his Red Man chew and said, “Bring on the vee-no, Frenchy!”
The waiter poured three glasses. We band members clinked the rims together…
The sun rose over the Alabamian highway, and it was pure majesty. The sound of birds was music. I was on my way to speak to a book club who finished reading my book.
I don’t usually speak to book clubs, namely because I’m no good at it. I’ve found that avid readers are smarter than I am. Most often, it goes like this:
A man in steel-rimmed glasses stands and asks a question like: “What was your subjective motivation within the pretext of the outlined apparatus of your—dare I suggest?—almost quasi-static prose?”
I usually just mumble something about current tax laws, take a sip of water, and say my closing remarks:
“It’s been a bona fide treat, folks. A bona fide treat.”
Then it’s off to KFC for some bona fide supper.
This book club, however, is different. These are thirteen-year-olds.
A girl named Claire emailed me several weeks ago. She told me their group of friends formed a club that reads books instead of playing
with phones.
At club meetings, members store cellphones in a locked safe. Their mothers serve pimento cheese sandwiches and juice boxes. And the kids talk about, say, Leo Tolstoy.
They are smart kids. They read authors like Robert Frost, Carson McCullers, Walt Whitman, and one redheaded writer whose truck has needed new brake rotors since 2002.
I arrived in a residential neighborhood of manicured lawns. I wasn’t sure whether I should wear my tweed jacket with the elbow patches. I decided against it.
Their mother invited me inside. I shook hands with kids and parents. A kid named Brad held his hand out and said, “Cellphone, please, sir.”
He locked my cellphone in a fireproof safe with the other phones, then showed me to the den. The living room was full of kids sitting on the floor.
The round table started by discussing…
They were people who took one look at me and decided that I was underwhelming. Or those who told me to use the back door when entering their house—in case company was over.
The weather in Alabama is exceptional. The winding roads snake through parts unknown. Kudzu is exploding in all directions. The sky is the color of blueberry ice cream. The weather is hot.
Long ago, I dated a gal who wasn’t all that nice to me. In fact, she left me feeling like I would never amount to squat.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hashing over ancient history, but I am thinking about how some people over the years—either with or without words—told me I wouldn’t amount to much. I remember these people with vivid clarity.
They were people who took one look at me and decided that I was underwhelming. Or those who told me to use the back door when entering their house—in case company was over.
Chances are that you have these people in your history, too. I know this because you are human. And if you are not human, but you are, for instance, a walrus, and you are still
reading this, please reach out to me. You and I are going to make a lot of money together.
But today, in these Alabama hills, I am grateful for the people who treated me crummy.
I am not trying to be weirdo-spiritual about this. I am simply telling you the truth. When I step back and think about it, these people were very important in making me into me.
So if I ever won some award thingy like they do on TV, at one of those fancy award ceremonies where celebrities in designer clothes who have about as much body fat as a pine tree, stand at a microphone and thank other beautiful celebrities in designer clothes for being so beautiful, and so celebrity-ish, and so low in body fat, but totally forget to thank the twenty-year-old volunteer who brought Starbucks coffee to their dressing-room every day for two…
The smell of turf, the taste of roasted peanuts, the sound of cheering, the long line of ladies waiting for the restroom, jogging in place and clutching their bladders.
ATLANTA—SunTrust Park is a madhouse. Think: Disney World, only if it were filled with people who were old enough to drink Coors and get into fistfights with security.
The smell of turf, the taste of Cracker Jacks, the sound of cheering, the long line of ladies waiting for the restroom, jogging in place, clutching their bladders. It all makes me want to say out loud:
“God, isn’t this great?”
Yes. It really is. It’s better than great. Tonight, there are forty-two thousand people here. The best teams in the National League are facing off. The Dodgers and the Braves. I am a lifelong Dodger-hater, so you can imagine how big this is for me.
I have bumped into several friends who I didn’t expect to see tonight.
I saw my pal Bo, who is my fishing buddy. And by “fishing buddy,” I mean that we have never actually fished together. But once, when Bo’s wife was out of town we sat in his eighteen-foot
bass boat, which was still on the trailer, watching his children almost burn the house down with bottle rockets.
Also, I ran into my buddy Lyle. He has been rooting for the Braves ever since the team was still in Milwaukee, back before the Civil War.
And my friend Allen. I found him seated in the Chop House, which is an outdoor restaurant in centerfield where you can order nachos served in a baseball helmet. And if you are lucky, a home run ball might fall into your nachos and explode chips onto everyone seated within a five-foot radius, whereupon you can stand atop your table holding your baseball high for the TV cameras, screaming “WHO’S YOUR DADDY?!”
I have seen this done once. The guy who stood on the table was approximately seventy years old and about as coordinated as a seasick giraffe. His adult daughter was humiliated.…
If there’s one thing I love, it’s the simple joy of hating scorpions. We live in the woods of West Florida, and we have a lot of scorpions.
I have been stung by scorpions at least nine times in my life. That’s not counting the times I’ve been stung in my sleep.
A few years ago, when I was getting dressed, a scorpion crawled up my shirtsleeve and stung me on a very sensitive region of my body. Since this is a family column, I won’t use the word for this specific body part. So let’s just say that name of this body part rhymes with the word “fipple.”
I went to the ER because I got worried when this usually tiny body part swelled to the size of a hubcap. My doctor made me lift my shirt and his exact words were: “Hooo boy, look at that.”
Then, he called several of his night-shift buddies into the room and the nurse had to start charging a nickel at the door for admission.
The doc sent me away by saying, “Don’t worry, if it was one of the really bad ones, you’ll know in a few hours.”
I started to get nervous. The really bad ones? As opposed to what? The really good ones? What did he mean? What would happen to me? What exactly made the really bad ones really bad? But before I could ask the doctor anything else he was already in the hallway, demonstrating his golf swing to nearby nurses and X-ray techs.
Wildlife-wise, we have a lot going on in our backyard. Our house was built on ceremonial frog mating grounds. When we first moved onto the property, it was surrounded by miles of pines, swamp, and native blood-sucking insects commonly known as “real estate developers.”
Our realtor warned us beforehand. She said, “Are you sure you wanna buy this place? It isn’t anything but…