Taking your dogs to a dog park can be a fun and exciting experience, especially if your dogs are clinically deranged like mine.

We have a nice dog park near our house. And after a day spent in this nicely maintained park, my dogs are kinder, happier, more relaxed, and less likely to destroy my baseball cap.

The exact moment we enter the park, the party begins. My dogs transform into wild creatures who are so excited they forget about normal things like behaving, using good manners, not digging unnecessary holes, and not peeing in communal water bowls.

The park is a beautiful spot surrounded by a big wooden fence and pine trees. It is the official “hangout” for local dog-people. But my favorite thing about this place is watching the dog world in action.

There are natural laws in the dog kingdom that dogs somehow know to follow.

For example: When I open the gate and present my dogs to the the other dogs, they must smell each other. Must with

a capital “M.”

Modern experts tells us that this is an ancient custom dating back to the primal civilizations of miniature lap dogs who once coexisted peacefully with early man and always chewed on early man’s Atlanta Braves baseball caps.

Among dogs, this mass butt-smelling maneuver is a simple ritual, full of nuance, and intrigue. Imagine fifty-eight dogs gathering around one tail. Which sets off a chain reaction of sniffing within the pack. Dogs begin placing their noses into the private regions of everything located within a ten-foot radius—including oak trees, certain species of ferns, and me.

Once this is finished, new arrival dogs are then issued W9’s by veteran dogs and expected to become tax-paying members of dog society.

My two dogs have a unique set of skills which they offer the rest of the dog world.

Thelma Lou (bloodhound) specializes in smells. She is highly skilled…

I am going to answer a few messages I have gotten from actual young people who have taken the time to send me their thoughtful questions.

This idea was sparked by the letter I received from Dillon (age 9), whose mother gave him my books for his birthday. His mother used a Sharpie to mark out two words in the book.

These words weren’t cuss words, I might add. Because, as any Methodist preacher will tell you, both of these words are found in the Bible. True, the words weren’t originally intended to describe my cousin, Ed Lee, but they work in this context.

DILLON: Sean, Elvis is my new hero now because my grandma and grandpa like him, I’ve been downloading his music a lot. Do you like him, too?

A: Dillon, yes. I love Elvis, just like any red-blooded American boy. I once attended a Baptist Fourth-of-July picnic dressed as Elvis. I wore a rhinestone jumpsuit and everything. I had to be rebaptized that next week.

My favorite song is, “You’ll Never Walk

Alone.” It makes me cry every single time. I once sang it for the funeral of a very special person.

ADRIANNE (age 10): Do you ever go to people’s houses and teach them how to write about dogs?

ME: There’s a first time for everything.

SARAH (age 19): I want to study journalism, what should I do to prepare for this?

ME: Sarah, never under any circumstances do a Q-and-A and try to pass it off as serious writing. It’s what lazy people do, and it’s tacky.

BILLY (age 9): I have a dog, but how many dogs have you had? Mine is a Yorkie Poo and we thought it was a girl dog, but he’s not.

ME: I’ll have to do some counting. One, two, carry the four… I have had twenty-one dogs. Wow. I didn’t realize I was so old. Thanks for making…

PELL CITY—Cracker Barrel is quiet tonight. There are five or six tables with customers. I am tired. My wife and I have been on the road for three weeks. Five states. One hundred and fifty-two hotels. I need saturated fat.

Our waitress is named Katelin. She is young, all smiles, and wearing a brown apron.

“What can I get y’all?” she asks.

Breakfast. I am in the mood for breakfast. I love eating breakfast at night. This goes back to my childhood. It was a tradition in my house when I was a boy. Once in a blue moon, we would eat breakfast for supper.

My late father would go to great lengths to make pancakes, hash browns, cheese grits, and our house would smell like bacon even though it was almost bedtime. We called it upside-down night.

So I order eggs over easy, bacon, sausage, sliced tomatoes, biscuits, gravy, the works.

Katelin says, “No problem.”

When she leaves, she waits on two more tables with the same chipper spirit. A man and woman, for instance, are seated in

Katelin’s section. When she passes their table, she waves to them and offers a hearty greeting.

I can’t hear her words, but I can hear the friendly cadence of them. She’s probably asking something like: “How y’all doin’?” or, “You need a warm-up on coffee?” or, “Want some Coca-Cola cake?”

Katelin arrives back at our table to refill drinks and check on us. I notice that there are four stars on her apron. I’ve seen these on Cracker Barrel waitress aprons before, but I’ve never known what they stand for.

“What do the stars mean?” I ask.

“Oh, these?” she says. “We get stars when we start working here. You start with none, if you’ve been here long enough, you earn four. We call this PAR Four. I’m a PAR-four.”

I ask what being a PAR-four means.

“Well,” she says, “basically…

When traveling with my wife, it is important to realize that she is the boss. If you forget this, you will die.

When I say “you will die,” I don’t mean that men wearing black hoods will publicly execute you, necessarily, my wife might do the honors herself. What I mean is that she has planned our trips to a T and there is no wiggle room for doing fun or touristy things like, for instance, stopping to go pee.

My wife’s talent for being the boss stems from the fact that she is a former math teacher. I remember when she took her exam for her math teaching certification, long ago. She had to study like crazy. I helped by quizzing her with flashcards.

“Uh...” I would begin reading. “The inverse decibel is an absolute, or sublingual when found within the parenthetical equation of a biconditional Centroid Formula, and is thereby a null integer from which popular Pink Floyd album?”

Her answer would be so complex that I had no idea whether it was right or wrong.

So after her response, I would sort of nod and say, “Okay.”

Then she’d say, “Okay? Was my answer right or wrong?”

“Sweetie,” I’d say in a reassuring voice. “There are no right or wrong answers in life, only happy accidents.”

