It’s eight days until Thanksgiving. The neighbor’s house is buzzing. There are vehicles lining the street. Minivans, trucks, SUVs, Fords, Kias.

My neighbor’s family is in town to celebrate an early holiday. His grandchildren just arrived from Georgia. They’re playing in the front yard. I overhear them screaming, “TAG! YOU’RE IT!”

“I’M NOT IT! YOU’RE IT!”

“NUH-UH!”

“YES-HUH!”

“OUCH! I’LL KILL YOU!”

“I DARE YOU TO TRY!”

“#$%!@”

“HELLLP! GRANDPAAA!”

Just yesterday, a cantankerous elderly man up the street asked if I would help hang his Christmas lights. I reminded him that it’s too early. He insisted. So, I pointed out that I’ve had two back-surgeries, one tonsillectomy, and I’m Southern Baptist.

He is Pentecostal and doesn’t believe in tonsillectomies.

It took three hours on a ladder to hang those god-forsaken lights. He stood below and preached my ear off for the entire time.

When we were through, I was sweating. He opened a garage refrigerator and asked if I wanted an ice-cold chocolate milk.

“That depends,” I said. “Is it manufactured by the Anheuser-Busch Company?”

Some Pentecostals can’t take a joke.

“Chocolate milk will be fine,” I remarked.

Christmas

comes earlier each year. It wasn’t but a few weeks ago that children in pirate costumes were at my front door, panhandling for candy. Now it’s Christmas lights in November.

And if you ask me, the holidays can’t get here quick enough.

My wife has already started cooking to get a jumpstart on Thanksgiving. She’s practicing. Our little home is alive with aroma. It smells like cornbread dressing, allspice, and sweet potato pie.

There are candied pecans on the counter—fresh from the baking sheet. My wife will brain any man who ventures near them. This I know from the trial-and-error approach.

A ham is in the oven. And a poundcake is in the immediate vicinity. I sampled both without permission this morning and got neutered with a melon baller.

She…

It’s not a good idea to let your kids ride in the bed of a pickup truck. It’s a bad idea, actually. Of course, most people already know this. But apparently some don’t.

Oh, well. I suppose that people are going to do what they’re going to do, even if it’s a fatal mistake. Otherwise we wouldn’t have so many karaoke bars.

I was in traffic yesterday when I saw a vehicle carrying four boys in its truck bed. I was behind them at a stoplight. It wasn’t busy traffic, there was no real danger. And, I’m sure the driver of the vehicle wasn’t going very fast, but it’s just a bad idea.

You can trust me on this. I know what I’m talking about. We used to ride in the bed of Mister Danny’s pickup before and after Little League practice, or when riding to games. I estimate that during my Little-League years, each week I would spend hundreds of hours in the back of a Ford pickup with my sweaty teammates who smelled

like gut-eating buzzards.

We were not a great team. We were the team who always showed up looking like a bunch of messy-haired inmates on punitive work-release programs from a state institution.

One of us, and I’m not naming names here, (Darren Marion Jenkins) even kept a package of cigarettes rolled in his sleeve. They were just candy cigarettes, mind you. But to us he was James Dean.

Mister Danny would pile nine boys in the back of his pickup, four crammed in the front seat. Also in the truck bed were two duffle bags full of wooden bats, baseballs, and a Coleman cooler full of Mister Danny’s special “coaching juice.”

Every game went the same way. We would jump out of the truck and end up playing a really slick uptown team who wore matching black uniforms. These teams were usually named after some…

COLUMBUS—It’s a rainy night in Georgia. I have an interview on the local evening news. This is a monumental occasion. My mother called to make sure I was wearing clean underwear.

The last time I was in Columbus, I was in college. I was wearing clean underwear then, too. I was an adult student, traveling with a bunch of eighteen-year-old music students on a school trip. That weekend, I saw some of the world’s most accomplished pianists perform in concert. And it was great.

I was a different person back then. Back then, I had this ridiculous idea that I was going to be a pianist one day.

I wish someone would’ve told me life doesn’t happen how you plan, no matter what kind of underpants you wear.

Anyway, being on the news is a big deal. I have only been on the news twice before.

The first time, I was helping judge a barbecue competition. Me and my friend Buck were interviewed on a local channel. There were cameras with blinking lights, teleprompters, cameramen giving hand signals,

and a makeup lady kept powdering my face and saying, “I’ve never seen so much oil on one godforsaken forehead.” And the interview basically went like this:

“So, tell us about the upcoming event, Sean.”

“Uhhhh…”

“Sean, what can people expect at this event?”

“I uhhhh...”

“Back to you, Terry.”

The other time I was on the news was when my cousin accidentally stole a luxury sedan. His elderly father-in-law had forgotten that he’d agreed to let us borrow his Buick for a road trip. He reported the car as stolen.