Which doesn’t work for a mathematical person. To a math-wiz, there are no such things as happy accidents, numerically speaking, only the quantified deconstruction of bivalve ellipses as expressed in the linear equation found in EXAMPLE 1:

S=15.9√ (2AB)df>L

So what I’m saying is that as a mathematician, she has an Order of Operations for everything in life, even traveling. And this makes her bossy.

She packs our car a certain way and becomes very annoyed if I so much as scratch my nose using the wrong tone. She plans our itinerary, accommodations, bathroom breaks, books our flights, makes reservations, drives…

BUFFALO—A grocery store. I am at the deli counter looking for something to eat. We have been driving through Upstate New York countryside since this morning and I am hungry. If I could just secure a ham sandwich, I’d be in business.

The deli has fresh baked ham. Still hot. They offer samples.

“May I have a sample of that ham?” I ask the woman at the counter.

“Huh?” she says.

So I repeat myself.

She smiles. “Say it one more time.”

So I do.

Then she calls her coworker over. “Eugene,” she says. “You gotta hear how this guy talks.” Then she tells me, “Say ‘ham’ one more time.”

I’m waiting for a please in there somewhere.

“Go ahead,” she insists.

I clear my throat.

“Hay-um.”

Eugene enjoys this very much. Apparently, I am a real knee-slapper.

“Teach me how to say it with two syllables like that,” says Eugene.

“Well, it’s very simple,” I say. “And I don’t mind teaching you, but first I’m gonna need a free sample of that hay-um.”

We get along famously. It’s great. They give me all the free

ham I can stand. Then they point to objects in the store and ask me to name them. Among the words they ask me to say are: shopping cart (pronounced “buggy”), pen (“pee-yin”), chair (“chay-er”), fire (“fie-yer”), and chest of drawers (“that thar chifferobe”).

We get to the subject of Coca-Cola, which is pronounced “Ko-KOLA” by anyone who loves the Lord.

“I’ve never heard it said that way,” says Eugene. “We just say ‘pop.’ What would you say when you order pop at a restaurant?”

We wouldn’t. We would order sweet tea.

“But what if they don’t have tea?” he says. “Then what would you order?”

If a restaurant does not have sweet tea, we would ask to speak to the manager, reason with him or her, then set fire to the establishment. After…

NEW YORK—LaGuardia Airport is located in the Queens borough of New York, smack dab in the Fifth Circle of Hell.

The airport is big, rundown, covered in bubblegum wads, and full of angry people who are waiting for delayed flights. I am told that LaGuardia always has thousands of delayed flights.

In fact, three quarters of New York’s population is comprised of airline passengers, most from the Midwest, who have been waiting for a flight home since 1940. They are sleeping atop their luggage, huddled in various corners, living on breath mints.

I am sitting with hundreds of them. Most of these are people whose mothers never taught them to speak with inside voices. Like the two women behind me.

One woman says loudly, “Have you ever seen that one movie with, oh… What’s his name?”

“What movie?” says the other.

“It has that movie star… Oh, what’s that movie? He was real funny.”

“Chevy Chase?”

“No, not Chevy Chase.”

“I love Chevy Chase.”

“I don’t remember the name of the movie.”

“Look it up on your phone.”

“My phone’s dead.”

“Why don’t you charge it?”

“I forgot my charger.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t Chevy Chase?”

“No. It wasn’t Chevy Chase.”

“Chevy Chase was in a lot of movies.”

“I’d remember if it was Chevy Chase.”

“I like Chevy Chase.”

“I wonder what ever happened to him?”

“Who? Chevy Chase? He’s still going at it.”

“Chevy Chase is?”

“Chevy Chase won’t quit.”

Silence.

“Did I ever tell you about my hysterectomy?”

Sweet Jesus.

Beside me are boys playing games on smartphones. They barely speak. They are not even in this world. Their heads are craned forward. They are staring at bright screens.

Every few minutes one shouts something like, “HAHA! I JUST DECAPITATED YOU!”

“I‘M LIQUIFYING YOUR BRAIN!”

“NUH UH!”

“YUH HUH!”

“NUH UH!”

“YUH HUH!”

“MOM!”

Maybe I should be concerned about America’s youth. But of course these…

I am at a bar. It’s loud. There is live music. And cheeseburgers. I missed dinner tonight because I was making a speech at a dinner banquet. Which is ironic when you think about it.

Everyone at this big banquet was eating hors d’oeuvres, sipping expensive chardonnay, and chowing down on Maine lobsters the size of baby grand pianos.

I could hardly keep my mind on my speech because the ballroom was full of people in tuxedos, all wearing little plastic bibs, making a chorus of slurping, sucking, licking sounds.

A woman at the head table who looked like Queen Elizabeth II was wearing a bib. She kept asking me, “Now, how exactly were you invited to this dinner again?”

Each time I answered, she would get this far-away look in her eyes and start sucking meat from a lobster leg like a baby Wolverine.

So I felt out of place. I felt even worse when the waiter informed me that the bar didn’t stock Natural Light.

Pretty soon, Queen Elizabeth forgot all about me. Butter sauce

dripped down her chin, all over her bib. She would lick her hands violently when she didn’t think anyone was watching. And I don’t mean just her fingers. This woman was actually licking her forearms and her tennis bracelet.

When my speech was done, the last thing I wanted was to stick around and eat lobster with the Royal Family, so I found a beer joint that was open late. Which is where I am now.

It’s a dump, and there are lots of people here. There’s a guy playing guitar. He plays a rendition of “Brown Eyed Girl” and sings in a voice that is faintly reminiscent of the late Daffy Duck.

The lady bartender gives me a menu and asks, “What’re you so dressed up for?”

“I was just at a banquet.”

“Wow. Fancy pants.”

“You shoulda seen them eat lobster.”