We got pulled over in Tennessee. After much confusion with local law enforcement officials, we all had a good laugh about it. And I can say one thing about the upstanding penal system in Tennessee, they serve delicious hamburger steaks.

But getting back to Columbus. Tonight’s news interview is about the…

I bought a jigsaw puzzle at the grocery store today. The box features an ornate cathedral with red roses and blossoming foliage. The cathedral is in Germany. The puzzle cost two bucks.

My mother and I used to do jigsaw puzzles. Big puzzles. We did them together. I was no good at jigsaws, but she was an expert.

Long ago, puzzles cost seventy-five cents, and provided hours of distraction. We needed distractions back then. We welcomed anything that took our minds off my father’s untimely death, and the gloom that came thereafter.

My mother looked for distractions that made us laugh, things that made us smile, games, puzzles, crafts, or road trips.

Once, she took us to Branson. She took me to see a Dolly Parton impersonator. The show was spectacular. After the performance, the woman in the blonde wig hugged me so tight she nearly suffocated me with her enormous attributes.

When my mother saw me locked with the buxom woman, she shrieked and started praying in tongues. She yanked me by my

earlobe and drug me away. And I have been a lifelong Dolly Parton fan ever since.

Anyway, my mother loved doing things with her hands. She made large quilts from old T-shirts, she gardened, she did puzzle books, anagrams, crosswords, cryptograms, she knitted, crocheted, and painted.

She played cards with me, sometimes checkers, and she was a Scrabble fanatic. But jigsaw puzzles. Those were our thing.

My mother started each puzzle by saying the same thing:

“We gotta find the corners first, that’s how you do it.”

The idea was that once you found the corners, the rest of the puzzle would come together. Thus, we would sift through twenty-five hundred pieces, looking for four corners. Once we found them, we’d dig for the edges.

We’d place pieces into piles, then link them together. Piece by piece. Section by section. Mama and I could spend a…

Fourteen-year-old Hayden from Maryland, sent me a letter asking what my favorite food is. Hayden says that her personal favorite food is apple pie with melted cheese on top.

All I can say is: Hayden, you can enjoy that pie all by yourself, sweetie. Because I’d rather lick a mule between the ears than put cheese on apple pie. But then, who am I to judge? Someone wise once said: “Just because we can’t agree doesn’t mean that you’re not a complete wacko for ruining your apple pie like that.”

Anyway, to answer your question, Hayden, my all-time favorite foods have changed over the years.

When I was a baby, my mother says that I would eat entire blocks of cheddar while in my high chair. My mother, who thought it was cute to see a child gnawing on a brick of cheese, would take photographs of this, thereby documenting the origins of my longtime childhood weight problem.

But I eventually grew out of the cheese fascination and I moved onto:

Mashed

potatoes. The women in my family make mashed potatoes using an ancient family recipe:

—1 potato.
—80 sticks of butter.
—“Days of Our Lives” blaring at high volume.

Also, my mother did not whip her potatoes with electric mixers like the pagans do. She had an actual hand masher. It was covered in rust and looked like a tiny tetanus-covered farm implement. I would always lick the masher when she finished. Though occasionally, I would lick the masher while she was still mashing.

I love collards. And the only way to cook greens is with the ugliest, most deformed ham hock knuckle you can find.

Also, bacon. And I do not believe that all bacon is created equal. The bacon I like is the hand-cut kind your granddaddy would spend his hard earned money on.

My mother told me that when she was a girl, men…

Before setting out for our six-week Great American Road Trip we did what all responsible travelers must do to prepare for the unforeseen dangers and dire emergencies of the highway and we packed our fifty-dollar essential oil diffuser.

I know that some young men out there might be wondering what a diffuser is. But if you are a married man you are probably nodding and saying, “Yes, my wife also spends our hard earned mortgage money on essential oils, too, then pours these oils into a diffuser.”

A diffuser is basically a smell-good machine that sprays out scented fog laced with essential oils that make the air smell like cinnamon and cause you to feel drowsy.

There are supposed health benefits from diffusers. But I can only speak from experience when I say that I have been breathing diffused air for years and I, personally, have received more health benefits from Anheuser-Busch products.

Either way, we do not leave home without our fifty-dollar diffuser.

We do not travel light. My wife could

take a one-night trip to her mother’s house and still bring a Coleman cooler, a king-sized comforter, half her hanging clothes, an electric fan, a harpsichord, and of course the diffuser.

The diffuser isn’t usually a problem unless you travel by airline. In which case we put the diffuser in my carry-on bag and it becomes national news.

Whenever I go through airport security, the TSA employees always zero in on this device and squint at it doubtfully, at times even smelling it. Then they glare at me and call in the German shepherds.

But getting back to our road trip. We have been all over the place this last month, doing my one-man show. Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Lousianna, Mississippi, Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania.

Traveling is hard work. You basically wear the same outfit for days, live out of a suitcase, and sleep on crummy hotel pillows.

Each…